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 ;* DEC 15 1908 *, 
 
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 BV 3790 .M2 1906 
 
 Mabie, Henry Clay, 1847- 
 
 1913. 
 Method in soul-winning on 
 
 i-^ 
 
METHOD IN SOUL-WINNING 
 
Method in Soul- Winning 
 
 On Home and Foreign Fields 
 
 v/ 
 
 By HENRY C. MABIE, D.D., 
 
 Corresponding Secretary American Baptist Missionary Union 
 Boston, Mass. 
 
 He that is wise winneth souls — Pro^v. 11:30, 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1906, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 FOURTH EDITION 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
^0 au Minners of Sauls 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The Writer of the following pages, while yet in 
 student days, was singularly led, largely through the 
 influence of Dwight L. Moody and some of his asso- 
 ciate workers in Chicago, into active efforts for souls, 
 and was blessed in seeing many brought to the ac- 
 ceptance of Christ. 
 
 Later when he entered the ministry and assumed 
 different pastorates, east and west, much more marked 
 blessing attended his labours of an evangelistic sort. 
 An important spiritual crisis through which he passed 
 while pastor in Indianapolis, in 1884, led him to see 
 with new clearness that faith primarily involves a 
 decisive act of the will in obedience to some present 
 measure of spiritual light. This rather than theoretic 
 belief of the truth as a system of intellectual proposi- 
 tions, is the chief element in that '^belief of the 
 heart" which is ''unto righteousness." It is also 
 the only principle on which any Christian however 
 orthodox can grow in grace, and have power to help 
 others into light. A certain measure of theoretic be- 
 lief is, of course, always implied in an act of faith ; and 
 may usually, in Christian lands, be taken for granted. 
 
 Practically, however, what others need from us, is 
 to be ''put on the clue" to a personal realization of 
 Christ within themselves. This, the Holy Spirit, al- 
 ways and everywhere, waits and yearns to work in 
 the willing heart. 
 
 In 1890, the writer as secretary of the foreign mission 
 society of his denomination, was commissioned to visit 
 
 7 
 
8 PEEFACE 
 
 the mission fields of Asia. On that tour lie had much 
 opportunity to test, among the heathen, the value 
 and practicality of his conceptions in dealing savingly 
 with souls. Interviews with many inquirers in the 
 various lands visited, and frequent conferences with 
 experienced missionaries then and since, have but 
 confirmed him in the validity of the conclusions 
 herein recorded. The great moment of the subject is 
 sufficient apology for contributing in the way of tes- 
 timony what one may, towards the solution of a ques- 
 tion of ever growing interest, namely, how success- 
 fully to lead men to Christ. 
 
 In the course of the years of varied experience in 
 evangelical work, a good many striking instances of 
 conversion, illustrating the postulates laid down in the 
 following chapters, have come under the writer's notice. 
 As he has related from time to time, the accounts of 
 how some of these souls were started in the new life, 
 he has been asked to commit the narratives to print, 
 in the hope that they might shed their light afar. 
 
 In the chapters which ensue, various incidents 
 showing steps whereby particular individuals were 
 ^'put on the clue'' Christward, are given, in the 
 hope that they may afford helpful hints to some per- 
 plexed workers on the home field ; to students, Sun- 
 day-school teachers, leaders of young people's socie- 
 ties, and ministers, and to young missionaries about 
 commencing their work among pagan peoples. To 
 this end the special aid of the Holy Spirit, who alone 
 can give that ^^understanding " and skill which shall 
 '•'' turn the many to righteousness," is invoked. 
 
 H. Co M. 
 Boston, January 10, 1906» 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. Presuppositions m the Soul- Winner . 11 j 
 
 Soul-winning not a perfunctory thing— Implications i 
 
 in the winner — Vision of God presupposed — Something \ 
 
 to impart — D. L. Moody's Anointing — Evan Roberts i 
 
 — Author's experience in college days— Similar crises j 
 
 in lives of present-day college men — A wife's impress j 
 
 on her husband — Bishop Williams and his Japanese | 
 
 pupil — How an army major was reached — Anxiety i 
 
 for a neighbour rewarded — Idealizing those we would ] 
 
 save — A woman prominent in the Blaine Campaign, { 
 
 won — A timid farmer, "doing the impossible" — ;; 
 
 Story of Valentine Burke, the Missouri convict — The j 
 
 vision which inspires. j 
 
 1 
 ■\ 
 
 II. The Evangelizing Message ... 34 -j 
 
 Two elements in the saving problem — Finding and de- i 
 
 limiting the message — Dr. R. A. Hume's answer to a \ 
 
 Parsi — What it is to evangelize — The aegis of an evan- . 
 
 gelical probation — All men exist under it; few realize 
 
 it — A lawyer who "took under the will " — The new i 
 
 potential heredity in Christ — Speculative beliefs in " j 
 
 abeyance — Weakness in current use of the Atonement ] 
 
 — Something deeper than the Crucifixion tragedy — 
 
 Meaning of redemption by blood — A speaking emblem i 
 
 — Under spell to the redeeming Christ. { 
 
 III. The Immediate Practical Aim . . 48 \ 
 
 The subjective side of the problem — Dealing with i 
 
 children — A bewildered agnostic — Putting on the \ 
 clue — Gaining the confidence — A wicked vow repudi- 
 ated — A Harvard agnostic committed to his ideal — 
 
 The Russian Baron Uixkiull's conversion — Christ's i 
 
 method of giving light — Disappointment of prejudice ' 
 
 — Our highest work — Continuance of the spiritual I 
 
 life as affected by true evangelization. ', 
 
 d 
 
10 CONTENTS 
 
 lY. The Nature of Saving Faith . . 64 
 
 Faith synonymous with doing the truth — A collective, 
 executive act of the soul — Sad misunderstandings — 
 Standing-ground in heathen systems to be utilized — 
 Loyalty to light is faith — Beginning in Christ's school 
 can be made anywhere — A common tactical mistake — 
 Dealing with a Romanist — The place for objective 
 doctrinal instruction — David Brainerd and the Indian 
 reformer — Walking in the light rather than living up 
 to it — Confession of George Romanes — Christ's method 
 that of the laboratory, experimental. 
 
 V. Tact in Personal Approach. . . SQ 
 
 The right angle of approach — Dr. Hume's preaching 
 in India — The personal equation — A blaspheming car- 
 penter's conversion — Picking up an inebriate — a 
 Japanese convert — Reaching the aged — A cynical 
 blacksmith won — The old brickmaker paying his 
 vows. 
 
 VI. Christ^s Method of Self-Disclosure, 111 
 
 Visit to India— Test of principles— Message to Brah- 
 mins — Christ's method of illumination in Ninth of 
 John — Four stages in process— Principles involved — 
 (1) Christ permitted to have His way— (2) Divine 
 word acted on : a German agnostic — (3) Light ac- 
 knowledged as it came— (4) Stood alone— Sequel of 
 visit and exposition of principles. 
 
 VII. The Fields White Unto Harvest . 129 
 
 Large harvests warranted — One conversion may imply 
 many — Great evangelists personal workers — Not all 
 however will believe — Supernatural draughts of men — 
 Christ's method at Sychar — (a) Found joy in divine 
 will— (6) Established friendly relation— (c) Disap- 
 pointed prejudice— (<Z) Built on elementary faith— 
 (e) Induced spiritual thirst— (/) Awakened conviction 
 for sin — (g) Unveiled a present Messiah — (h) Pre- 
 sumed on work of predecessors— Surprise in all re- 
 vivals — Expect great things. 
 
Method in Soul-Winnin 
 
 g 
 
 PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL- WINNER 
 
 And do thou, when once thou hast turned again, establish thy 
 brethren.— Xwfce. 22 : 32. 
 
 Winning souls is not a perfunctory undertaking. 
 The soul-winner is not a recruiting sergeant, nor a 
 mere zealot gaining adherents to a sect. He is rather 
 one who seeks to add ^'to the Lord" as men were 
 ^ ' added '^ at Pentecost, or as expressed in Hosea's 
 word '^ betrothed'^ unto the Lord forever.* The 
 achievement sought presupposes much in the winner j 
 that he himself is the possessor of assured, personal 
 blessing from God. If one who would win souls is not 
 thus consciously in touch with God, it would be well 
 to closet himself with Him long enough to find out 
 what obstruction in heart or life prevents commun- 
 ion : to give to it if necessary a prolonged season of 
 heart-searching, until the vision of God comes clear 
 and pronounced. We dare not say that all men are 
 called to be conspicuously evangelists ; certainly not 
 that a given form of emotional experience as such is 
 to be expected by all. God has His own original 
 
 2:19. 
 11 
 
12 METHOD m SOUL-WINOTIJ^G 
 
 way of self-communication to every man : there is 
 doubtless a sovereign element in it. The bestowal of 
 particular powers upon certain workmen, for exam- 
 ple, Whitfield, Wesley, Spurgeon and Finney, are 
 such as all may not claim. Temperamental gifts de- 
 termine much. ^Nevertheless, I think it may be truly 
 said, other things being equal, that real evangelistic 
 power can coexist only with a certain clearness of 
 vision of God's face, and as some specific divine 
 secret is therewith imparted. 
 
 It is a well known fact that Mr. Moody, before go- 
 ing to England on his great evangelistic campaigns 
 in 1871-5, experienced a peculiar unveiling of the 
 love of God, although it was a matter of which he 
 rarely spoke. He had been a remarkably successful 
 evangelist on many lines previously. At the time 
 referred to, however, he had been moved to un- 
 wonted prayerfulness, in which others joined him, 
 that he might be filled with the Spirit. Under these 
 deep exercises of mind, while in New York, one day 
 there broke upon him such a realization of the Divine 
 Love that it well-nigh overpowered him, so that he 
 cried out : ^' O Lord, stay Thy hand." 
 
 This realization was the earnest, as all the world 
 knows, of the profoundest spiritual awakenings in 
 England and America witnessed within the past 
 century. 
 
 When later Mr. Moody returned to this country 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL- WINNER 13 
 
 and entered on his great meetings in Brooklyn, 
 Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and Boston, even 
 those who had previously known him best in- 
 stantly perceived the revolution which had occurred 
 in him, and the new power with which he wrought. 
 
 Evan Eoberts thus speaks of the spiritual exer- 
 cises which preceded his own recent extraordinary 
 testimony in Wales : 
 
 "For thirteen years I had prayed for the Spirit, 
 and this is the way I was led to pray. William 
 Davies, the deacon, said one night in the society ; 
 ^ Eemember to be faithful. What if the Spirit de- 
 scended and you were absent ? Eemember Thomas ! 
 What a loss he had.' 
 
 "I said then to myself: ^I will have the spirit' ; 
 and through every kind of weather and in spite of all 
 difficulties, I went to the meetings. Many times, on 
 seeing other boys with the boats on the tide, I was 
 tempted to turn back and join them. But, no. I 
 said to myself: ^Eemember your resolve,' and on I 
 went. ... I went faithfully to the meetings for 
 prayer throughout the ten or eleven years I prayed 
 for a revival. I could sit up all night to read or talk 
 about revivals. It was the Spirit that moved me 
 thus to think. 
 
 '^One Friday night in 1904, when praying by my 
 bedside before retiring, I was taken up to a great ex- 
 panse — without time or space. It was communion 
 
14 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 with God. Before this, a far-off God I had. I was 
 now taken up into the divine fellowship for continu- 
 ous hours. What it was I cannot tell, except that it 
 was divine, — too divine to talk about. ^^ 
 
 When Mr. Eoberts afterwards went to school at 
 New Castle-Emlyn, he was so afraid he would lose 
 the communion with God that at first he set apart a 
 half hour daily for prayer. Then, this not sufficing, 
 he gave successive days to it and many nights be- 
 sides. At length, he felt impelled to leave the school 
 and went to attend certain meetings held under the 
 Church Federation Evangelists, led by one Seth 
 Joshua. At a certain morning meeting, Mr. Joshua 
 prayed with great earnestness. In one of his peti- 
 tions he besought that the Lord would ^^ bend us.'' 
 The Spirit seemed to say to Eoberts : ^' That's what 
 you need, to be bent." He was deeply exercised 
 about not being completely bent to God's will for 
 him. Finally, as he says: *^I felt a living force 
 coming into my bosom. . . . This grew and 
 grew, and I was almost bursting, o . . My bosom 
 was boiling. What boiled in me was that verse : 
 'God commending His love.' I fell on my knees 
 with my arms over the seat in front of me ; the tears 
 and perspiration flowed freely. I thought blood was 
 gushing forth." Certain friends approached to wipe 
 his face. Meanwhile he was crying out, ^'OLord, 
 bend me I Bend me!" Then suddenly the glory 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL-WINNEE 15 
 
 broke. It was Eoberts^s Peniel after the night of re- 
 sistance of the Angel- Wrestler at the Jabbok. 
 
 Mr. Eoberts adds: ^^ After I was bent, a wave of 
 peace came over me, and the audience sang, ^ I hear 
 Thy welcome voice, ^ And as they sang I thought 
 about the bending at the Judgment Day, and I was 
 filled with compassion for those that would have to 
 bend on that day, and I wept. 
 
 ^'Henceforth, the salvation of souls became the 
 burden of my heart. From that time I was on fire 
 with a desire to go through all Wales, and if it were 
 possible, I was willing to pay God for the privilege 
 of going. '^ 
 
 But lest any should say, these experiences are for 
 altogether uncommon persons, let the writer, an ordi- 
 nary Christian worker, add his modest testimony of 
 what came to him in boyhood, long before he had any 
 purpose to become a minister. 
 
 During my first term in college, being brought into 
 contact with more forceful types of Christian associ- 
 ates than I had previously known, and, suffering not 
 a little from homesickness, I began to feel a deep 
 longing for a more conscious relation to Christ. I 
 sought it for many weeks, but blindly and unavail- 
 ingly. One night, however, while assembled with a 
 few companions at the regular students^ prayer-meet- 
 ing — a meeting which I had refused to give up, to 
 hear a lecture by Miss Anna Dickinson, then electri- 
 
16 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 tying the country on themes connected with the Civil 
 War — the consuming longing which had possessed my 
 soul was rewarded by a new vision of the Divine 
 One, altogether unknown before. 
 
 There had been much concentration of thought on 
 the theme of the meeting — '' Christ in Gethsemane,'' 
 and we were upon our knees in prayer when suddenly 
 there shone out to me at least a presence as of the un- 
 veiled and risen Lord, This entirely supernatural 
 glory seemed to suffuse the place with resurrection 
 light, and all the other persons in the room also were 
 spiritually affected in a way altogether uncommon. 
 Indeed what occurred that night in that little upper 
 room is entirely beyond human telling. Probably 
 the form of it was determined in part by mental sug- 
 gestion, by psychic influence, by various second 
 causes, kindling the imagination at such a time. Be 
 this as it may, the reality of this theophany I can no 
 more doubt than I could deny my own identity. It 
 was not conversion, for this had occurred at least four 
 years previously. At all events, from the time of 
 which I speak the whole character, current and out- 
 look of my life changed. The Scriptures lighted up. 
 Christian joy displaced depression, passion for souls 
 ensued, courage triumphed over fear in public relig- 
 ious exercises. Other people also recognized the 
 realness of the change, and the whole providential 
 
PRESUPP0SITI01i[S IN THE SOUL WINKEE 17 
 
 course of life since has corroborated the divineness of 
 the vision of that night. 
 
 About that time the college was broken up through 
 the occurrence of a case of smallpox among the 
 students, and I went home. Calling on my pastor the 
 next morning and reporting the great change which 
 had occurred in me, with quick sympathy he replied, 
 ^'The Lord has sent you home in this frame just at 
 the time when we most need you. The state of relig- 
 ion is low among us : the young people's meeting has 
 died out : you are the means to revive it." Then 
 taking a note-book and pencil he wrote down the 
 names of about two hundred young people in the town, 
 and putting it in my hands said, ^' There, go and 
 bring them in. Lead them to Christ. That's your 
 work." 
 
 Encouraged by such a proposal, I set about it. The 
 first visit I made was characterized by a soul-contest 
 of hours resulting in the conversion of a young 
 woman. That led to another and that to others until 
 an entire Bible class of influential young persons sur- 
 rendered to Christ. From that the work so spread 
 that ere the summer was over nearly all the persons 
 named in my note-book were converted and added to 
 the several churches of the town. Moreover, all this 
 work was marked by the almost total absence of 
 special preaching, the testimony of new converts to 
 new inquirers instead, seeming to suf&ce. 
 
18 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 Wlien I returned to college in the following 
 autumn, I was in the afterglow of the realization of 
 that revival and my Christian fellow students were 
 alert to hear accounts of it, and to ascertain its secret. 
 On occasions I was invited to other towns and similar 
 revivals occurred. In one of these towns over sixty 
 converts came out in a few days, while within the col- 
 lege itself the revival spirit, now being alive in many 
 hearts, continued for years following, with many 
 striking conversions, some being so smitten with con- 
 viction that unable to sleep they sought their Chris- 
 tian associates in the night hours begging for prayer. 
 
 In relating the above reconstructive crisis in one 
 life, I do not imply that such an experience is excep- 
 tional. Probably it is only typical of what occurs 
 sooner or later in t)xe lives of most ministers and mis- 
 sionaries, and such others as ever become effective 
 winners of souls. Such experiences are occurring 
 constantly in connection with College Y. M. C. A. 
 and Student Volunteer work. The Motts and Speers, 
 the Brockmans and Galleys, the Briggses and Sher- 
 wood Eddys, aye, and the Hugh Beavers and Horace 
 Pitkins, of blessed memory — all stand for lives 
 marked by just such crises and changes under the 
 wondrous grace of God. The place of some such 
 realization at least in principle, a special vision of 
 Christ, — as antecedent to power to win others, cannot 
 be gainsaid. 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOTJL-WINNEE 19 
 
 Said Jesus to Peter, ^^ And I also say unto thee that 
 thou art Peter, — a rock — and upon this rock — this 
 solid substratum, product of My Spirit — I will build 
 My Church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail 
 against it. I will give unto thee the keys of the 
 kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind 
 on earth shall be bound — lit. ^ have been bound' — in 
 heaven : and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth 
 shall be loosed — ^have been loosed' — in heaven."* 
 In other words, the servant of Christ that has been 
 brought to a keener discernment of the Divine One 
 will have been so brought en rapport with the very 
 sovereign purpose of God, as that the keys of the 
 kingdom of heaven may be said to have been given 
 him, not as in lieu of Christ, but as so completely 
 subject to Him as that Christ can work through 
 him. 
 
 ^'When thou hast turned again — establish thy 
 brethren.'' ^ Of course, no two persons ever have a 
 divine manifestation to them in the same form. It 
 may come in the form of some marked realization in 
 the soul with or without emotion : it may come from 
 some calm, inward voice of the spirit co-witnessing 
 with some specific Scripture ; or it may arise in some 
 other way ; but in order to power, it must exist. The 
 element of reality, — some vital touch with the infinite 
 One, — must be present before much motive power can 
 ^ Matthew 16 : 18, 19. » Luke 22 : 32. 
 
20 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 be engendered to reach out victoriously after others, 
 or before others will respond to the winner's touch. 
 
 In the first parish where I laboured lived a man, 
 who was not only agnostic in his attitude towards 
 things religious, but even derided them, and was wont 
 to chaff his wife on her devotion to her church. The 
 wife, however, went on her quiet but earnest way, 
 living out her religion in the home. One morning 
 very early the husband awoke and discovered his 
 wife beside his bed absorbed in whispered prayer. 
 Her pale, upturned face was fixed with intensity upon 
 the Invisible, and her warm hand was resting upon 
 his own, she supposing him to be asleep. As the 
 husband's eyes opened on the unexpected scene, the 
 suggestion came like a flash to his soul, ''My wife's 
 God is more real to her than her husband is. If she 
 is so in earnest for my welfare as to rise at such an 
 hour and pray alone for me, it is time I had some 
 care for my own soul" ; and he instantly arose from 
 his bed, knelt beside her and added his own prayer 
 to hers. He gave his heart to God on the spot, and 
 that very morning came to the early meeting at the 
 church and announced his change of heart ; the next 
 Sabbath he united with the church. The conviction 
 of reality in the wife's intimacy with God was what 
 roused and brought him ; the wife had something to 
 impart, which of itself wrought to open the husband's 
 soul. 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL-WINNEE 21 
 
 During my visit to Tokio, Japan, I met a superior 
 Japanese youth, a convert of the American Episcopal 
 Mission. I had been asked to speak to our native 
 church in the locality. This young man interpreted 
 for me, and a friendship which has continued till now 
 sprang out of the incident. Afterwards he told me 
 how he was converted. He had come to Tokio full of 
 ambition for the best education he could get. Being 
 ill-prepared, however, to enter the Imperial Univer- 
 sity, as he desired, he was admitted to the Episcopal 
 Academy under the saintly Bishop Williams. At 
 length a fit of rebellion took possession of the students 
 because of the poor accommodations in the school and 
 this young man and his roommate, a professing Chris- 
 tian, were deputized to go to the bishop and announce 
 the purpose of many of their number to leave the 
 school. Said the young man, '^ We appeared before 
 the bishop with our complaint and said that we could 
 no longer put up with the poor accommodations j 
 evidently, the mission cared little for our welfare. 
 We two students roomed over on the north side of the 
 building where the sun never entered, and we were 
 often chilled to discomfort and we would not stand it 
 longer. The bishop beamed upon us with benevolent 
 surprise, and said : 
 
 << ^ Why, young gentlemen, this will never do ; you 
 are not going to leave the school. True, our mission 
 is slow in providing better accommodations, but they 
 
22 METHOD IN SOUL-WINNII^G 
 
 will come soon. Meanwhile, we are bound to do the 
 best we can for our students. We expect you young 
 men in the future to become the bishops and leaders 
 in the Japanese churches. As for yourselves in par- 
 ticular, I'll tell you what we can do. I have a good 
 warm room on the sunny side of the school ; now you 
 young gentlemen come over and occupy my room and 
 I myself will go over and take yours.' ^Oh, no!' 
 we both exclaimed ; ' we would not have you do that j 
 we did not mean that' 'But that's what I mean,' 
 said the bishop; that's what will be done.' We 
 again remonstrated and my fellow student, a Christian 
 boy, began to weep with chagrin and brokenness of 
 heart, and soon J found I too was weeping. I never 
 before had seen anything like that and my heart 
 broke under it. Why, sir, there was a light in that 
 good bishop's face similar to that which I think Saul 
 saw on the way to Damascus. I could not stand it 
 and I was converted on the spot." It is ever so ; the 
 agnostic soul discovers in some follower of Christ a 
 surprising something which he himself has not, and 
 the vision smites him to penitence and faith. It is 
 the aureole on the face of believers as on that of their 
 risen Lord which compels conviction and wins as- 
 sent. 
 
 Ten years afterwards, the young man referred to 
 above renewed acquaintance with me in Boston, an 
 earnest Cambridge divinity student. During the last 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL-WINNEE 23 
 
 year he has served as a member of staff to an impor- 
 tant envoy to the United States, and is identified with 
 the highest ideals for the new Japan. 
 
 Along with our sense of deep blessing from God, 
 when it exists, will spring up also the realization of 
 the soul-poverty of those who are without God, and 
 the corresponding conviction that God waits to enrich 
 and fill such souls if they but once open to Him. I 
 was once introduced to a singularly gifted man in my 
 parish who was a major in the Civil War, and who 
 after the war won standing as a man of business and 
 in social circles. But, alas, he had become addicted 
 to drink, and was rapidly wrecking all his prospects 
 and breaking the heart of devoted relatives. Through 
 a Mend, uncommon personal interest in this man was 
 aroused. I invited my new friend to my home for 
 long conversations ; I called at his office again and 
 again, told him of the high hopes I cherished for him, 
 hovered about him for weeks, until the vision of new 
 possibilities for the discouraged man became con- 
 trolling. Other friends cooperated with great earnest- 
 ness and skill. At length the man reasoned, ''This 
 must be a divine concern which these several friends 
 have for me ; no human self-interest would so follow 
 me ; now is my time to cooperate with this heaven- 
 sent power" J and he did, and shortly to the aston- 
 ishment of the whole community, he publicly con- 
 fessed Christ and became a winner of other soul^, his 
 
24 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 testimonies to the new grace received carrying great 
 weight to multitudes. 
 
 Often when one is in the right way, a particular 
 soul is laid upon his heart with great weight, until 
 he feels that he cannot be denied his craving for that 
 friend's salvation. Undoubtedly it is the divine 
 spirit which imposes such burdens, and this is often 
 evidence that the desire so cherished is to be granted. 
 I recall such an instance. It was in my native town. 
 I had seen the spirit of God's grace at work, bringing 
 many to repentance. Among those for whom my de- 
 sire grew was one man in particular for whom I had 
 had high appreciation for many years. He and his 
 family were far above the average in intelligence and 
 cultivation : as neighbours they were genial to a high 
 degree, but they were entirely irreligious, rarely at- 
 tending church. At length one night I was awakened 
 with intense concern respecting this man, and could 
 not sleep again for the depth of my feelings. I found 
 my wife in a similar state of mind respecting him, 
 and we arose to pray together for him with all our 
 powers. The next day I made it my first errand to 
 go and see this man. I was particularly anxious to 
 see him alone, and as I went I prayed for such an 
 opportunity. Driving around a turn in the road 
 under the hill below his home, I saw him coming 
 from his mill, which was a few rods distant. The 
 Lord seemed to say to me, ^' There, I have given him 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL- WINNER 25 
 
 into your hand." As I came nearer I could see the 
 signs of agitation in his face and I think he would 
 have hidden behind the hedge by the roadside, if he 
 could have done so unobserved. This encouraged 
 me. At length meeting him face to face, I said, 
 " Isaac, I have come after you this morning." 
 
 With the familiarity of our earlier days, he replied, 
 "• Henry, I know it, what do you want of me? " 
 
 I replied, ^' Isaac, so deep is my interest in your 
 salvation that if it were necessary I would crawl on 
 my hands and knees for miles if I could share with 
 you my sense of Christ." 
 
 Said he, ^'I have no doubt of it: I have known 
 for years how you felt for me. I remember hearing 
 you pray aloud for me years ago as you rode by my 
 place on your pony late in the evening on the way 
 from the church to your father's house. I was husk- 
 ing corn by the roadside behind the stocks in the 
 moonlight, and you did not know I heard you, but I 
 did." 
 
 ^^Well," I said, ^ that's true, I have loved your 
 soul all this time, and now I want you to come 
 along." 
 
 ^^All right," he said, ''I have come; it's settled 
 now." And he invited me up to the house. There 
 I had further conversation with his wife, his daugh- 
 ters, and others in the family circle, and we all knelt 
 and prayed together. It will easily be believed that 
 
26 METHOD IN SOUL-Wi:t^mNG 
 
 I had the pleasure of seeing this entire family, to the 
 number of five, shortly gathered into the church. 
 But what impressed me in that case, as in many 
 others in my memory, is that multitudes of people 
 really feel divine emanations from us, if we are in 
 the spirit of love and grace towards them — simply 
 yearning to impart those blessings to them — even 
 though we do not speak a word. When, therefore, 
 the right moment comes for the word to be spoken, 
 we are often surprised to find the work already 
 wrought. The truth is God's spirit always goes be- 
 fore us J and if we relied upon that fact more abso- 
 lutely, we should often find our way prepared, and 
 the saving work done with scarcely a word spoken 
 on our part. 
 
 Then if from the appreciation one has of certain 
 natural powers in unconverted people, he is moved 
 to idealize those same powers, to think of them as 
 they might be if consecrated to Christ, his influence 
 over such people unconsciously to himself will grow, 
 and this will also tend to the discovery of the real 
 key to their hearts. There is nothing so inventive, 
 so discerning as love. 
 
 In a western town where I had a pastorate for a 
 period, there was a high-spirited woman, a former 
 schoolmate of mine, who was frequently visited and 
 found very open-hearted, although somewhat mysti- 
 fied as to what the religious movement in progress 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL-WINNEE 27 
 
 portended for herself. This woman^s manner of life 
 was entirely worldly. She had some notoriety for 
 nerve and horsemanship ; and ha^l gained reputation 
 for uncommon public spirit. In the presidential 
 campaign of the previous year, when Mr. Blaine was 
 a candidate, she had organized a mounted troop of 
 patriotic young women, who on occasions would ride 
 in torchlight processions with their husbands or es- 
 corts. I became intensely desirous of seeing this un- 
 common woman a Christian. Familiar as I was with 
 this late popular demonstration on her part, I thought 
 I saw how to use it for her welfare. Accordingly, 
 when I called one day to press home Christ's claims, 
 the lady inquired, 
 
 ^^What is it you want of me anyway and what 
 would you have me do? I don't see that I am so 
 very bad.'' 
 
 I replied, *' Probably not. But do you recall how 
 prominent, how decided, and how fearless was the posi- 
 tion you took in the Blaine Presidential Campaign? " 
 
 ^'Indeed I do." 
 
 Then said I, ^' I wish you to become as pronounced 
 in allegiance to Jesus Christ as you were known to be 
 for James G. Blaine, Hhe plumed knight of Maine.' " 
 She was astonished, but she was impressed. The ap- 
 peal reached her and she understood it. 
 
 ^^Well," said she; ^' that would be a pronounced 
 position indeed j do you mean it ? " i 
 
28 METHOD IN SOUL-WINOTISTG 
 
 ^'Certainly I mean it ; nothing less than that will 
 do for you, and in this community. Christ must be- 
 come supreme, or what others suppose to be supreme, 
 above all else in your life. You were not ashamed of 
 Blaine, you will not be ashamed of the Eedeemer of 
 your soul. You cannot do anything by halves. This 
 is what I want you to do in order that you may assure 
 yourself and others what is really supreme in your 
 life ; and in doing this, you are certain also to find 
 assurance from God." The ideals this woman had 
 allowed for herself in things worldly made it impos- 
 sible for her to entertain small estimates in things 
 spiritual ; otherwise there would have been little 
 reality in them, and they would have seemed un- 
 worthy of her. I also doubt if terms less than these 
 would have appealed to her. She was startled at the 
 unexpected ideal presented, but she could not dismiss 
 it from her mind. A few evenings later this proud 
 spirited woman came to one of my meetings, and at 
 an opportune moment came directly to the front, 
 faced the congregation, and referring to the conversa- 
 tion above detailed, concluded by saying, ^' And now 
 I wish it to be understood by everybody that just as 
 publicly and decidedly as I was lately recognized by 
 citizens of this town as devoted to the candidacy of 
 Mr. Blaine for the presidency of the nation, so now I 
 am committed to Jesus Christ as the King of the 
 universe and of my heart." She of course came into 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL-WINNEE 29 
 
 peace and blessing, and was conspicuously useful in 
 influencing others to a similar decision. On summer 
 nights she would take a pair of horses and a barge 
 and carry a dozen or more young people miles away 
 into the country to certain meetings I was then con- 
 ducting, that they might sing and otherwise help on 
 the work ; as prominent for Christ as for Blaine. 
 
 The soul-winner must be in a position to demand 
 large things, ideally high things, such as at times 
 may shock his fellows into attention and thoughtful- 
 ness. He must cherish higher possibilities for unre- 
 generate souls than they begin to think he cherishes : 
 vastly higher than they cherish for themselves. They 
 need to be waked up and shaken out of their own low 
 self-estimates by some spiritual idealism which begins 
 to rate them and their capabilities as God does. The 
 temptation is to make too little of the change con- 
 templated ; we make conversion too easy ; we talk 
 down to people, and both we and the ideals presented 
 as motives to win, make little impression. Con- 
 science respects the heroic, even the apparently im- 
 possible, if it only be coupled with a clear require- 
 ment of the living and everlasting God. 
 
 I call to mind a bashful young farmer in the west, 
 who had grown up far from the atmosphere of the 
 church and to whom the habits of religious meetings 
 were unfamiliar, saying to me when I urged upon 
 him to come to the prayer-meeting that night in a 
 
30 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 neighbouring farmliouse, and openly confess with the 
 mouth his need of Ohrist, 
 
 ^'I never could stand up and talk in that way be- 
 fore people, even though I wanted to 5 it would kill 
 me to do it.^^ 
 
 ^^Well," I replied, ^^die then: I know how hard 
 it is for you, but Christ commands the impossible. 
 He told Peter to come to Him walking on the water, 
 and as long as Peter kept his eye on the Lord, he also 
 walked the waves. He commands you to confess 
 Him before men and I shall expect you to do it to- 
 night, even though you die in doing it.^' To the 
 meeting this timid man came. When he rose to 
 speak he laboured as if he were Atlas lifting the world 
 on his shoulders. The effort crushed the cowardice 
 out of him ; for before he sat down he sang the song 
 of the new life. By faith he attempted the impossi- 
 ble : he seized the ideal he knew. Christ met him in 
 the act, and he came into a saved state. 
 
 One's zeal for the salvation of souls, moreover, will 
 greatly depend on the attitude which the imagination 
 assumes, whether it be negative or positive. One 
 may picture to himself the soul negatively, in its sin 
 and wretchedness from which it needs to be delivered, 
 or it may cherish the possibilities, positively speak- 
 ing, into which the soul may be brought in Christ. 
 Which conception rules will make all the difference. 
 
 I recall having seen some years ago in a western 
 
PEESUPPOSll^lONS m THE SOtTL-WINNEE 31 
 
 city, two strikingly contrasting pictures, pictures 
 since used somewhat widely by Mr. Moody. They 
 were likenesses of a notorious prisoner, a Missouri 
 criminal by the name of Valentine Burke, who for 
 twenty years was one of the worst characters known 
 to the police. The first likeness was taken against 
 his will, and long hung in the rogue's gallery : it was 
 labelled '' Ko. 1010- A." While there were marks of 
 power and manhood in the features of this likeness, 
 yet they revealed desperateness and abandonment of 
 character, and were very revolting. You would not 
 have cared to meet such a face alone after nightfall. 
 Then there was another picture of the same man 
 which we will call picture ^^ number two." The face 
 of a man of great dignity, of uncommon calm, of real 
 nobility and spiritual purity : a lofty brow, with hair 
 thrown back, in impressive pose. In short, it was 
 the face of a man fit to adorn the judge's bench. One 
 could hardly have believed this to be a photograph of 
 the same man as shown in the other picture. But 
 seven years had intervened between the two. The 
 grace of God had entered that man, and had renewed 
 the springs of life, and rewritten every line of his face 
 as well. While in the St. Louis jail, Burke had ob- 
 tained a copy of a city paper which published a ser- 
 mon by Mr. ;^Moody, then preaching in St. Louis ; 
 this paper announced the topic of Mr. Moody's ser- 
 mon in a sensational headline, "How the Jailer at 
 
32 METHOD m SOUL-WINm:NG 
 
 Philippi was Caught." Burke thought the reference 
 was to the town of Philippi in Illinois, a place of 
 which he knew ; and he began to read what he sup- 
 posed to be jail news. He reasoned '' The jailer has 
 often caught me; now we'll see who caught him." 
 He soon saw his mistake, and at first was angered ; 
 but he became interested as he read on. Nine times 
 in the sermon he came upon the text, ^'Believe on the 
 Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved." It im- 
 pressed him so deeply that in the cell that night for 
 the first time Burke prayed. Soon after he believed, 
 and was assured of salvation. The jailer thought 
 Burke was playing the "pious dodge," and only sus- 
 pected him the more. When the case came to trial, 
 however, through a technicality, he escaped convic- 
 tion, and was released. For some months the ex-con- 
 vict could find no one so to trust him as to give him 
 steady work. He surmised it was because the lines 
 of past sin had made his face so ugly, and he prayed 
 to God to make him better looking. He finally was 
 given a position under the sheriff of the county, made 
 the collector of the office, and until he died some time 
 afterwards, Burke never disappointed the confidence 
 reposed in him. On one occasion he met a friend in 
 the street and stopped him to say, " Look at my hands 
 and see what the grace of God has done, when I tell 
 you that just now Captain Mason the sheriff, put into 
 these hands $60,000 to carry to the bank for deposit." 
 
PEESUPPOSITIONS IN THE SOUL-WINNEE 33 
 
 The photo ^'number two" was taken after this great 
 change had come about, and his face so altered that 
 none would recognize it as that of the same man. So 
 universal was the confidence which Burke won in his 
 new life, that finally the old picture which hung in 
 the rogue's gallery was handed over to him. He 
 sent the originals of the two likenesses above de- 
 scribed to a Mr. McPheeters of St. Louis, who had 
 befriended him, and wrote on the back of the picture 
 "number two,'' this text from the one hundred and 
 thirteenth Psalm, ''He raiseth up the poor out of 
 the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dung-hill, 
 that he may set him with princes, even with the 
 princes of his people." 
 
 Now in practical efforts for the salvation of lost 
 men, if we would gain the higher inspiration for the 
 service, let the moral imagination particularly con- 
 struct to itself the image of man ''number two." 
 Doing thus we shall see as God sees, not the "natural 
 face" — the face of birth, ^ but of the Neio Birth. In 
 other words we shall see the divine possibilities in 
 the soul; we shall begin to love that ideal as God 
 loves it, and cherishing it, nothing will daunt us in 
 the effort to secure its actualization in life. 
 
 * James 1 : 23. 
 
II 
 
 THE EVANGELIZING MESSAGE 
 
 And to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.— fie6. 12 : 24. 
 
 As we proceed, there are two things to be kept 
 clearly in mind, and of which we shall separately 
 ffpeak, namely, the objective evangelizing message, 
 and the subjective process of inducing men to come 
 into right relation to that message. In this chapter 
 we deal only with the former matter. Later on, we 
 shaU take up the subjective side of the problem, and 
 put large emphasis on it. 
 
 He who would evangelize effectively needs to have 
 a right view, first, of the divinely wrought basis on 
 which evangelization is possible. He needs a clear 
 view of the evangelizing message. Then he must 
 follow also the right process in rendering available 
 its benefits. The moment we begin to think of evan- 
 gelizing, it is natural to call up the whole range of 
 speculative truth, — take account of our theological 
 ^^ stock in trade,'' — in which we have confidence, but 
 Which we erroneously suppose needs to be grasped as 
 a whole by those who would be saved ; and we wake 
 up to find that many do not grasp any part of it. 
 If we are to be skillful as evangelists, we must learn 
 
 34 
 
THE EVANGELIZING MESSAGE 35 
 
 to delimit the content of our message in the interest 
 of strategic skill. 
 
 I am not now saying aught against the holding of 
 a theological system and a correct one. I am simply 
 speaking of the way in which we should use it for 
 the technical purpose of starting men Christward. 
 
 At a Bombay missionary conference, Dr. E. A. 
 Hume was asked by a Parsi native preacher if he 
 was accustomed when preaching to tell people that 
 they were born in trespasses and sins. Dr. Hume 
 replied, '' Never. '^ The native inquired, ''Is that 
 taught in the Bible, and do you believe it?'^ 
 
 Dr. Hume replied, ' ' Yes, it is taught in the Bible 
 and I believe it, but I don't preach it, because that 
 is not part of the good message which I have to give 
 to men. It is hard enough to make Hindus realize 
 that they are now in trespasses and sins for which 
 they themselves are responsible. If I should say that 
 they were born in trespasses and sins, they would 
 probably lay it on their parents and the more readily 
 excuse themselves from responsibility." Of course 
 Dr. Hume meant that in his evangelizing message to 
 Hindus, he was careful to focus everything upon the 
 point of awakening new hope of immediate salvation 
 through Christ, and while so doing he kept more 
 speculative questions in abeyance. 
 
 It is at this point that preaching in many pulpits 
 is often vague and ineffective. It is too general : or 
 
36 METHOD IN SOUL-WINKENG 
 
 its use of theoretic truth is too disproportionate to 
 be strategic. 
 
 What is it to evangelize ? And what is the specific 
 message needful to secure results'? It is of course 
 easy to say that to evangelize is to '^ preach the 
 gospel,'^ but the word gospel in many quarters has 
 lost its meaning. At a time, tl^STefore, when the 
 term is used by men as variant in thefi' interpretation 
 of it as Tolstoi, Edward Everett Haiej. *Sabatier and 
 Dr. E. A. Torrey, it cannot be quite eiear what is 
 meant by the term ''. Gospel " ; hence it needs defining. 
 
 The gospel is the ''God-spell." It is that because 
 it is news so surprising, so unexpectedly gracious as 
 when understood brings us under spell to God, a 
 divine enchantment, a renewing fascination, as no 
 other message ever did or could. It seems too good 
 to be true, an unbelievable reality : — that God should 
 have provided Himself a lamb so sufdcient for our 
 sins that both their curse and power, through our 
 faith in Him, may be destroyed forever. 
 
 Be it remembered that the word ''evangelize" is 
 an exclusively biblical word ; it would never have 
 been heard of in our world but for the fact that God 
 had something to disclose which man could not have 
 found out without a revelation. To evangelize is to 
 tell good news, that which is really news and that 
 which is surprisingly joyful news, — a real saving 
 message. To evangelize is to point out to men how 
 
THE EVANGELIZING MESSAGE 37 
 
 they may come into a new moral and religious status, 
 under a regime which God had made possible through 
 the sacrificial work of Himself in His Son. To evan- 
 gelize a soul is to make clear to it the evangelical 
 status made possible for it by Christ. To evangelize 
 is to place in thought under the aegis — the protec- 
 tion — of an evangelical probation ; an entirely dif- 
 ferent sort of probation from any that man could 
 possibly conceive for himself apart from the Bible. 
 The basis for this new, this previously unthought of, 
 probation is of course found in that specific work of 
 Christ which was wrought by His cross. The teach- 
 ing of the cross as central in Christianity, expresses 
 God's eternal and fathomless pain for man's sin and 
 His readiness to do everything morally possible to 
 reclaim him from it. This, beyond anything else 
 conceivable, is adapted to awaken repentance and a 
 desire to sin no more. The new probation which we 
 are privileged to announce to men as made possible 
 by the cross, is that under which all men in the world 
 come into being, even though they do not know it. 
 It is conditioned upon the fact that there is a ^ ' lamb 
 slain (foreordained) from before the foundation of the 
 world." ^ So great and so originative is God's love 
 that He purposed and provided this basis of salvation 
 from eternity. The whole actual divine government 
 for mankind takes its character and form from this 
 » 1 Peter 1 : 20. 
 
38 METHOD IN SOUL-WmNmG 
 
 redemptive work of God in Christ. This was the 
 ground purpose of the universe. It was anterior to 
 creation and to the incoming of sin upon earth. 
 Every soul born into the world therefore is born 
 under a redemptive economy, — under the segis of 
 grace. It is born of course a partaker of the sin of 
 the first man Adam ; but it is also born with an in- 
 choate, an incipient, relation to Christ, the last Adam. 
 It has a heredity of evil from Adam, but it has also 
 a new potential heredity of grace from ''the last 
 Adam.'' ^ But how far from such a conception are 
 the common thoughts of men ! It is a thing too new, 
 too original for them readily to entertain. Hence 
 the danger is that the soul will fall in with the 
 first heredity, and repudiate its possibilities of new 
 heredity in Christ. Hence the perpetual need of 
 preaching of the best sort. 
 
 Doubtless most, perhaps all, souls, do at first re- 
 pudiate the principle of this new heredity ; that is, 
 they ignore or deny God's gracious intention for them ; 
 hence it is that men need to be evangelized, even very 
 young children need to be. They need to reverse 
 their attitude where rebellious self-will has asserted 
 itself, at that very point where they had repudiated 
 their new birthright in Christ and its claim upon 
 them. And all impenitent souls to the last hour of 
 earthly life need to be called upon to repent of that 
 1 Cor. 15:45. 
 
THE EVANGELIZING MESSAGE 39 
 
 repudiation, and to claim positively for themselves 
 that evangelical status under the atoning work of 
 Christ which was their misunderstood or despised new 
 heritage. Hence, the ever-present need of the evan- 
 gelist. Both age and youth supremely need to be 
 evangelized : it is at the point just indicated that they 
 need to be evangelized, and established in habits of a 
 new personal relation to Christ. In order to this, 
 men have to be awakened and recovered from those 
 false conceptions of probation so common, especially 
 from legalistic conceptions, from dependence upon 
 mere outward morality, and from that indifferentism 
 and fatalism which suppose that sinful situations can- 
 not be helped, and so must simply be stoically en- 
 dured. 
 
 In view of the issue which I have now presented, it 
 will be seen what I mean by the evangelizing mes- 
 sage. It is the message which announces that on the 
 basis of what Christ has done in His eternal atone- 
 ment, a new kind of probation, namely a probation 
 of grace ' — offering salvation by gift outright, on the 
 
 ^ By the term "probation of grace," we mean that probation by 
 which one is placed in new relation to a person — God as seen in 
 Christ — rathei than to a broken, abstract law ; a probation under 
 which the test of character is determined by one's penitent and be- 
 lieving attitude to the personal Redeemer, rather than to legal con- 
 formity to an abstract statute. Man, in his rudimental state in 
 Eden, lost his one and only opportunity to do that before he fell. 
 In the garden, our first parents were tested with respect to their 
 obedience to such a law. Under the gospel system, the attitude 
 
40 METHOD IN SOUL- WINING 
 
 ground of what Christ has done in His new covenant 
 or will, exists for all, is their new birthright. It is 
 therefore to be accepted by faith as a free gift. 
 
 In my parish in Indianapolis, was a bright young^ ] 
 lawyer who occasionally came to church but in a 
 rather cynical attitude. He soon married a young 
 woman, who was the particular joy of the church, as 
 an earnest Christian worker. It was a surprise to 
 many that she should have formed an alliance with 
 the gentleman referred to. Once married, however, 
 the young woman found herself in an agony of relig- 
 ious concern for him ; and of course she prayed with 
 great intensity, for his conversion ; and she enlisted 
 other friends to the same end. For a time, however, 
 the result seemed doubtful. Legally trained as he 
 was, proud of his morality and habituated to ignore 
 all forms of religion, his indifference continued, to the 
 distress of many. About that time, in my mid-week 
 meetings, I was giving a series of Bible-readings on 
 the ethico-evangelical acts of faith successively en- 
 joined in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Starting from 
 the notable defect of Israel, namely, his disobedience^ 
 
 of one's personality at the centre, towards the sacrificial and risen 
 Saviour and Lord — a new Master — is the vital matter. In this 
 latter conception we speak of the probation as "new" or "al- 
 tered." It is, of course, only relatively so. It is really the 
 oldest conception of probation, the one which God eternally en- 
 tertained for man ; it was new, only in its historical manifestation. 
 ^In the reviser's text we have the Greek word drreideca (diso- 
 
THE EyANGELIZi:N^G MESSAGE 41 
 
 before Canaan's gateway, Kadesli-Barnea, I introduced 
 into the series of readings, a study on "the New 
 Will, or Testament " of Christ. From the many legal 
 references associated with the idea, I thought the 
 study would interest this lawyer friend, and I gave 
 him a special invitation to come and hear it : to see 
 '4f the will would stand.'' He accepted, and I pro- 
 ceeded with my exposition of "The New Will." In 
 my study I traced the parallels between the ordinary 
 legal transaction of bequeathing property in a "Last 
 Will and Testament," and the provision in Christ's 
 "Last Will and Testament" for the spiritual welfare 
 of all believers. I pointed out that in the old covenant 
 as ministered by Moses two parties were required 
 to the covenant, whereas in Christ's new covenant 
 or will, it was the act of one party, ^ namely, God 
 in Christ. He offers salvation to His heirs as a pure 
 gratuity. The New Testament is really a codicil 
 to the former will, superseding and abrogating it.^ 
 
 In the will of Christ I accented several points in the 
 parallel, for example : (1) that it was grounded on a 
 promise ; ^ (2) that there was an estate to be divided — 
 an eternal inheritance,* an actual spiritual value to be 
 bequeathed, (3) that by the Spirit a new principle of 
 
 bedience) instead of anKTzla (unbeUef) as in the received text. 
 Of course the thought is of a disobedience which had its root in 
 unbelief. See Hebrews 3 : 12, 18, 19 ; 4:6. 
 
 ^ Gal. 3:20. ^Heb. 8:13. 
 
 8 Gal. 3 : 18 ; Ibid. 4 ; 28. * Heb. 9 : 16. 
 
42 METHOD IN SOUL-WINMNG 
 
 heirship was formed ^ in the regenerate heart ; (4) that 
 the values in the will were available only on the death 
 of the testator ; ^ (5) and that this will had to be j)?'o- 
 hated or passed uj)on in thejudgment work of ChrisVs 
 death recognized when He ascended to glory ; ^ (6) and 
 that Christ as risen from the dead, ^' ever liveth '' and 
 becomes the executor of His own wilV 
 
 This view of the objective truth had produced a 
 most solemn impression on the meeting, and for a few 
 moments there was profound silence. Suddenly, how- 
 ever, my legal friend, to the surprise of all, arose and 
 spoke about as follows : 
 
 ^^My friends, I have been deeply interested as a 
 lawyer, in this presentation. I think the points made 
 have all been well taken ; but from my point of view 
 there is something left out. Pardon me if I supply 
 it." Turning to two or three other lawyers who sat 
 near, he remarked, " Gentlemen of the legal fi^aternity 
 about me here will corroborate the point I make. 
 When a will is probated in our courts, it is well-known 
 that the legatees, or heirs named in the will, are ex- 
 pected to appear before the court and by formal act 
 elect either to accept what the will allows, as expressed 
 in the terms of the will, or they appeal to the law ; 
 they elect either to 'take under the will,' or 'take 
 under the law,' i. e., try to break the will. Friends, 
 
 ' Heb. 8 : 10. ' IMd. 9 : 15-18. 
 
 3 J hid. 9 ; 84-28. Ubid.7: 24, 25. 
 
THE EVANGELIZING MESSAGE 43 
 
 I have been casting about in my mind to see whether 
 I should get anything out of the bequest if I were to 
 appeal to the law. I see no prospect of getting any- 
 thing thus ; the will is not likely to be remade for my 
 benefit and I have no hope that I could break the 
 will. I think the only thing that remains for me if I 
 get my portion is to ^take under the will.' My 
 friends, I here and now elect to Hake under the 
 will.' '' 
 
 The gentleman sat down ; his astonished wife and, 
 indeed, the whole meeting were overcome under this 
 extraordinary and original declaration. It was a sur- 
 prising act, but it was the fitting response to the 
 evangelizing message. 
 
 It is important in all our preaching, however varied 
 the themes, so to present truth as to show the soul, 
 first, its evangelical status under Christ, and then its 
 evangelical relations to Christ in all the practical 
 conduct of life. It is one's relation to Christ that 
 should determine his business habits, his politics, his 
 domestic and social relations, his recreations and all 
 else he thinks and plans and does ; and all this needs 
 to be preached as implicates of Christ's redemption. 
 To do this successfully in great variety of form and 
 freshness of expression is the supreme achievement of 
 the Christian pulpit. For the failure to do this well, 
 great numbers of people in our congregations live and 
 die in confusion respecting the things which God con- 
 
44 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 stantly requires of them, in the relations of their com- 
 plex human lives. 
 
 The indefinite and loose ways in which these re- 
 lations have often been conceived and stated, are 
 doubtless fundamentally due to the vagueness which 
 prevails respecting the nature of Christ's atoning 
 work, and its implicates. Any marked increase in 
 evangelistic power which shall bring that wide-spread 
 revival for which many long, can come only with the 
 emergence of the ministry from enveloping mists 
 respecting the cross of Christ. That cross must be 
 interpreted with more discrimination, clearness and 
 passion than heretofore. Indeed there can be no 
 heavenly passion in the pulpit, where the divine 
 meanings of Christ's cross are indefinitely conceived, 
 superficially felt, or vaguely stated. 
 
 It may be timely to hint in passing one important 
 distinction, which, if it alone was grasped, we think 
 would go far to clear away some obscurities which 
 greatly becloud the gospel message. This distinction 
 concerns the very nature of this message on which we 
 have been focusing attention. It may appropriately 
 be mentioned here. We refer to the distinction 
 between the cross of the atonement and the tragedy 
 of the crucifixion. These two things lie side by side 
 in history ; but they represent opposites in principle. 
 The tragedy represented man at his worst ; it was the 
 crime of the ages, sin at its worst. The cross of the 
 
THE EVANGELIZING MESSAGE 45 
 
 atonement was the sublimest act in the moral history 
 of God ; it was the provision of His last will and 
 testament for the salvation and spiritual enrichment 
 of man ; it was God at His best j it represented what 
 was being enacted on the divine side of the central 
 event in earth's history. It represented a sacrifice 
 on God's part which, while it was historical, was also 
 eternal in principle ; it cost the Father as much as it 
 did the Son ; it was wholly voluntary ; it adequately 
 compassed the sin-problem of the universe ; it was 
 adapted to cure sin and to recover believing mankind 
 from its curse and power. 
 
 That divine transaction and the implied relations 
 of mankind to it, determine for every one the kind 
 oi being he is to be, the kind of life he is to live, and 
 the kind of destiny he is to seek. To ''believe on the 
 Lord Jesus Christ" is to accept for oneself by an act 
 of will as well as heart, — by an executive act of the 
 soul, — the relations under the probation of grace 
 which God purposes for him. The cross is to form 
 the new motive power in his life under the spell of 
 which, properly understood, man is to live, move 
 and have his new being. This is to render evangelical 
 the whole habit of the new life in Christ : it is to 
 render evangelical all practical ethics ; for the ethic 
 that is not more than ethical, even evangelical, is 
 unethical for a fallen human being intended to be 
 redeemed. 
 
46 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING i 
 
 In the light of the foregoing statements it will be 
 
 seen that when the Bible speaks of redemption "by i 
 
 the blood of Christ," it means redemption through the \ 
 
 self-sacrificing work of God in Christ of which His \ 
 
 blood is the symbolic life-principle. ' 
 
 In the museum connected with the monument to 1 j 
 
 Abraham Lincoln at Springfield, Illinois, among ' 
 
 other relics suggestive of the spirit and mission of i 
 
 the great emancipator of four million slaves, is : 
 
 treasured a piece of the rich gown worn by Laura ! 
 
 Keene, the actress, in Ford's theatre, Washington, , 
 
 on the tragic night when Lincoln fell. After the ! 
 fatal shot of the assassin, Miss Keene sprang to the 
 
 box and caught in her lap the head of the slain i 
 
 president, while the blood from the oozing wound \ 
 
 saturated a portion of her garment. After the event, | 
 
 that blood-stained breadth was cut from the gown, ; 
 
 sent to Springfield and preserved as the speaking '■ 
 
 symbol of the great sacrificial life which Lincoln j 
 
 lived even unto death, on behalf of the redemption | 
 of the black slaves of the South. Could we imagine 
 
 one of those redeemed men on a visit to Lincoln's ; 
 
 tomb looking at that emblem and properly remaining ! 
 
 indifferent to its appeal ? Nay, rather, we would say ' 
 that henceforth with a new abandon of personality 
 the ransomed man should live his life spellbound to 
 the moral majesty of the offering of the great presi- 
 dent on his behalf. For that man^ repentance would 
 
THE EVANGELIZING MESSAGE 47 
 
 mean repudiation of any past indifference to the price 
 paid for his emancipation ; and faith would mean a 
 new, thorough resignation of himself to the moral 
 mastery of the great ideals for which the name of 
 Lincoln stands. Life henceforth for him would mean 
 the acceptance of his new probation as a freedman, 
 with all the fascinating possibilities of his new 
 citizenship as a redeemed man. The evangelizing 
 message for the freedman of the South would be the 
 new potentialities made his through the priceless 
 sacrifices of the Civil War culminating in the de- 
 votement of the nation's head to his redemption. 
 
 And so, bearing in mind the inadequacy of the 
 human illustration, the evangelizing message to a 
 world of sinful men, is the proclamation of the new 
 and relatively speaking, altered probation made pos- 
 sible to men through the sacrificial lamb eternally 
 slain for them. 
 
 The wise, tender, divinely persuasive presentation 
 of this message, this or nothing will ever evangelize 
 and hold under speU to God, this world, — that is. 
 Christianize it. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE IMMEDIATE PEACTICAL AIM 
 
 How can I except some one shall guide me ? — Acts 8 : 31. 
 
 We now come to the subjective side of our problem. 
 In the effort to win the soul of a given individual, the 
 form of the effort will greatly depend upon the moral 
 and even the mental attitude which the soul sought 
 is supposed to hold. Often there is correct belief 
 respecting the fundamental Christian facts, such as 
 the Saviourhood of Christ, His atoning work and the 
 rightness of discipleship to Him ; and little more is 
 needed than so to win the confidence of the soul as 
 sympathetically to help it to yield the will in believ- 
 ing trust to truth already known. Probably really 
 Christian parents in dealing with their children, and 
 Sunday-school teachers with their simple-hearted 
 pupils, will commonly be successful even with lim- 
 ited skill, if their effort only be whole hearted and 
 sympathetic. 
 
 There are, however, great numbers of people of 
 maturer years, especially in times like ours, who 
 are in great suspense and uncertainty of mind re- 
 specting speculative interpretations of Christianity, 
 and yet who are not unfriendly to the consideration 
 of practical discipleship to Christ. There is there- 
 
 48 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PEACTICAL AIM 49 
 
 fore occasion for much careful thought in defining to 
 oneself just how to proceed in direct efforts for these. 
 Many are of vacillating habit or disposition, or 
 argumentative in mind, and so have become torpid 
 and inactive in reference to God : they are befogged, 
 in the dark, and sincerely sceptical concerning the 
 realities claimed for Christian experience. They 
 thus settle into chronic agnosticism. How shall we 
 deal with these ? What should be our practical and 
 immediate aim? We answer in one sentence, "put 
 them on the clue'' through some subjective com- 
 mittal of themselves, whereby in the end they will 
 come to the needed realization of God and divine 
 things. Wherever, however, any such soul comes 
 into new spiritual realization and so is consciously 
 saved, we may be sure it is always through the 
 energy of the Holy Spirit, and on the ground of the 
 atonement of Christ — the atonement which, in God's 
 "nature of things," is eternal reality, however im- 
 perfectly it is grasped intellectually. 
 
 I recall a conversation with an agnostic rela- 
 tive of mine, a typical instance of the class just 
 referred to, which may make clear our principle. 
 This relative was a man of much thought and read- 
 ing, bred in a family of pronounced Christian faith, 
 but the marked exception in the household who had 
 shown disinclination to accept Christianity ; and he 
 was apparently candid in his position. His mind, 
 
50 METHOD IN SOUL-WmmKG 
 
 however, was argumentative in type : he lived in the 
 realm of theory, and to him Christianity, so readily 
 apprehended by his family relatives, seemed wholly 
 out of reach. As we were conversing together one 
 day, he suddenly inquired : 
 
 ^' How do you explain all those mysterious things 
 in the Bible?'' by which he meant the realities of 
 supernatural revelation of God as a whole. 
 
 I replied, "I don't explain them: I take them 
 in the main just as they stand ; I can't explain 
 them." 
 
 ^^Why," answered he, ^'I thought you ministers 
 pretended to explain all these things." 
 
 I replied, ^']^o, we don't; we expect to have the 
 explanation some time." Then turning to him, I 
 inquired : 
 
 "And now, how do you explain them? These 
 problems are as much yours as they are ours." 
 
 ''Oh," he replied, "I can't make anything of 
 them ; they are all Greek to me." 
 
 "Exactly," I answered; "but in one respect at 
 least we believers have this advantage over you ; 
 we have found the clue, the key, to the explanation 
 of these things now so far beyond us ; and that is 
 vastly better than nothing. 
 
 f "The case is like this ; suppose you and I were out 
 in the depths of a vast forest ; night comes on, and 
 even after the day breaks no sun appears, and the 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PEACTICAL AIM 51 
 
 heavens are dark with clouds. You finally speak up 
 and say, 
 
 ^' ^We are lost. ^ 
 
 ^^ I reply, ' As for you, you are lost ; you know not 
 even the points of the compass. Quite so. But as for 
 me, while I am your companion in the circumstances, 
 I still know the trail. I, no more than you, can see 
 the open ; but follow me, and I will bring you out at 
 last. This is vastly better than stark bewilderment. ' ' ^ 
 To this he had no reply to offer. He could simply 
 inquire how I found the trail when he had missed it, 
 and this gave me opportunity to show him that there 
 were deep, experimental, subjective tests of richer 
 worth than all possible speculative ones, whereby 
 one could progressively find his way into the truth 
 of God.y These experimental tests involving the 
 action of the heart, the conscience and the will, he 
 had never applied to the problem, and of course he 
 had thus shut himself out from many precious 
 secrets. This was all I could do for him ; give him 
 my testimony as a real witness and explain to him 
 how to get on the clue ; he must then live the 
 amount of faith possible to him, hoping that step by 
 step the explanation of the deep mysteries of revela- 
 tion would come clear to him. ''The secret of the 
 Lord is with them that fear Him,'^ and not with those 
 who stand outside the truth and merely patronize it 
 as theory. 
 
62 METHOD IN SOUL-WINNIKG 
 
 Of course one may wholly fall to induce his fellow, 
 especially if his heart has become embittered and his 
 will perverted, to make the experimental test. In 
 such a case, however, the wicket-gate has been 
 pointed out 5 the real and only key to the situation 
 has been offered. If now the soul perishes, it 
 perishes, a moral suicide. The skirts of his guide 
 are clear. One perishing thus is not a truth lover, 
 and for such there is no salvation, neither in this 
 world nor in the world to come. 
 
 We are, however, persuaded that great numbers 
 all about us are lost to Christ and the church because 
 of the lack of skill on the part of those who are sup- 
 posed to be competent spiritual guides in affording 
 them a method of escape out of religious obscurity 
 and confusion into the path of clear and growing 
 light. There are teachers enough who can set forth 
 the doctrines of Christianity, who can give most re- 
 fined definitions of the new birth, atonement, 
 justification, etc., who yet prove highly incompetent 
 to make clear to men their actual relation to Christ. 
 The secret of success is back of this. It is in 
 managing through love and sympathy, and the 
 tuition of the spirit of God, to get so near to the 
 soul, to so win its confidence as to discover the secret 
 of agnostic difficulty, and the real point where the 
 remedy is to be applied. In most cases the soul to 
 be won himself must and will, if followed with 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PEACTICAL AIM 53 
 
 sufficient love, give up the key to Ms own difficulty. 
 This once gained, it remains but to turn back the 
 bolt, enter, and lead the soul to Christ. 
 
 Some years ago in Indianapolis, I was preaching to 
 a large evening congregation on the necessity of for- 
 giveness of injuries, if such are cherished, as a condi- 
 tion of securing the peace of God. As the sermon 
 progressed, I observed that the head of a man sitting 
 directly before me went down on the back of the pew 
 before him. In this attitude the man remained 
 throughout the sermon and even after the service 
 concluded. The benediction pronounced, I ap- 
 proached the man and found him under high tension 
 of feeling. The congregation having withdrawn I 
 drew from him this story : 
 
 ^' After the Civil War |I went from the North into 
 one of the southern states as an ambitious young 
 lawyer and politician. I soon rose to some promi- 
 nence and became a candidate for public office. Dur- 
 ing the heat of the campaign in which feeling ran 
 high, one night when I was in the midst of a campaign 
 address in the open air, a political enemy drew a pis- 
 tol and shot me through the arm destroying this elbow 
 joint, as a result of which I am crippled for life. My 
 enemy secreted himself, was protected by the author- 
 ities, and although I sought him for months, to this 
 day I have never overtaken him ; but I have made a 
 vow that if I ever meet him anywhere in^this world, I 
 
54 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 will kill him on the spot. Now,'' continued my 
 friend, "you have been teaching here to-night that no 
 man with resentment towards his fellow man in his 
 heart can have hope of divine forgiveness : then what 
 about that vow of mine ? " 
 
 Of course this man was revealing the very gateway 
 to the citadel of his being, and himself in the light of 
 an awakened conscience was hinting to me that I 
 might enter. 
 
 I gladly accepted the intimation, and the convicted 
 man having been led to renounce his evil vow, sur- 
 rendered to Christ and the sense of forgiveness im- 
 mediately followed. Observe, however, that the ac- 
 tion of this penitent was primarily a moral rather 
 than an intellectual act — the application of an experi- 
 mental test to the fidelity of God, and it was promptly 
 honoured. There was a clue to that soul' s deliverance. 
 The confidence of the soul was somehow sufficiently 
 gained to enable me to perceive the secret, and add- 
 ing my sympathy and prayer to his disclosure of him- 
 self, the saving work was easily wrought. 
 
 Until such secret is gained, promiscuous efforts to 
 convert people resemble a firing at random upon the 
 hills surrounding Port Arthur, instead of ascertaining 
 the susceptible points in fort after fort, and so follow- 
 ing the path to conquest. 
 
 We who are ministers, trained as we are to consider 
 truth in systematic theological forms, are prone to 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PEACTICAL AIM 55 
 
 suppose that as we are to maintain our faith firmly, 
 so in method also we are to stand formally on our own 
 dogmatic ground, and labour to bring men over to our 
 way of thinking, theologically. Of course we are to 
 maintain our ground ; and yet tactically, in a true 
 pedagogic method, it is essential that we should go 
 over on to the territory occupied by the mind we 
 would lead, and look at things from his point of view 
 long enough to get into sympathetic touch on some 
 single practical ideal, and thus move the discouraged, 
 helpless one to take one brave unselfish step out of 
 himself into a larger realization of truth; such a 
 realization can come only through such a subjective 
 act. It is impossible to force our view of truth into 
 the mind of another. We must learn to take account 
 of even the minimum of truth held by him, and then 
 encourage the moral resolve to act upon the ray of 
 light possessed. Thus only can any one^s measure of 
 light be increased, and the soul itself experience a 
 personal first-hand realization of God. 
 
 As illustrative of this principle I give an incident 
 which occurred during my pastorate in Minneapolis. 
 I was invited by President Northrup of the Univer- 
 sity of Minnesota, to a parlour lecture on Eussian 
 literature to be given one evening at his home by an 
 interesting and gifted young Russian — a graduate of 
 Harvard University. He had been at one time a 
 Nihilist in theory, a rank materialist, at times most 
 
56 METHOD IN SOUL-WINOTNG 
 
 pessimistic in Ms view of life, and often had been 
 tempted to destroy himself. Betimes he sought con- 
 verse with leading philanthropists in Boston and else- 
 where, seeking with his noble, impulsive nature in 
 some way to relieve the distresses of poverty and 
 wretchedness characteristic of great cities, but with 
 little practical outcome. He was now giving the 
 lectures referred to in cultivated parlour circles east 
 and west. In the lecture I heard, I discovered a 
 characteristic and plaintive note as he sought to in- 
 terpret the various authors with whom he dealt, par- 
 ticularly Tourguenieff. It was the principle of self- 
 renunciation and its correlative emergence into the 
 after-peace which characterizes real self-abandonment 
 to moral light. This was the precise principle into 
 the deep reality and meaning of which after a period 
 of long spiritual depression I personally was initi- 
 ated through the grace of the Holy Spirit, in the 
 second marked crisis in my life, which occurred while 
 I was a pastor in Indianapolis, referred to in the pref- 
 ace. The passing of that crisis disclosed to me how 
 heterodox in heart one may be, if he is in a wrong 
 state of will, while yet being very orthodox in head. 
 This experience greatly altered my conception of 
 faith, and changed the whole practical method of my 
 dealing with agnostic souls. 
 
 The man referred to greatly attracted me, as one 
 whom I believed was groping for light and having my- 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PEACTICAL AIM 57 
 
 self had a profound experience on that principle, I 
 hoped I might help him. At the time, however, he 
 was far enough from faith in any form of evangelical 
 truth. But this I thought quite subsidiary for the 
 time. I observed in a daily paper a few days after- 
 wards that this friend had been invited to attend a 
 meeting of ministers of the liberalistic wing, in the 
 city. The report of the meeting which I read also 
 stated that when this Eussian gentleman, although a 
 guest of the meeting, came to speak, he rather 
 strongly reflected on the essayist of the morning, in- 
 timating that he had not thought through his ques- 
 tion, and suggesting that a ''lonely meditation of 
 about forty days in the desert would probably lead 
 the writer to burn his paper." Putting together 
 these two things in the temper of the Eussian — his 
 appreciation of the renunciatory principle and his 
 moral courage, I was led to invite him to lunch with 
 me. We were entire strangers to each other, but we 
 were soon in a close heart to heart converse, respect- 
 ing the motif of his lectures. I was persuaded he was 
 a sincere seeker after truth. I simply sought at this 
 time to draw him out, and at length astonished him 
 by asking him to come to my church the following 
 Sunday evening and address my congregation on any 
 theme he might choose. He was of course amazed 
 that an orthodox minister who knew so little of him 
 should extend such an invitation and hesitated, saying, 
 
58 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 "What will your people think of me, a dilettante 
 lecturer in swallow-tails, known chiefly in ladies' 
 parlours, appearing in place of their minister?" 
 
 "Oh,'' I said, " of course I myself will be there ; I 
 shall introduce you, express my appreciation of your 
 message as far as I have heard it and give you carte 
 Uanche to express yourself." 
 
 I was aware that I took some risk, but I felt certain 
 that the best thing I could do for such a man was to 
 disappoint his prepossession of mind that all ortho- 
 dox people are necessarily narrow and intolerant. I 
 took pains to explain the situation a little later to 
 my deacons who approved my course in the circum- 
 stances, and we all awaited the outcome with prayerful 
 interest. My Eussian friend appeared, showing signs 
 of some agitation, but evidently in earnest not to 
 disappoint the courtesy extended. His address was 
 upon Tolstoi and although by no means adopting his 
 views, my friend reiterated that note of self renuncia- 
 tion in order to higher life, which he had declared to 
 be so central in the previous lecture I heard. This 
 principle of course is vital in Christianity, although 
 at the time I think the man scarcely knew it. We 
 thanked him for his lecture, assured him of our in- 
 terest in him, and for the time parted. 
 
 The incident passed, and my friend left for Boston 
 with the promise to write me. It was not long until 
 I received a letter giving an account of intense exer- 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PEACTICAL AIM 59 
 
 cises in secret prayer, of long walks into the country 
 by himself alone, on one of which occasions he had 
 found a secluded spot and bowed down before the 
 Saviour of the world and accepted His atoning sacri- 
 fice in his behalf, and was now rejoicing in Him as 
 his Eedeemer. I was not surprised. He further 
 asked if I would baptize him in case he would come 
 back to Minneapolis. I of course assented, and he 
 came. His second appearance before my congrega- 
 tion with the testimony of profound Christian ex- 
 perience, evangelical to the core, was received with 
 amazement and wide rejoicing. The event also com- 
 manded very general attention in the city and opened 
 the way for numberless conversations with men of his 
 class who perhaps would not have opened their mind 
 to any minister whatever. 
 
 The point in method was this. I seized upon the 
 modicum of truth which I perceived this man held. 
 I presumed upon it, encouraged him to risk himself 
 upon it, and shortly in so doing he came into a new 
 state. The man was put upon the clue to his own 
 first-hand realization of Christ, and it led him to the 
 goal. 
 
 One of the most interesting characters in attend- 
 ance upon the late Baptist Congress in London was 
 Baron Woldemar Uixkiull, another Eussian, a repre- 
 sentative of the greatly persecuted Baptist churches 
 of that empire. He is a man of wealth, living on 
 
60 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 his baronial estates in Esthonia, one of the Baltic 
 provinces. He was brought up in luxury amid the 
 nobility, and as a child was often on the knees of the 
 great Prince Bismarck, who was a frequent visitor at 
 his father's palace. During an intimate conversation 
 I had with him this summer, I drew from him the 
 story of his conversion. He was for years an agnostic, 
 having no sort of light upon the great spiritual prob- 
 lems of the soul. Finally, through the reading of 
 Tolstoi's writings, he became convinced that there 
 was some reality in the gospel story of Jesus Christ. 
 He began to read the gospels. This further led him 
 to pray, but in this limited way : '^ Oh, God, if there 
 be a God in this universe, make Thyself known to 
 me." And very shortly, as he thus concentrated his 
 soul upon the supposition, the mere hypothesis, that 
 there might be a God, and challenged Him to disclose 
 Himself to him, suddenly, the light broke. He felt 
 a sense of the deepest peace, and turning again to 
 the Bible, he found it luminous from end to end 
 with the explanation of the soul's spiritual history, 
 and with the assurance that he himself was God's 
 child. He shortly after led his wife into the same 
 realization, and ever since, as a layman, has preached 
 the gospel, given himself to building chapels for the 
 poor, and in other ways evincing the profound nature 
 of the divine change in his heart and life. 
 The real secret in soul-winning is not to win souls 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PRACTICAL AIM 61 
 
 to ourselves, nor to the acceptance of our dogmatic 
 views, but into the practice of following their own 
 light, and so to an interior experience of truth and 
 God. 
 
 It is not ours to win people to the abandonment of 
 their own theological traditions, and to the accept- 
 ance of our own dogmatic systems instead. People 
 usually suppose us to be doing this : this we need to 
 disappoint as Jesus disappointed the woman at the 
 well of Sychar. There is indeed a time for the im- 
 parting of theological instruction, even to the com- 
 munication of some system of truth ; but that time 
 is not yet in the more primary process of soul- 
 winning. The utmost we now need to do, the utmost 
 we can do, in method, is to put a soul upon the clue 
 to its own realization of Christ. If we do this, we do 
 much, because we help at least to strengthen, we may 
 even initiate the habit of walking in the light, and 
 this is to induct one into an act of faith ,• for in the 
 last analysis an act of faith is nothing more nor less 
 than the committal of the soul by an executive act, a 
 collective act of the entire soul, to walk in the pres- 
 ent measure of spiritual light possessed. 
 
 In that remarkable story given in the ninth of 
 John, of the opening of the eyes of the man born 
 blind, we have simply the account of how a man was 
 led into faith, although everything is set before us 
 under the forms of a man walking in the light, albeit 
 
62 METHOD IN SOUL-WIl^rNraG 
 
 starting from utter night, and walking more and 
 more bravely and loyally as the light increased until 
 at length he became an open-eyed and luminous 
 prophet testifying to Christ in the most exalted and 
 confident terms. 
 
 The highest work we ever do for another soul is to 
 afford incentive to treat the truth it already knows as 
 a reality, and so to act upon it, risk something on it. 
 This is the development of faith in another. It is 
 putting the soul on the clue to personal and imme- 
 diate realization of God. Thus and thus only can 
 Christian experience so-called be begun or continued. 
 As ministers of Christ, whether professionally so or 
 not, this is our distinctive mission in the world ; and 
 happy is he or she who has developed tact and skill 
 in so profound a matter. When this shall become 
 general in the church, as we see it occasionally mani- 
 fested in individual instances, the world-wide uni- 
 versal revival will have come. 
 
 And be it noticed, the spirit of such an evangelism 
 is by no means exhausted when a specific result lead- 
 ing an unregenerate soul to its first experience of 
 Christ is gained, because the whole spiritual life 
 under the gospel in its method and ongoing is 
 germinally contained in the taking of one such step. 
 Each successive step in the divine life in whatever 
 relations, is to be taken on the same principle of 
 loyalty to light, as that on which the first step was 
 
THE IMMEDIATE PEAOTICAL AIM 63 
 
 taken. It is from the failure to inculcate this in 
 developing the newly begun life that after results in 
 the lives of really converted people are so unsatis- 
 factory. Young converts are not properly instructed 
 and aided to the expression of this important principle 
 in the unfolding habits of their entire career. For 
 lack of this great numbers who come into the church 
 truly converted, become either legalistic in their 
 thought, or shortly grow confused, and lose their 
 evangelical bearings. So then nothing short of a 
 ^^reconversion," so-called, will set them right again. 
 The whole habit of the new life needs to be rendered 
 evangelical, to be continued on the basis of the 
 evangelical status, under which as converts their new 
 life began. 
 
 From this point of view the evangelism so pro- 
 foundly and widely needed in our day and a far 
 better type than is common, is itself necessary in 
 order to train and accustom the church to live truly 
 under the evangelical status in which the gospel 
 would place and establish them, as well as to bring 
 in new converts. Thus viewed the evangelization 
 required is a vastly deeper and more universal thing 
 than is commonly supposed. 
 
IV 
 
 THE NATUEE OP SAYING FAITH 
 
 But he that doeth the truth cometh to the light that his works 
 may be made manifest that they have been wrought in God. — 
 John 3 : 21. 
 
 Nothing is more certain than that for practical 
 dealing with men, the soul-winner needs to have a 
 clear conception of what constitutes saving faith. 
 Doubtless in the general mind there is a supposition 
 that faith is primarily the belief of a theological 
 proposition ; a particular intellectual concept respect- 
 ing Christ and certain aspects of His work. The fact 
 that the Scriptures place such emphasis on the matter 
 of believing on the Lord Jesus Christ, and the further 
 fact that in the apostolic writings there is a sharp 
 antithesis drawn between what are called ' ' works of 
 law," considered as meritorious, and faith in Jesus 
 Christ as the Eedeemer of men and the fulfiUer of the 
 law, partly explains this. But there is in the New 
 Testament at least a third principle with a character- 
 istic phrasing, which certainly is not the equivalent 
 of doing the deeds of the law, nor is it discovered, in 
 common thought, we fear, to be what it really is ; the 
 synonym of real faith in God. 
 
 The principle we refer to is expressed by Jesus on 
 64 
 
THE NATUEE OF SAVING FAITH 65 
 
 this wise: ^'He that doetli the truthj cometh to the 
 light, that his works may be made manifest that they 
 have been wrought in God.^^ ^ Note the three ac- 
 tivities expressed in this text ; doing the truth ; increase 
 of light and a divine operation in the soul. The text 
 implies that the right relation to Christ, such as is 
 embraced by a personal faith in Him — a faith which 
 commits itself to Him and makes a personal test of 
 His reality and faithfulness — involves action upon 
 some present measure of truth possessed : — enough 
 truth to act on. As it does so, it comes to fuller 
 illumination because the Spirit is cooperating until 
 at length a divine operation, although quite below 
 one's consciousness, is wrought in the soul. This is 
 the miracle of faith in action, plus the correlative 
 work of the Divine Spirit in the soul. 
 
 The entire Epistle of James, often in the past, even 
 by Martin Luther, supposed to be a contradiction of 
 the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, is really 
 a confirmation of Paul's doctrine and only another 
 way of stating it. The works which James com- 
 mends, for example, the act of Abraham in yielding 
 up Isaac, are really worlcs of faith, and not works of 
 law, at all, and the work of faith is simply faith in 
 action, faith proving itself real.' Even Paul himself, 
 in the Epistle to the Eomans, emphasizes the im- 
 portance of ^^ obeying the truth," and points out the 
 
 > John 3 : 21. ^ James 2 : 21-24. 
 
66 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 fearful evil of ^' obeying unrighteousness," ^ of " hold- 
 ing down the truth in unrighteousness.'' ^ Indeed, at 
 one point Paul seems to afford promise even of 
 eternal life, ''to them that by patience in well-doing, 
 seek for glory and honour and incorruption " ;' but 
 if so, it is altogether on the principle of faith on the 
 ground of Christ's atoning work of which they may 
 as yet be in ignorance, while yet cherishing certain 
 spiritual ideals. Paul certainly says that '' glory and 
 honour and peace are to every man that worketh 
 good ; to the Jew first and also to the Greek." * We 
 should however miss the whole spirit of Paul's teach- 
 ing if we failed to see that all these terms are in- 
 tended by him, to be mere expressions of faith ; that 
 is, of a collective, executive act of the entire soul in 
 the direction of the ideals which it cherishes and on 
 the basis of the measure of light enjoyed, whether it 
 be in the case of the Jew or the Greek. 
 
 Doubtless the failure to recognize this third form 
 of Scripture teaching which we are now emphasizing, 
 has led to deplorable misunderstandings between 
 evangelicals and non-evangelicals, as it has also ren- 
 dered narrow the interpretations of some evangelicals 
 in considering the moral and spiritual status before 
 God of many whose theological views are erroneous, 
 or of those who have never known the historic Christ. 
 
 * Rom. 2:8. « Ibid. 1 : 18. 
 
 8 i6i(?. 2 : 6, 7. ^ Ibid. 2: 10, 
 
THE NATUEE OF SAVING FAITH 67 
 
 And so some workers in foreign missions have put 
 much further away from them than they need to the 
 so-called ^'heathen.'' The missionary erroneously 
 supposes that before a soul reared in Paganism can 
 even be started in the way of salvation, he must 
 necessarily first be indoctrinated into a body of 
 theological truth, and this matter seems so difficult 
 in the face of ignorance, prejudice and superstition, 
 that some workers are discouraged from the start, 
 and accomplish little or nothing of value. Some 
 justify their failure by thinking they are ^' seed- 
 sowing," which may be true enough ; but it is much 
 more likely they are pursuing a mistaken pedagogic 
 method. 
 
 Now in our effort to reach the heathen, we do well 
 to ponder, for their pedagogic values, any and every 
 aspect of religion however false or imperfect. Every 
 form of religion, even the crudest fetishism, gives 
 utterance to some deep hunger of the soul, and so 
 hints a thought of God. 
 
 For example, animism, — spirit- worship — even at 
 its lowest, holds a belief in the existence of a human 
 spirit, in the antagonism of spirits good and bad, in 
 the possibility of some sort of communion of spirits, 
 and in the future life of spirits. The savage idolater 
 often does not really worship the symbol before 
 which he bows ; he simply tries thus to realize and 
 localize the spirit which he fears. The rude African 
 
68 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 who would not complete a bargain with the European 
 trader until he had time to go and bring his fetish 
 which he had forgotten, is far nearer to God than 
 the modern, nominal Christian who essays to con- 
 duct his business aj)art from his religion ; nay, the 
 African in loyalty to his crude conscience reads a 
 needed lesson to all such as have forgotten that God 
 has the most intimate relation to all business, even 
 to corporate acts. Brahminism with all its grossness 
 is at bottom a non-materialistic religion. It seeks to 
 fit the spiiit by endless transmigrations for a future 
 life. Buddhism represents a half-truth, viz. : that 
 the soul to find its true blessedness must lose itself. 
 Its fundamental defect is that unlike Christianity, it 
 does not show how through losing its lower life, the 
 soul may find itself in the higher life, a life which 
 Christ makes possible. The remnant of truth found 
 in any of these religions should be used to put men 
 on the clue to the realization of Christ, and of all 
 that follows. 
 
 The essential principle at the root of all saving 
 faith is loyalty to present spiritual light, a loyalty 
 that is ready to act on its light. This being so, any 
 soul may make an instant beginning anywhere, and 
 with whatever measure of truth it has, in the school 
 of Christ. I freely grant that this idea has not al- 
 ways prevailed, and is even now far from general 
 acceptance among evangelicals. Many sincerely 
 
THE NATUEE OF SAVING FAITH 69 
 
 suppose that in order to salvation in any degree, there 
 must first exist in the mind a certain concept, or set 
 of concepts, which in themselves must be dogmat- 
 ically believed, before the soul can come into vital 
 relation to Christ. This assumes that faith is 
 primarily and essentially an intellectual belief 5 
 belief in a doctrine about God, or Christ, or the 
 Bible. But this is not the truth concerning Chris- 
 tian faith, and never was. There is a place for 
 intellectual beliefs, but this in the matter of method 
 is at a later stage. Of course we do not forget that 
 a certain modicum of objective truth must precede 
 any subjective action of the soul. But some amount 
 of such truth is always present to every mind. 
 
 Saving faith at its heart is a moral attitude of 
 personality ; ^ as such, therefore, any soul, anywhere, 
 whatever its degree of illumination, is capable of 
 exercising such faith in principle, the moment it is 
 appealed to. Christianity, alone, of all religions, 
 takes note of so elemental a thing as this. Christ 
 in His school requires of no soul more than one 
 step at a time, and that step a relative one, in view 
 of all the conditions it faces. That step however 
 may hold in itself the potentiality of all possible 
 Christian living. Doubtless at this point many 
 Christians have sadly misunderstood their own 
 religion, and so they still place the cart before 
 1 Rom. 2 : 15, 16. 
 
70 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 the horse, in their initiative appeals to men. This 
 really embarrasses Christianity and makes it need- 
 lessly slow of acceptance. 
 
 It is always a tactical mistake also to put religion as 
 a philosophy over against any other form of religion 
 as a philosophy, in a competitive way. Those who 
 proceed as if Christianity were a competitive religion, 
 always do so to the damage of Christianity ; they mis- 
 represent its spirit and distort its method. Christian- 
 ity is not in the field to gain a partisan victory. Such 
 victories as Christianity wins, it wins from intrinsic 
 desert, because it complements the limited, or 
 vitalizes the expiring hope in other systems. Chris- 
 tianity never seeks victory for its own selfish sake, 
 but because of its genuine and exhaustless love for 
 those whom it would win from error and short- 
 sightedness ; it came ^' not to destroy but to fulfill.'^ 
 It comes as sunrise comes, not to obliterate the star- 
 light, but to suffuse it with a more original glow. 
 
 The following account of a method employed in 
 dealing with a Eoman Catholic will illustrate the 
 principle. 
 
 Last summer I was observing the work of some 
 labourers who were laying water pipes at Northfield, 
 Mass. For several days I had noticed among the 
 force a broad shouldered, big brained Irishman who 
 was the principal man on the job, named Jim, a Eo- 
 man Catholic. I came upon him one day at work 
 
THE NATTJEE OF SAYING FAITH 71 
 
 down in a trench six feet below the surface, lying flat 
 on his stomach, tamping in the jute around the joints 
 of a water main. He did not observe me as I sat 
 down on the bank to watch him at his work. Shortly 
 Jim called to an Italian attendant to bring him lead. 
 The Italian promptly responded, bringing a ladle full 
 of the molten metal but slopping it rather carelessly 
 as he approached. 
 
 I cried out, ^' Careful, man, you'U burn the fellow 
 down there." 
 
 Jim looked up surprised and taking in who I was, 
 although we had barely learned each other's names, 
 he said, ^'Well, doctor, if that lead is hot, what d'ye 
 think about the hot place ? " 
 
 I replied, ^' It's a good place to keep out of." 
 
 Jim answered, '^But d'ye think there is such a 
 place, anyway?" 
 
 I answered, ^' There is such a thing as a hot con- 
 science, and that's the worst sort of a hell. 
 
 ?? 
 
 ^'Well," said Jim, ^'I observe that the clergy 
 differ about these things. And then," he added 
 throwing up his hands despairingly, "what's a man 
 to do in my circumstances about religion, anyhow •? 
 Look at me amongst these Italians, and I only a poor 
 plumber." 
 
 Observing that the man had appreciated my almost 
 unconscious sympathy with him, and that he was 
 reaching out after more, I warmed to him and said : 
 
72 METHOD IN SOUL-WmNmG 
 
 ^^My dear fellow, your work down there in that 
 trench is just as acceptable to God, if you do it in the 
 right spirit, as mine is preaching in the pulpit." 
 
 He looked up surprised, and continued : "Do you 
 believe that r^ 
 
 " Believe it? I know it ! It's the one truth I'm 
 trying to get everybody to believe." 
 
 "Well," replied Jim, " I think I must come up and 
 have a talk with you." 
 
 I answered, "All right, Jim, I'm looking for the 
 man that's looking for me. When will you come? " 
 
 He looked up with a quizzical twinkle in his eye : 
 "I'll come — next Sunday afternoon — at four o'clock 
 — if it doesn't rain." 
 
 "Well," I said, " come on, I'll be looking for you. 
 If it rains I'll see you in the house." 
 
 "Oh," he said, "I don't want to come into your 
 house ', 1 want to see you alone." 
 
 " AU right," said I, "I'll be out under the trees ; " 
 and I earnestly hoped it would not rain. 
 
 Four o'clock Sunday afternoon came, and true to 
 his word Jim came sauntering up the walk, with what 
 deep thoughts the sequel will teU. I was waiting to 
 receive him, and we sat down under the trees together. 
 
 He opened by saying : "I've been working here 
 in ITorthfield for six weeks. I'd like to live here al- 
 ways. I wish I could get a job to keep me the year 
 round." 
 
THE NATUKE OF SAVING FAITH 73 
 
 I answered, ^^ Why, where do you live"? " 
 
 He repUed, ^' I live in hell — in S ." 
 
 " How so ? ^' I answered. 
 
 ^^Well," said he, ^'you see I married unfortu- 
 nately ; my wife is a terror. She has fits of unaccount- 
 able madness; she wiU sometimes rouse me in the 
 night and threaten to strangle me, and with no 
 reason; the froth will stand out on her lips; she's 
 like one possessed of the devil. She won't eat any- 
 thing I buy ; she thinks I mean to poison her. And 
 yet for more than twenty years I have taken home all 
 my wages week by week, and laid them down on the 
 table, and said, ^ Wife, there it is, spend it as you 
 like^ ; and she has done it ; I've not even bought a 
 shirt .lO*- myself; and yet I'm only tormented by her. 
 Some of my friends, one a judge, have said to me, 
 * Get quit of her, get a divorce,' but I've always said, 
 ^I won^t do it, she's my wife ; '^what God has joined 
 together, let not man put asunder." ^ I won't leave 
 her. I'll bear it." 
 
 His great chin quivered and the tears were on his 
 lashes. 
 
 I said, ^'You bear that for principle's sake, do 
 youl" 
 
 He said, ^' Yes, that's my cross." 
 
 I replied, ^^The Lord bless you, my dear fellow, 
 that is Christianity, — bearing the painfal thing for 
 Christ's sake, for duty's sake." 
 
74 METHOD IN SOUL-WINOTNG 
 
 I then added, ^' You must have prayed a good deal 
 about this, not merely said prayers," 
 
 ^' Prayed,'^ said he, ^'of course I have. I could 
 never have borne it but for that." 
 
 I added, " God appreciates all that." 
 
 ^'And then," said he: ^'doctor, what do you 
 think of purgatory ? " 
 
 I said, ^^ Jim, if you want to know what I think, 
 there is no purgatory in the Bible, it's salvation Jesus 
 brings. Do you know what the name ' Jesus ' means ? ' ' 
 
 ^' No," he asked, ^^ is that a Greek word ? " 
 
 '^ Yes," I said, ''that's Greek. The Hebrew word 
 is 'Joshua' or 'Jehoshua' ; it means 'deliverer,' from 
 purgatory and all. The angel in the Bible said, ' Thou 
 Shalt call His name Jesus for He shall save His people 
 from their sins. ' ^ When Jesus undertakes to save a 
 man He makes a clean job of it ; He makes thorough 
 work; He does not leave us in any purgatory." 
 
 Jim replied, " I half believe it. Then," he added, 
 "tell me, doctor, why the priests [say we are not to 
 read the Bible." 
 
 I replied, " Jim, have you got a Bible T^ 
 
 "Yes," said he, "a big, fine one ; but I don't read 
 it much ; the priests tell me I mustn't." 
 
 "Well," I added, "I'm not going to quarrel with 
 your priests, I'm your priest just now, and I tell you, 
 read your Bible. '^ 
 
 »Matt. 1:81, 
 
THE NATUEE OF SAVING FAITH 75 
 
 '^But,'' said he, ^'I wouldn't understand it." 
 
 "No,'' I said, "not all of it. Neither do your 
 priests 5 no more do 1 5 but I understand the simple 
 things in it, and so may you. You understand your 
 morning paper. Bead your Bible in plain English, 
 and follow that.'' 
 
 Said Jim, "I believe I will." 
 
 Finally I asked, ^ ^ How long have you had so serious 
 views of these religious matters ? " 
 
 " Oh," said he, "more or less always." 
 
 "More or less," I said; "there has been some 
 crisis in your life when apart from priests and cere- 
 monies of every kind, you turned to God in some 
 earnest way for yourself, with no priest but Christ. 
 Tell me now honestly." 
 
 " Well," said he, "if you must know, it was when 
 I was sick in Chicago, in a hospital, and thought I 
 would die." 
 
 "Then you gave up your heart and all to Christ, 
 and He received you." 
 
 "That's it," he said. 
 
 And so, observe I had found one of Christ's sheep, 
 not of our ecclesiastical fold at all, but really a sin- 
 cere follower of the true Shepherd starving for sym- 
 pathy, for some one to confide in, whom he could 
 trust. He had come to a real confessional, of which 
 the formal thing is often a farce and a travesty. In 
 my conviction, all the priests in the world could not 
 
76 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 have broken the bond formed between him and me 
 that day in our fellowshii3 beneath those trees. After 
 prayer which we had together, as Jim rose to go, he 
 inquired, ^' When shall I see you again, I would like 
 to talk some more.^' 
 
 " WeU,'^ I said, ^' I go to-morrow. You must read 
 your Bible for yourself, and talk to Christ.'^ 
 
 I have never seen him since, but I am sure a soul 
 was put on the clue to a larger and deeper realization 
 of divine things, than it had previously known. We 
 had got clean off partisan, sectarian ground. As I have 
 thought the thing over again and again since, I can- 
 not resist the persuasion that that which made all 
 those confidences possible was the simple evidence 
 of sympathy Jim found that day when a stranger con- 
 cerned himself lest he should suffer injury as he lay in 
 the trench, and helped him to believe that his hard 
 and unrecognized toil was after all appreciated by 
 Christ. I long since found it was a tactical mistake 
 to antagonize men on the side of their religious pre- 
 possessions. 
 
 It is not the first business of the Christian teacher 
 to furnish men with a creedal religion ready-made, — 
 but rather to put and keep men on the clue, as we 
 have called it, wherein under the tuition of the Spirit 
 they themselves will discover the truth they need. * 
 
 ' Several paragraphs in this chapter are quoted substantially 
 from a paper given by the author before the Congress of Arts and 
 
THE NATUEE OF SAVING FAITH 77 
 
 The wise teacher will point out the next step, and 
 then the successive steps towards the experimental 
 knowledge of Christ Himself, leaving the philosophy 
 about Christ to come in later. There is a place for 
 this philosophy, for theology, but this place is sec- 
 ondary. Christ is always within personal touch of 
 every soul, because God's love is so all-embracing, 
 even though the soul does not realize it. By pressing 
 our theological opinions inopportunely, we may create 
 or widen a breach between the soul and Christ when 
 we should abolish it. The real touch with Christ is 
 realized through the adoption of the right personal 
 attitude to the ideal one really has. The Bible calls 
 this ideal "The Word," or that "light which light- 
 eth every man that cometh into the world," * "the 
 essential Christ," the omnipresent Eedeemer. 
 
 To assume a willing attitude to one's ideal is faith, 
 a faith always morally, rather than intellectually, 
 conditioned. Our will has no power of itself to realize 
 the essential Christ to the soul. The will, however, 
 can annul the practical living lie which controls the 
 life in its self-will, and the moment this is done, the 
 Spirit of Christ rushes unsolicited to the soul's con- 
 fessed helplessness and effects faith in Him. As na- 
 
 Sciences at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, on 
 Comparative Keligion, and published in the report of that Con- 
 
 'ess. 
 
 ^ John 1 ; 9. 
 
78 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 ture abhors a vacuum, so the moment in the light one 
 has, the self-will endeavours to vacate the heart's 
 throne that moment the Spirit of Christ with infinite 
 pressure rushes in to fill the vacuum. God's interest 
 in conferring grace is infinitely greater than man's in 
 seeking it. 
 
 Says Dr. Cremer : "The wondrous counter-efiect 
 of God against man's sin is indeed a supernatural 
 thing, — the absolutely inconceivable to human philos- 
 ophy ; it is different from anything which elsewhere 
 or otherwise ever takes place, or can take place." 
 This is the interior, profound reality in the Christian 
 religion. 
 
 Now, assuming that this initiative of Christian 
 experience which we have called the entrance on the 
 clue to the experimental realization of the Christ, 
 has taken place, Christianity depends for its deeper 
 intellectual apprehension of what has occurred, upon 
 the after-effect of such an experience, as the mind, 
 like a waking dreamer, is prepared to cast its eye 
 backward, and reviews in the light of the Bible the 
 track over which the soul has come. At this point, 
 the Holy Scriptures enter with measureless value, to 
 bring out into consciousness, to explain to the under- 
 standing, the profound realization which has oc- 
 curred, as well as to afford a basis on which further 
 subjective experiences may be wrought. Here is the 
 true, the indispensable place for objective truth. 
 
THE NATUEE OP SAVING FAITH 79 
 
 Then this loyalty to light which Christianity so 
 values, receives from its divine author various forms 
 and degrees of attestation. This attestation will 
 come to him who responds to the light of nature, 
 although in a different degree, and with less assur- 
 ance, as really as to him who follows the light of 
 revelation, because the God of nature and of revela- 
 tion are one and the same being. Christ speaks as 
 really in the voice of natural conscience as in His 
 written word/ because the conscience with all other 
 created things is constructed ^ through ^' Christ,"^ 
 according to Christ, with reference to Christ, the 
 true norm of creation. The conscience indeed, as 
 well as other powers of the natural man, is fallen, 
 and needs to be renewed by the influence of the 
 written word. The voice of Christ, however, yet 
 speaks in the conscience, however obscurely ; and to 
 obey that conscience, is of the spirit of faith, albeit 
 it needs continual enlightenment from the Bible. 
 
 It is the embarrassment of current Christianity that 
 by so many it is still supposed that the realities of 
 Christian faith and experience in themselves are co- 
 terminous with the limited diffusion of the Scriptures 
 — that in themselves faith and experience cannot 
 exist except where the knowledge of the Bible exists. 
 To this extent Christianity has narrowly and mis- 
 takenly alienated from itself much territory which 
 
 » Rom. 2 : 14-16. » John 1 : 3. 
 
80 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 really belongs to it — a domain which is its birth- 
 right. Christian revelation brings to light what is,^ 
 in the spiritual realm 5 for example, life and im- 
 mortality, the love of God in Christ, the suspended 
 judgment for sin, etc., etc., but the existence of all 
 these was before revelation, and independent of their 
 explanation in the Bible. It is of the realities, and 
 not of the explanation of them, we now speak. ^' In 
 the beginning was the word, and the word was with 
 God, and the word was God.'' " 
 
 Says Paul in his letter to the Eomans, ''But the 
 righteousness which is of faith saith thus ; say not 
 in thy heart, who shaU ascend into heaven (that is, 
 to bring Christ down) or who shall descend into the 
 abyss (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead) but 
 what saith it 1 The word is nigJi thee — (that is, the 
 ideal is nigh thee) — in thy mouth and in thy heart ; that 
 is the word of faith which we preach.^ ^ ^ The word, 
 or ideal, of faith which is, is such a thing as in itself 
 may exist unexplained — perhaps fantastically or 
 ignorantly held ; — the word of faith which we preach 
 is the same reality receiving a rational Biblical ex- 
 planation. Because the Holy Spirit has gone before 
 him, this essential faith is to be sought for by the 
 missionary, in however slight degree, immediately, 
 everywhere and in all men, and where found, always 
 
 ^Eph. 3:9. 2 John 1:1. 
 
 3Kom. 10:6-8. 
 
THE NATUEE OF SAYING FAITH 81 
 
 encouraged, and fed with revealed truth. This is 
 the missionary's true place of beginning with the 
 pagan mind, everywhere. He is to find the handle 
 of the soul, take hold of it and direct it to God. 
 Such is the practical, already existent basis which as 
 co-workers with God we have everywhere in God's 
 world. 
 
 It will be remembered that in the account of David 
 Brainerd's work among the Delaware Indians, he 
 speaks of a remarkable priest or reformer who had 
 been ^ '■ strangely moved to devote his life to an en- 
 deavour to restore the ancient religion of the Indians. '^ 
 He was grotesquely dressed in Indian fashion, but he 
 was evidently devout. He lamented freely the degen- 
 erate condition of the Indians, and said that ^^ their 
 ignorance and wickedness had so troubled him some- 
 times that he had felt driven to the woods" in the 
 solitariness of his distress for them. At length, he 
 said, ^'God comforted his heart," and showed him 
 that he should not so withdraw himself, but should 
 return to his associates and love and labour for them 
 as never before. While Brainerd was discoursing 
 with him at times he would say, ^^l^ow that I like, 
 so God taught me." Brainerd testifies that this man 
 was sincere, honest and conscientious, according to 
 his own religious opinions, as no other pagan he had 
 seen. He laboured earnestly to banish the drinking 
 habit from the Indians j but by his followers for the 
 
82 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 most part, he was regarded as ^^a precise zealot,'^ 
 and his efforts were unwelcome. It would thus ap- 
 pear that in the heart of this nature-taught savage, 
 was the spirit of faith existing with most limited 
 light. It needed further instruction to give it such 
 form and power as would enable it to grasp the large 
 concept of '' salvation '^ — assured salvation for him- 
 self and others ;' but the germ in ^'the righteousness 
 of faith '^ evidently was there, before the missionary 
 with his message" came. The man was not ''living 
 up to '^ his light, as no man does ; but he was ivalMng 
 in his light ; that is, he may have been in the spirit 
 of a penitent and believer ; he probably was. It was 
 the function of the missionary to develop that germi- 
 nal faith, that it might grow to intelligence and 
 power. How far even Brainerd did this we are not 
 told. Doubtless multitudes of instances, among so- 
 caUed heathen peoples similar to this exist, and they 
 are coming to be better known than formerly. This 
 is evidence of the at-liomeness of Christianity, among 
 all men, everywhere. Christianity in fact is a relig- 
 ion which cannot be apprehended by the intellect 
 alone, but requires for its realization the right use of 
 other faculties of the soul as well, such as the con- 
 
 ' Rom. 10:10. Note the distinction implied between "unto 
 righteousness," and "unto salvation " ; the latter term seems to 
 have the force of assured, conscious salvation, in order to which 
 the preached word is necessary. , 
 
THE NATURE OF SAVING FAITH 83 
 
 science, the feelings, the imagination— and above all, 
 the will. And all these acts pagans can exercise, 
 with the very dimmest intellectual light. There is 
 need that the entire composite soul be open. Even 
 the living God cannot authenticate Himself as He 
 desires to the mere fragment of personality, albeit 
 that fragment were the majestic reason. In the mere 
 action of the understanding, the executive soul puts 
 itself outside the truth, and simply speculates upon it. 
 One needs to move by an act of will inside the truth 
 with all the love of the heart, and with all the moral 
 sense of the conscience. He who does this touches 
 reality. The agnosticism of the world is only the 
 outcome of a mistaken intellectual self-sufaciency, a 
 species of intellect worship. 
 
 It will be recalled that George J. Eomanes, long a 
 devoted disciple of Charles Darwin, when he returned 
 to Christian faith after a long period of agnostic doubt, 
 reproached himself for what he called "sins of the 
 intellect, mental errors and undue regard for intel- 
 lectual supremacy.'' Eomanes thus clearly saw the 
 principle which we have above enunciated, that faith 
 in the Christian sense is essentially a right attitude 
 of personality to the light one has, whatever its 
 degree. It could not be otherwise than that one who 
 previously closed so many avenues of the soul in the 
 interests of intellectual supremacy should have, for a 
 time, blindly missed the way to God. It is precisely 
 
84 METHOD IN SOUL-WmNING 
 
 such blindness of heart that our Lord had in mind 
 when He said: "I thank Thee, Father, Lord of 
 heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things 
 from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them 
 unto babes. '^ ^ The essential difference in habit of 
 mind between a child and a mere creature of intel- 
 lectual prudence is this, that the child allows its 
 whole composite being to act and the philosopher 
 does not. 
 
 Now Christianity risks everything as to its accept- 
 ance or rejection, with him who will put its proposals 
 to the experimental test. Said Jesus to Thomas : 
 *' Eeach hither thy finger and behold My hands, and 
 reach hither thy hand and thrust it into My side, and 
 be not faithless, but believing. '^ "^ So in principle He 
 ever says : ^^ Try Me and see if I am not what I claim 
 to be." 
 
 The method of Christianity corresponds to the lab- 
 oratory method of modern science. When it can 
 have its way it puts the inquirer into the laboratory 
 and it says: ''There are the chemicals, the test 
 tubes, crucibles, dynamos, etc. ; now by personal 
 executive acts enter into relations with the Lord of 
 nature, put Him to the test with these implements, 
 and get your experienced results. When one passes 
 through such a scientific school he becomes an ex- 
 pert j that is one experienced in what is called "in- 
 1 Matt. 11:25. 'John 20: 27. 
 
THE NATUEE OF SAVING FAITH 85 
 
 ductive science/^ and so also Christianity through 
 experience reaches assured conclusions which shine 
 in a peculiar divine light. As between God and man 
 there are two correlative movements : the man move- 
 ment Godward and the God movement manward. 
 The point at which these meet and coalesce is faith. 
 It is here that salvation is wrought, a matter quite 
 above the realm of mere ethics, a concept peculiar to 
 the Bible, and often quite missed by non-evangel- 
 icals. The distinctive element in evangelicalism, 
 viz. , the effectual working of the divine grace upon 
 the penitent but believing human soul is left out. 
 Without this divine operation, there is nothing left 
 for the soul but its helpless human fluttering against 
 the bars of its own cage ; there is no salvation possi- 
 ble worthy of the name. This downcoming of the 
 grace of God always hidden from view, upon the soul 
 following the proper clue at some moment of crisis, 
 is the vital thing. The soul finds a Saviour j but 
 what is far greater, the Saviour finds a soul ; and this 
 latter is the profounder element in the transaction, 
 the divine part in it j that which makes it saving and 
 transforming. The sooner the soul can be brought 
 to perceive by faith this outreach of the divine em- 
 brace after it, the better ; and the more strongly the 
 soul-winner can realize the divine aspect of the new 
 possibility in Christy the greater will be his power to 
 start the lost homeward. 
 
TACT IN PEESOKAL APPEOACH 
 
 And I will make you to become fishers of men. — 3Iark 1 : 17. 
 
 A MATTER of very great importance in dealing 
 successfully with souls is to know how to find the 
 right angle of approach, so as really to commend our 
 message. One of the best illustrations I have known 
 came to me some years ago, in an address given by 
 Dr. E. A. Hume, one of the most skillful of mission- 
 aries to India. 
 
 (In one of the departmental meetings at the great 
 Students' Conference in Detroit, Dr. Hume was dis- 
 coursing on method. He was making the point that 
 if we would secure entrance for our message on the 
 part of the religionists of Asia, for example, the 
 Hindus, we must endeavour to put in place of their 
 superstition, a solid reason for any change we urge 
 upon them, and we should always be sympa- 
 thetic, and never, under any circumstances antag- 
 onize them. ) Then Dr. Hume proceeded about as 
 follows : 
 
 ^'Sui)pose I am in India. I come out of my 
 bungalow in the early morning, and I see a poor 
 
 86 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 87 
 
 pariah Hindu with whom, perhaps, I have had a 
 slight acquaintance, coming along the road leading a 
 goat, with a red band about its horns. I know per- 
 fectly well what it all means, but I approach my 
 Mend and say pleasantly, 
 
 ^^ ' Good-morning, my Mend, where are you going 
 with the goat ? ' 
 
 ^^ ' Oh, I am going to the temple.' 
 
 ^^ ' Indeed. May I go with you % ' 
 
 ^^^What!' says the simple-hearted man. ^Do 
 you wish to go to the temple ? ' 
 
 *^ ^Certainly I do.' 
 
 << ^ Very weU, then, come along.' " 
 
 The missionary further queries : " ^ And what are 
 you going to do with the goat, my Mend, when you 
 get to the temple % ' 
 
 " ^Oh,' says the man, somewhat hesitant, " ^the 
 goat is to be killed ; I am going to sacrifice him.' 
 
 "^Indeed,' I reply, ^and why, Mr. So-and-So, 
 do you kiU the goat % ' 
 
 " a don't know.' 
 
 " ^ You don't know ! Surely you must have some 
 reason for it.' 
 
 " ^I don't know any reason.' 
 
 ^^ ^But you must have some reason.' 
 
 ^' ^ No, none that I can think of. It's our custom,' 
 throwing his thumb over his shoulder, as if pointing 
 to the past ; 'it's our custom ; my fathers did it.' 
 
88 METHOD IN SOUL-WIl^NmG 
 
 ^^ ^ But you must have some reason for killing the 
 goat.' 
 
 ^' ^ I do not know any.' 
 
 *' ^ Is it because there is some sense of wrong, of sin 
 in your heart and life, and you feel that something 
 must die to satisfy it ? ' 
 
 *^ ^ I don't know, sir, you know ! ' 
 
 " ^ WeU, then, why do you have a red band around 
 the horns of the goat? Why not a white band, or a 
 black one ? ' 
 
 ^' Again he answers: ^I don't know, sir j it's our 
 custom ; our fathers did it.' 
 
 '' ^ It must be for some reason.' 
 
 ^' ' I cannot think of any ; it's our custom.' 
 
 " ^Well, then, is it because the red band is the 
 same colour as the blood of the goat that is to be 
 slain 1 ' 
 
 " ^ I don't know. You Tcnoic / ' " 
 
 (Observe how the man's confidence is growing 
 in the sympathy and wisdom of his missionary 
 questioner.) 
 
 ^^ 'And do you know, Mr. So-and-So, where this 
 custom of sacrificing beasts originated ? ' 
 
 '^'Oh, no,' says the Hindu, 'I don't know; 
 nobody does. It has existed for ages. Nobody 
 knows.' 
 
 ''' Excuse me,' I reply; 'I know where it 
 originated, and this is why I have come from 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 89 
 
 America to live in India, to tell you and your peo- 
 ple about it/ ^' 
 
 From this beginning the missionary, in the simplest 
 and most interesting way possible, tells the varied 
 story of the early sacrifices recorded in the Scriptures 
 from Abel down to the present time, and then going 
 back over the ground, he shows him the insufficiency 
 of animal sacrifice of every sort, explains how the 
 poor human heart has ever sought to express itself 
 thus, because it has a deep sense of distance from God, 
 and of the certain penalty that must follow sin. 
 
 And then taking up another line, the missionary 
 explains how God, from the beginning, has ever 
 looked with pity and compassion on the unsatisfactory 
 efforts of men of all times and countries to make 
 sacrifices for themselves ; and knowing that they 
 never would succeed. He Himself, from the begin- 
 ning, from before the creation of the world, so loved 
 the world as to suffer infinite pain with it and hence 
 gave His only begotten Son as the consummate ex- 
 pression of that suffering with and for it, that whoso- 
 ever believeth on Him might have everlasting life. 
 Thus, for the first time, the poor, ignorant, super- 
 stitious Hindu has found a man, a stranger from 
 another country, who has helped him to understand 
 his own poor, crude system of religion better than he 
 himself understands it 5 and the man begins, through 
 his own poor religion, to find his way to ^Hhe Lamb 
 
90 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 of God, whicli taketh away the sin of the world. ^^ ' 
 Of course the missionary has brought his acquaint- 
 ance into sympathy with himself, and gained a strong 
 moral grip on him. 
 
 By this time they have reached the temple, and 
 meeting the priest, the missionary explains to him 
 how he happened to come to the temple, and goes 
 over a similar process with the priest, nor does he 
 finish until he has taken the remnant of truth, the 
 scarlet thread, even in the Hindu religion and made 
 it a channel through which to convey to the priest 
 also the same rich and divine gospel. He has antag- 
 onized neither of them; he has come into close 
 quarters with them ; he has given reasons where they 
 had nothing but blind custom ; and from the shadow 
 he has deduced the substance of the final and univer- 
 sal religion for all men. 
 
 Often we have wondered, as we have recalled that 
 simple but telling narrative by Dr. Hume,^ if mission- 
 aries among pagans generally, have discovered the 
 true angle of approach, so as to be really "fishers of 
 men." This spiritual tact is the supreme human 
 qualification for catching men. 
 
 1 John 1 : 29. 
 
 ' Another fine instance of Dr. Hume's great tactfulness in 
 dealing with the Hindu mind is given in the last chapter of his 
 recent book, "Missions from the Modern View," published by 
 
 Toeveil. 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 91 
 
 The personal equation as between man and man, is 
 always a differing factor, and no two men will use 
 precisely the same method, or adopt the same tactics. 
 One's inventiveness in the circumstances in which he 
 finds himself, and one's knowledge of the habits of 
 mind of the people among whom he labours, will al- 
 ways have much to do with the matter ; and of course 
 the special Spirit's guidance is always supremely 
 needed. (^ What we are now urging however, is, that 
 this matter of personal approach should be carefully 
 studied and cultivated. At the basis of peculiar skill 
 in this line of things is the spirit of a divinely begot- 
 ten love ; the love which " beareth all things, believeth 
 all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,'^* 
 the love which never seeks to win a victory in argu- 
 ment over another, for the victory's sake ; but rather 
 tries to make another's difficulty one's own and to 
 help him out of it ; it yearns to impart all that is best 
 in itself to one's fellow. ) 
 
 In my first pastorate in Illinois, which was blessed 
 with many striking conversions, the following oc- 
 curred : One day, while I was sitting in a barber's 
 chair in a shop of the town, a man of uncouth ap- 
 pearance and great recklessness entered and began to 
 talk very loud upon some subject that had irritated 
 him, punctuating his excited remarks with shocking 
 oaths. One of the barbers tried by signs to silence 
 *lCor. 13:7. 
 
92 METHOD IN SOUL-WINNmG 
 
 him, indicating that a minister was in the chair to 
 whom profanity was offensive. At this the man be- 
 came even more profane and vociferous. I paid no 
 attention to it except to note the features of the man. 
 
 A week or two afterwards I had occasion to visit a 
 large carpenter shop to request the use of some tools 
 that I might shave out a new handle for my hatchet. 
 I was made welcome to a bench and some tools, 
 pulled off my co^i-t and went to work. Not long after 
 the man whom I had seen in the barber shop, who, it 
 seems, had a bench in the same establishment, came 
 in. He observed me at work, and I recognized him, 
 but for a moment nothing was said. Soon after I 
 noticed that this man was watching my movements. 
 He finally gathered courage to approach and re- 
 marked ; 
 
 ^' Well, it seems that some preachers can do some- 
 thin' besides preach.'' 
 
 I replied pleasantly, ^'Yes, I can shave out a 
 hatchet handle. I was brought up to use tools," and 
 I went on finishing my work. After a time the man 
 came around again and said : 
 
 ^' Well, that is pretty good ; it's a fine job." 
 
 I replied, "Well, it will do." 
 
 Having finished my work, I turned to the several 
 workmen, thanked them for the use of the tools and 
 the courtesies of the shop, and added : 
 
 "Gentlemen, my shop's open on Sundays on the 
 
TACT m PEESONAL APPEOACH 93 
 
 corner of Third and State Streets. Come around and 
 use my bench and see how the tools work ; you'll all be 
 welcome." 
 
 ^' Well," responded my softening townsman of the 
 barber-shop episode, ^^ I would like to see your bench 
 and how your tools work. I may come." 
 
 ^TU look for you," I answered, and with a warm 
 hand-shake, I departed. 
 
 It was not long after, that one Sunday night, this 
 man appeared in the church with his wife and two 
 daughters, and was seated well up towards the front 
 of the room. I proceeded with the service with an 
 uncommon sense of actual business on hand. The 
 meeting drew to a close. Meanwhile my friend, I ob- 
 served, was not a little interested in the line of thought 
 I had been following. After the benediction, in a 
 moment I was at his side, expressing pleasure at see- 
 ing him in the church and inquiring if this was his 
 wife beside him and if these were his daughters, and 
 inviting them to come again and come regularly if 
 they had no other j)lace of worship. 
 
 He thanked me and then returned the compliment 
 by saying : 
 
 " Would not you and your woman call on us some- 
 time?" And then, improving upon that, he turned 
 to his wife and said : 
 
 " Wife, why can't we have the elder and his woman 
 to tea some evening ? ' ' 
 
94 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 "With pleasure," she replied, and with a feeling 
 which I thought I understood. 
 
 I answered : ''Name the evening, and we will be 
 there.'' 
 
 The date was fixed on the spot and a few evenings 
 after my wife and I found ourselves at the table, in a 
 comfortable home that evidently had been put in un- 
 usual order for our reception, and the table was laden 
 with dainties. 
 
 We chatted away pleasantly through the meal, and 
 at the close my friend turned to me and said : 
 
 "Now the supper is over, and I suggest that your 
 woman and mine remain here to visit, while you and 
 I go into the parlour by ourselves." 
 
 We went in and sat down, and then began the nar- 
 ration of a story that surprised me beyond measure. 
 It was to this effect. 
 
 In years gone by this man and his wife had been 
 happy members of a particular church in that town. 
 All went well until some trouble arose and a party 
 developed unfriendly to the pastor; sentiment was 
 divided and the minister, to whom this man was 
 deeply attached, was required to leave the field, to the 
 great distress of many devoted parishioners. 
 
 "Then," said the man, "I grew angry at that and 
 I left the church, and I got out into the world and I 
 found wrong companions and I got to drinking, and 
 things went from bad to worse until I became the 
 
TACT IN PEBSONAL APPEOACH 95 
 
 godless wretch you heard blaspheming the other day 
 in the barber shop. I am ashamed, and I wish I 
 could get back to the old times. '^ 
 
 Well, of course I was not slow in showing sympathy 
 for such a state of mind. Enough to say that that 
 man and his wife and three daughters, ere many weeks, 
 were gathered into our church fold. The last I saw 
 of the old man when I visited the town years after- 
 wards, he had become a cripple, hobbling about on 
 crutches ; and as I crossed the street to greet him he 
 recognized my features and invoked a blessing on my 
 head for my gentle dealing with him in the earlier 
 times, and leading him back to the Lord from whom 
 he had wandered. With moistened eyes he said he 
 was looking forward to the next life with a radiant 
 hope. Of course it would have been easy on the first 
 occasion I met him to upbraid and perhaps quarrel 
 with the man for his profanity, or to reason ^^that 
 man is beyond reach ^' ; but there was a better way ; 
 there always is. 
 
 In that same town I was enabled to get hold of a 
 high-spirited but intemperate man, when all other 
 efforts had failed, by taking him into my buggy one 
 evening when I found him with unsteady steps stag- 
 gering on the street and driving him to his home a 
 mile away. I saw him safely inside the door with my 
 best wishes to himself and wife. I did not imme- 
 diately see him rescued from his habits, but some time 
 
96 METHOD IN SOUL-WINNIli^G 
 
 after I had left the towu, in a marked revival whicli 
 occuiTed, this same man one night rose in a great pub- 
 lic meeting, and testified to the circumstance of my 
 picking him up off the street and carrying him home. 
 He went on to say that he never had been able to 
 shake off the impression of brotherliness thus made 
 upon him, and he came into a new life therefrom. Of 
 course the last thing he needed from me was a lecture 
 on temi3erance j he needed rather what Joel Stratton 
 gave to John B. Gough as a broken young man in 
 Worcester, Mass., the touch of a brother's hand on 
 his shoulder, at a time when it was easy for others to 
 scorn him. The winner of souls must find the way to 
 impart that touch ; it will be found only as a real 
 love for the one sought springs up ; and this the 
 Divine Spirit must create. He often will create it if 
 there is a consuming desire to bless another. This 
 divinely wrought inventiveness — this ingenuity in 
 getting at men in an original way, is one of the best 
 gifts of the soul winner. No rules can be given for 
 its exercise ; each must develop it for himself in orig- 
 inal touch with the soul through Christ. 
 
 While travelling in Japan in 1890, I fell in with a 
 very interesting native. He was living in a monas- 
 tery with several Buddhist priests, teaching them the 
 English language, and also was devoting a part of his 
 time to teaching Japanese to some American mission- 
 aries. He had read the Bible throughout, but prob- 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 97 
 
 ably self-interest held him to Buddhism. During two 
 interviews with him I pressed upon him the imme- 
 diate acceptance of Christ. He pleaded for more time 
 in which to study Christianity. I urged that he did 
 not need to study it more in order to become a Chris- 
 tian ; that he should give his heart to Christ at once, 
 on the present light he had, and then he could go on 
 studying Christianity throughout his life. He was so 
 impressed that he came to call on me in the home of 
 one of the missionaries the afternoon on which I was 
 to sail for China. We had but an hour or so to be 
 together, and I pressed him strongly to settle his per- 
 sonal relation to Christ before I left. He was ex- 
 pressing to me his great surprise that a stranger, just 
 parsing through his country, should feel so deep an 
 interest in him, and he wished me to explain it. I 
 answered, ^'It was the Christ in me that explained 
 it.'^ He protested to me that he was not worthy of 
 so much attention, and he wondered that I was so 
 urgent. 
 
 ^^Why do you wish me to decide so soonf he 
 queried. 
 
 I answered, ^^I must do my missionary work as I 
 pass. I cannot remain for years, as the resident mis- 
 sionaries here do, but must do my work while on the 
 wing, and for the brief time I am with you I am a 
 missionary, and I must now press upon you the claims 
 
98 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 of my Master and yours. ^Now is the accepted 
 time.^ " ' 
 
 "But,'^ he said, *'Mr. Mabie, this is so sudden." 
 
 "But," I replied, "it is none too sudden. You 
 understand perfectly what Christ has done for your 
 salvation and it only remains for you, by one 
 decisive act, to accept it, and then go to work to 
 save others." 
 
 At length, finding himself so closely pressed, he 
 made a sudden bid for time by thrusting at me a 
 speculative question. "But," said he, "what do 
 you think of Baddha ? You know we Japanese are 
 largely Buddhists." 
 
 Discerning his tactics, for I saw he wished to draw 
 me into discussion, I was careful to disappoint what 
 he expected, viz. : that I would put contempt upon 
 Buddha; for he had been told, as many another 
 Buddhist unfortunately has been told, that his Bud- 
 dha "is in perdition." Now had I fallen into this 
 snare, either of declaring Buddha's destiny or of 
 stopping to argue about it, I would have lost my 
 friend's respect. Instead thereof, I felt moved to 
 answer thus : 
 
 " But this is no time for you to be seeking refuge 
 
 from your conscience by hiding behind Buddha. 
 
 Beside, Buddha is the last person in the universe 
 
 who you can hope will screen you in the last day. 
 
 » 2 Cor. 6:2. 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 99 
 
 You forget that Buddha never heard of Christ ; he 
 never had a Bible; he never met a Christian mis- 
 sionary, and yet you have read the Bible through. 
 You know all about the Christ. If you were in dead 
 earnest, and every missionary withdrew from the 
 land to-day, you have light enough for Japan's 
 evangelization, and God holds you responsible for a 
 large part in it.'' 
 
 I continued: ^^ Assuming that Buddha was the 
 morally earnest man he is said to have been, if he 
 had had one hundredth part of the light you have 
 concerning God and Christ, instead of filling India, 
 China and Japan with mere Buddhism, we might 
 believe long ere this he would have practically 
 Christianized half Asia. In the judgment day Bud- 
 dha will be a swift witness against you. He will 
 ask why, with all the Christian light you had, you 
 did not at once accept Christianity and become the 
 most ardent evangelist in this empire. You need 
 not think that Buddha will ever justify you in 
 vacillation concerning Jesus Christ." 
 
 The young man winced under the unexpected 
 turn, and with real tremor of conviction, he 
 asked: 
 
 ^^ What, then, must I do *? " I answered : 
 
 "Kneel with me here on the spot, and surrender 
 your whole heart and life to Christ, who, you well 
 know, has been long waiting to receive you. Act on 
 
100 METHOD IN SOUL-WINNmG 
 
 the light you have, a light that Buddha never had, 
 and do it now.'' 
 
 '^ Well," he answered, " I am ready ; " and kneel- 
 ing there with me, he gave himself up, heart and 
 soul, to Jesus Christ. Weeks afterwards he wrote 
 me about his Christian baptism and of his efforts to 
 tell the gospel to others. 
 
 It would have been easy at the critical moment for 
 this man to be diverted into questions of speculation 
 and debate, and thus have been hindered, rather 
 than helped. But just how similar cases that may 
 arise with their varying objections and attempts to 
 evade the claims of Christ, are to be dealt with, is a 
 matter that must be determined in each instance by 
 itself, with all the tact that one can command, 
 illumined by the Spirit of God. 
 
 A single false step at such a crisis may open or 
 close the gateway of life forever. 
 
 It is sometimes too easily conceded that we can 
 scarcely expect men in advanced years to change 
 their religious attitude. We are persuaded that this 
 is a grievous, practical error. In such cases, as in 
 all others, much depends on the skill of the worker 
 either to disappoint prejudice or to place himself 
 positively en rapport with the soul he would win. 
 
 In one of my pastoral rounds one day, I dropped 
 in upon a man past sixty years of age who was 
 known as a very skillful blacksmith of the town, an 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 101 
 
 artist in his line, a man of rare keenness of mind, 
 very opinionated and religiously cynical. I had 
 previously been warned that a call upon him would 
 probably result similarly to an approach to a rabid 
 dog. However, I nerved up and entered the shop. 
 I introduced myself and explained that I was mak- 
 ing acquaintances in the new parish and I dropped 
 in to see him. He knew but little of me except that 
 I was a newly arrived stripling of a minister. He 
 replied by saying he pitied me with the job I had j 
 to bring into line a church made up of such doubt- 
 ful timber as I had in hand. 
 
 ^' Oh," I said, ^Hhere are some pretty good people 
 in that church, better than we think." 
 
 ^^No, they are a bad lot and theyVe been divided ; 
 you have a tough job." 
 
 ^'Well, now," I replied, ^^ perhaps it would be 
 wiser to look on the other side a part of the time ; 
 then besides, it is the easiest thing in the world to 
 find fault with anybody. There are no perfect peo- 
 ple in the world." 
 
 ''Well, but, there is no help for those people of 
 yours." 
 
 I answered, "Now, see here, you are a man of 
 brains and intelligence, but it takes no brain at all to 
 find faults in other people. I see you are working 
 out a lot of fine wheel coulters (referring to attach- 
 ments used on the farmer's plough for cutting the sod 
 
102 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 in front of the mould-board). Now I could not make 
 one of those coulters for my life, but I think I could 
 find fault with one of them if the disc was not perfect 
 or its set on the plough was badly adjusted." The 
 man, surprised that I knew anything about coulters 
 and ploughs looked up and said, ''What do you 
 know about ploughing ? " 
 
 I replied, '' I was brought up at that business. I 
 suppose, young as I am, I have ploughed more fur- 
 rows than you have made coulters." 
 
 ''Oh, I thought you were a kind of kid-gloved 
 minister." 
 
 "No! no matter about that, let's stick to my 
 point. I could easily criticise coulters, though I 
 could not possibly make one. It takes hard work to 
 hammer out steel coulters, and it isn't easy to make 
 good Christians in a church like mine j but both of 
 these things are worth doing and doing well." 
 
 "Very likely," he replied, "I like that talk; I 
 guess you are right. Anybody can find fault," and 
 then he added : " But there is one thing, elder, that 
 nobody can find any fault with." 
 
 I asked, " What's that ? " 
 
 " Oh, that life of Jesus Christ." 
 
 " Good," I said ; " I am going to talk on that sub- 
 ject Sunday night. Won't you come around and 
 hear me?" 
 
 " I have not been to church much late years, but I 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 103 
 
 believe I will come and see if you know as much 
 about preaching as you do about ploughing." 
 
 *' All right," and having got him into a good mood, 
 I said, '' Good-afternoon," and left him. 
 
 He was at church the next Sunday evening in the 
 front seat, and some of my people stared to see that 
 man in so close quarters with the pulpit. I called 
 again the following Monday and thanked him for 
 coming, found he was pleased, and in a greatly 
 altered state of mind. Soon, I got near enough to 
 extract from him the story of his early life ^'way 
 down East in Vermont" when he believed Chris- 
 tianity, before the wave of spiritualism struck the 
 town, and swept him into superstition for a time, and 
 finally left him morally cheated out of confidence in 
 any religion whatever, until now he lay stranded like 
 an old hulk upon the beach. 
 
 He admitted he was not satisfied, that there must 
 be something better, and he gave me a chance to help 
 him. In a few weeks he came to the church, re- 
 counted the story of his life and closed with a testi- 
 mony of experience of the Christ of the gospels 
 within his heart. The church received him and 
 shortly afterwards we gathered in also his two daugh- 
 ters and that family was reclaimed from the ranks of 
 non-church-goers and non-believers. 
 
 We often give up such people too easily under the 
 influence of current impressions given out by people 
 
104 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 who take men at their worst, and we really make no 
 earnest effort to get at their better side. 
 
 Take another case ; in that same pastorate, I felt 
 strangely moved one winter, to go out into a country 
 district and preach every night for three weeks, in a 
 schoolhouse, and meanwhile, visit every family 
 within the township in the hope that there might be 
 found some who would consent to be shepherded. 
 
 It was a period of tramping about, day after day, 
 from farmhouse ro farmhouse thi^ough the slush of 
 melting snows, taking meals where I was invited, 
 spending the night in farmhouses to which they made 
 me welcome, and preaching every evening in the 
 schoolhouse. 
 
 On my journey out the first evening I called at the 
 home of one of the strongest characters in the whole 
 region. He had been a brickmaker and had ac- 
 cumulated property; had two grown sons of whom 
 he was very proud ; one of whom was the first candi- 
 date I had baptized. This man and his wife were 
 about seventy years of age. The afternoon I called 
 the wife only was in. I explained my errand, telling 
 her of my purpose to preach every night in their 
 schoolhouse and inviting them to come. It seems 
 that after I had gone the wife, not herself a pro- 
 fessing Christian, said to her husband, on his return 
 home : 
 
 " Husband, what do you think ? Mr. Mabie has 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 105 
 
 been here, and he says he is going to preach every 
 night in our schoolhouse for the next three weeks 
 and I think we ought to go to the meetings. This is 
 our chance.'^ 
 
 '^ Just as you say,'' responded he. 
 
 Well, the meetings proceeded from night to night. 
 I was much at home amongst them for I, myself, had 
 been reared among farmers, and knew their habits 
 and could help them with the chores on occasions, 
 and understood many features of their monotonous 
 life. 
 
 One night when the meetings were well under way, 
 I preached upon the text : ^^ I will pay Thee my vows 
 which my lips have uttered and my mouth hath 
 spoken when I was in trouble." ^ In my discourse, I 
 spoke as concretely as possible; using illustrations 
 from men in various situations of peril or in crises of 
 business in which they almost universally make vows 
 to God while the difficulty lasts, and then when the 
 trouble is over, easily forget their vows. In con- 
 clusion, I pleaded as strongly as I was able that my 
 hearers would pay those vows, which God knew they 
 had made ; which they knew they had made and 
 which were long overdue. 
 
 It was a meeting of great solemnity. At the close 
 of the service, as I was shaking hands with the peo- 
 ple on all sides, my old friend, the aforesaid brick- 
 » Ps. 66 : 13, 14. 
 
106 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 maker, tapped me on the shoulder, turned me round, 
 and said : 
 
 "Elder, you are going home with us to-night." 
 
 I said : "All right, Mr. E., I am boarding on the 
 town." 
 
 We soon found ourselves in the long wagon, filled 
 with various friends from his part of the neighbour- 
 hood. The old gentleman sat on the front seat carry- 
 ing a lantern, while a young man drove. I sat 
 directly behind him. We had no sooner started on 
 the way than the old man turned round, slapped me 
 on the knee, and said : 
 
 "Elder, this is like old times ! " 
 
 "Old times!" I said to myself: "this man has a 
 religious history covered up somewhere behind him ! " 
 
 Little more was said until we reached his home a 
 mile distant. We entered the house in perfect 
 silence. He stirred up the fire, drew up some chairs 
 and said to me : 
 
 "Now we'll sit down here and have a little talk. I 
 have quite a story to tell you. My wife can sit up 
 and hear it or not just as she pleases. Your words 
 to-night and your visit to this neighbourhood among us 
 old, hard-hearted sinners compel me to tell you what 
 I have never told any one before." 
 
 The man then began from the time when he was a 
 ten year old boy and his mother had been taken 
 away by death, and he was left alone, and told me a 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 107 
 
 story of period after period in his life when he had 
 vowed to God, and had never paid. After his 
 mother's death, he had lived a life of prayer for some 
 time, but never got courage to profess his faith. He 
 grew to manhood and migrated to Illinois; mean- 
 while vowing to God that if He would give him a 
 good " government claim ^' in the new region he then 
 would acknowledge God and join the church ; but the 
 vow was unpaid. 
 
 f He then gave an account of the time when, in 1849, 
 the California ^' gold-fever " broke out, and he started 
 for the Pacific slope. He told of driving from 
 northern Illinois to St. Louis, Mo., of taking a steamer 
 up the river to St. Joseph ; of the breaking out of 
 cholera on board and men dying at frequent intervals 
 during the night. Every half-hour the steamer would 
 draw to shore ; a man would be buried in the sand, 
 and then they would move on until another burial, 
 was necessary. So, for many hours, this continued, 
 the young man, in his berth, meanwhile praying and 
 vowing that if God would spare him from cholera, 
 then he would pay ; but again he would forget. He 
 crossed the plains, often threatened by raids of wild 
 Indians, vowing as he journeyed. He went into the 
 mines in the Golden State, vowing day by day, 
 and week by week, to pay if God would prosper him 
 in his "finds. '^ These vows too were unpaid. The 
 time came when he turned homeward, by way of the 
 
108 METHOD 11^ SOUL- WINNING 
 
 Isthmus to his family with a certain amount of 
 ^^dust'^ whifch he had gathered, and again he vowed 
 if God would give him a prosperous voyage, then he 
 would serve the Lord, set up family worship, etc. 
 The poor old unseaworthy vessel in which he shipped 
 found itself driven by storm, hundreds of miles away 
 from its course in the South Pacific, and then it be- 
 came becalmed for weeks together ; the scurvy broke 
 out ; men died daily ; he too sickened and thought he 
 would die. He was nursed by a poor hunchbacked 
 cripple who was a Christian and devoted himself to 
 his care. During all this experience he prayed and 
 vowed, and vowed again, but nothing came of it. At 
 length the hunchback nurse himself sickened and 
 died, and as his body was about to be thrown into the 
 sea, the captain of the ship, before the plank was 
 tilted, asked if there was any one on board who would 
 offer a prayer before the body was committed to the 
 deep. 
 
 Said my friend : '' That was my time. I owed my 
 life to that hunchback who had died, but I hesitated. 
 In my cowardice I refused. Just then,^^ said he, 
 ^' a black man, the cook of the ship, fell on his knees 
 and prayed such a prayer as I have never heard be- 
 fore or since, and do you know,'' said he, ^' the Lord 
 at that moment took away the giffc that He intended I 
 should have and exercise, and gave it to that black 
 man, and to this day I have never been able to open 
 
TACT IN PEESONAL APPEOACH 109 
 
 my mouth in a public prayer. I have vowed and 
 vowed and yet have never paid. 
 
 *' Finally," said he, ^'our vessel made its way to 
 some port in Central America, at which I was landed, 
 and I made my way through feverous and pestilential 
 regions, step by step, to the northern states and 
 reached my home and found my wife and child still 
 preserved to me, and I, still recreant to my vows. 
 And I have been recreant ever since." 
 
 And thus until two o'clock in the morning this man 
 detailed his story, his wife meanwhile sitting in the 
 corner of the room with her face buried in her apron, 
 convulsed with emotion. 
 
 At length he concluded : 
 
 ^'Now I am ready to pay my neglected vows. I 
 am ready to confess Christ before these neighbours of 
 mine and before the church, and I want to be baptized, 
 thus following that son of mine whom you recently 
 took into your church, and whose position is a con- 
 stant rebuke to me, his unworthy father." ^ 
 
 Suffice it to say, the man and his wife both came 
 out, throwing their whole souls into their profession 
 of new life in Christ. It was one of the most thrill- 
 ing narratives ever told me ; and the whole event Vas 
 so unexpected by the entire neighbourhood in which it 
 occurred and by the church with which these friends 
 united, that it was the talk of the place for years. 
 
 Oh, for the grace and guidance to find our way to 
 
110 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING i 
 
 human hearts, young and old, in the depths of which i 
 great secrets are hidden, waiting for the person to 
 
 whom they can be confidingly imparted. It is my ■ 
 
 decided conviction that if there were more Christians ^ 
 
 whose hearts were open to receive such confidences, ' 
 
 God Himself would see that more people were brought j 
 
 to such confessions, even in advanced years. ; 
 
VI 
 
 CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 
 
 How then were thine eyes opened. — John 9 : 10. 
 
 In preceding chapters I have been dealing with the 
 matter of evangelism broadly, and yet in many con- 
 crete forms illustrating what seem to me right meth- 
 ods of work in both Christian and pagan lands. The 
 principle, of course, is the same anywhere and every- 
 where. In the present chapter I make special appli- 
 cation to the matter of dealing with pagan minds on 
 foreign mission fields. 
 
 In my wide travel in Asia some years ago, I came 
 into close personal touch with missionaries of many 
 denominations who were wrestling with this matter, 
 seeking to find the angle of approach to Buddhist 
 Confucian or Hindu heathen minds. In the midst of 
 our common questionings and difficulties, which more 
 than one missionary confessed were almost insoluble 
 to him, I had opportunities to test this matter of 
 method in ways which brought new illumination to 
 me at least. I here give with some detail one striking 
 example of a method used with a company of Brahmins 
 which God seemed to bless. 
 
 While I was in the Telugu town of Ongole, South 
 111 
 
112 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 India, I received one evening a visit of compliment 
 from a company of these Brahmin gentlemen. Some 
 of them were government officers, with English edu- 
 cation, speaking well our language, and ready to talk 
 on subjects of common interest. They bore personal 
 testimony to the character of our missionaries among 
 them, and begged us to enlarge our educational work 
 in the town. The evening passed delightfully, and 
 at the close of the interview one of the more sympa- 
 thetic leaders of the company surprised me by asking 
 if I would preach to them on the following Sabbath 
 evening if they would come again. I accepted the in- 
 vitation. Inquiring in my mind for a proper message, 
 I was at length strongly drawn to the incident of 
 Christ's healing of the man born blind, as told in the 
 ninth chapter of the Gospel of John, which sets forth 
 with rare clearness Christ's method of kindling His 
 own light in the soul. 
 
 Now Hindus are very fond of speculative talk ; the 
 more you argue with a Hindu Brahmin, the more you 
 arouse his intellectual pride, and so the more com- 
 pletely you bar the way to a practical spiritual result. 
 Aviien Christ's method is resorted to, we find some- 
 thing better than argument, namely testimony, wit- 
 ness — that divine something appealing to the heart 
 which shines in its own light. The Scripture passage 
 which I selected for exposition affords a choice in- 
 stance of the experimental method of testing truth, 
 
CHRIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSURE 113 
 
 whereby every seeker for light may ascertain for him- 
 self who the Christ is. ^ I should say that on the pre- 
 vious night one of these Brahmins in conversation had 
 said to me, ''You must not think of us as worse than 
 we are. In a sense we are believers in Christ. Christ 
 is undoubtedly a great teacher, a prophet ; only there 
 are other prophets." And he added with character- 
 istic Eastern self-satisfaction, ''And they are also vll 
 Asiatics. There is Confucius, and Mahomet, and 
 Buddha and Kapila, and others ; but how shall we 
 know that Jesus is more than these ? '^ That question 
 I felt compelled to answer. So when I came to my 
 discourse I began by saying, "Gentlemen, Christ has 
 given us a method whereby we may certainly know 
 that He is more than other teachers. He stakes 
 everything on one principle, uttered in this same gos- 
 pel, ' If any man willeth to do His will he shall know 
 of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I 
 speak of Myself.' " ^ I then proceeded to point out 
 the rapid growth made by the blind man who was 
 healed, in his progressive understanding of Jesus 
 Christ, who had wrought the sign in him. First, he 
 saw and described Him, as simply "The man called 
 Jesus" ; ^ then as "A prophet" ; ^ then as the One 
 "Sent from God "*— the Messiah j then as "Lord," ** 
 
 » John 7: 17. ^ Ibid. 9:11, 
 
 Uhid. 9; 17. */Wd. 9:33. 
 
 »76id. 9:38. 
 
114 METHOD IN SOUL- WINING 
 
 whom he devoutly worshipped. This was indeed 
 fapid growth in a unique school, very unlike prog- 
 ress reached thi'ough the merely didactic method. I 
 then passed on to show that if we read between the 
 lines in this story, we may find at least four definite 
 principles on which the man acted in acquiring his 
 vision : principles which are still operative. 
 
 The first principle is this : That in Christ's method 
 there must be sufitcient humility to allow Jesus to treat 
 His subject as He will ; to let Christ manage His case 
 in His own way, however mysterious. 
 
 When Jesus smeared the plaster of clay on the 
 sightless eyeballs of the wondering man he might have 
 proudly resented such treatment. Had he been char- 
 acterized by the average amount of pride which reigns 
 in the human heart, he probably would have pro- 
 tested, ^'Do you propose to add insult to my injury 
 by thus daubing my sightless eyeballs with that plas- 
 ter of mud? " But he did not so. For some reason 
 he was willing that Christ should have His own way 
 with him ; do as He pleased with him ; put him in 
 subjection to His own authority. Thus he welcomed 
 any method which the mysterious sympathetic stran- 
 ger cared to apply. How it was that this man was so 
 tractable is worth inquiring. It is certainly uncom- 
 mon, and the result was just as unique. 
 
 I once asked a good friend of mine, a quaint 
 French brother, a man of much spiritual insight, 
 
CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 115 
 
 whj he supposed Jesus put the clay upon the eyes 
 of the man. ^'Oh," answered he, ''I don't know, 
 unless it made him a little more willing to go and 
 wash." Possibly this was the reason. Our Lord by 
 His providence often puts us into a position wherein, 
 because of our new straits, we become willing to take 
 some other needful step to extricate ourselves ; and 
 if it were not for the trial we would never get de- 
 liverance. The trial is the one circumstance indis- 
 pensable to the winning of our consent to be led 
 further in the way of the Lord's will. And so Jesus 
 has a philosophy deeper than our metaphysics, a 
 method unique, divinely wise. When once it is 
 evident what Christ's will for us is, let us yield to it, 
 purely on trust ; and it won't be long before He will 
 show us that He is more than Buddha, Mahomet or 
 Confucius, more than all other masters. 
 
 A second principle in this experimental method 
 of Christ to which I pointed the Brahmins was this ; 
 that he who would come into Christ's light must be 
 obedient enough to act on His word. Eeal inward 
 faith will ultimately act upon some divine word. I 
 said to these Brahmins, ''You say that Jesus is a 
 teacher whom you revere. Do you enough revere 
 Him to risk something by a line of action towards 
 Him ? If not, your reverence is fictitious. Do you 
 believe that Christ is a prophet ? Then trust Him 
 sufficiently to take His directions j give reality to 
 
116 METHOD m SOUL- WINNING 
 
 His word. Eisk your life upon such reality." 
 After Christ had put the clay upon this man's eyes, 
 He gave a word of command, ' * Now, go to yonder 
 pool of Siloam, and wash it off." ^ Here the man 
 might have said, ^'But, sir, you have just put the 
 clay upon my eyes. Why now should I go to a 
 distant pool to remove it?" But Jesus had some 
 reason for the strange cleansing as well as for the 
 peculiar anointing ; some deep, divine reason that 
 human philosophy could not fathom. The very 
 meaning of the word ^'Siloam" is "sent" ; it was 
 an emblem of Jesus, the eternal fount of life, that 
 flows right out from beneath the throne of God. 
 Jesus Himself was "the sent" of God. And now 
 He seems to say, ^ ' If you would be My disciple be- 
 coming willing to be sent by Me, just as I was sent 
 by the Father. Act on My word; go and wash." 
 The surprising thing is that the man did not hesitate 
 to comply. He promptly started, groping his way 
 down the vale, doubtless soliloquizing as he went, 
 "That sympathetic teacher tells me to go, and I am 
 going." He reaches the pool, he dips deeply into 
 the brimming fount, washes, and lo, as he turns and 
 lifts his cleansed eyes heavenward, there meets him a 
 vision never seen before. There are the strange blue 
 heavens, the walls of the Holy City, the Temple, the 
 valley of the Kidron, the Mount of Olives, and 
 1 John 9 ; 7. 
 
CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 117 
 
 moving companions all about him. How wondi'ous 
 it all seems ! 
 
 "What a change His word can make, 
 Turning darkness into day ! " 
 
 To make this point clearer, I told the following 
 incident of an occurrence in America. One evening 
 there came to my inquiry meeting a bright young 
 German. He had become very agnostic in his 
 religious position, and yet he was so dissatisfied that 
 he desired help. He told me his story about as 
 follows : ^^I was brought up in Prussia. My father 
 was a minister of the Established Church. The 
 family regime was pretty rigid. I resisted and at 
 length I broke away from it all, and came off to 
 this New World, since which time, for five years, I 
 have been falling away further and further from all 
 I once believed, until I am afraid to go on.'^ 
 
 I replied, "That's a good sign," adding, ''But 
 have you drifted so far away that you have no faith 
 ataUleftr' 
 
 '' Oh,'' said he, ''I still believe some things." 
 ''Will you, then, tell me some one thing which 
 you still really believe ■? We'U not mind just now 
 what you don't believe." 
 
 "Well," said he, "I stiU believe in God." 
 "That is a good deal to believe if it be really so. 
 
118 METHOD m SOUL- WINKING 
 
 But how much do you believe in Him ? Do you be- 
 lieve enough to act on your belief? '^ 
 
 " A man ought to.'' 
 
 " Certainly. If one will not so act on his avowed 
 belief, what do you think of him ? ' ' 
 
 He promptly replied, '' He is a hypocrite." 
 
 *'Well," said I, *^he certainly is not candid, 
 honest with himself. Now, on the basis of your own 
 acknowledgment, I want you to do the simplest thing 
 I can think of in the way of acting out your belief 
 here and now." 
 
 ^^ What do you want me to do ? " 
 
 ^*I want you to speak to God. Just talk to Him 
 as you do to me.'^ 
 
 ''What, do you want me to pray? I can't make a 
 prayer." 
 
 "Well, then, don't call it prayer, if that troubles 
 you. But I want you to talk to God in your own 
 way, and so prove the reality of your belief in Him. 
 I do not ask you to make my prayer or anybody's 
 else prayer. You could not if you tried ; you do not 
 need to 5 do your own praying with just your present 
 notion of God. I wish you to risk yourself on the 
 truth you now avow, to treat the measure of truth 
 you hold as actual j nothing more and nothing less." 
 
 He answered, "I shall stammer badly, but what 
 you ask is reasonable.'^ 
 
 "Then," said I, "let us kneel down here." 
 
CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 119 
 
 We kuelt togetlier. First I prayed, and when I 
 had finished I waited for him to follow. After quite 
 a struggle, he broke out : '^Oh, my God," and hav- 
 ing gotten his voice, he went on step by step, pour- 
 ing out a torrent of confession of his treatment of 
 God, of his dear old father away in Germany, of the 
 Bible and Chi-ist, and begged for forgiveness, until 
 suddenly springing to his feet, he exclaimed, ''Oh, 
 Mr. Mabie, I feel wonderfully changed. Could you 
 lend me a Bible ? I am ashamed I don't own one. I 
 will buy one to-morrow. I want to read the Bible." 
 He longed for the biblical explanation of what had 
 just occmTed in his soul. The man was of course 
 converted before he knew it, through simply acting 
 on the measure of truth, however small, which he 
 still cherished, and there came to his soul the sense of 
 God, that amazing miracle of grace which is always 
 wrought when a man honestly acts on the faith he 
 has. 
 
 "So," turning to my Brahmin friends, I urged, 
 " do as this man did. Act upon some simple reality 
 concerning Christ, which you have already become 
 aware of, in the Bible you have read j and you will 
 soon know for yourselves yet deeper realities in the 
 school of Christ." 
 
 The third principle discernible in the method of 
 Christ which I urged upon the Brahmins, was this ; 
 the importance of testimony to the measuie of faith 
 
120 METHOD IN SOUL-WIKNING 
 
 one has as fast as it comes. It was so that the healed 
 man advanced so rapidly in the school of Christ. 
 When he saw that Jesus was simply ''The man called 
 Jesus," he said so. When later he saw Him to be 
 ' ' A prophet, ' ' he confessed it. And when the divine 
 Messiahship of Jesus broke upon him, he owned to 
 that. Here, be it observed, was the particular crux 
 of the situation. It was the last test on which every- 
 thing turned with him. The moment the man con- 
 fessed that Christ was ''The sent of God, the Messiah," 
 that moment the proud Sanhedrists thrust him out ; 
 because they had agreed among themselves ' ' that if 
 any man should confess Jesus to be the Christ, he 
 should be cast out of the synagogue," ^ so out they 
 thrust him, and there he stood in the environs of the 
 Holy Place, suffering alone for his new confession of 
 faith. What now happened ? Two things that under 
 similar conditions always occur. Jesus "heard it." 
 Who told Him ? A little before no man could find 
 Jesus. But now, instantly, the crisis being on with 
 a disciple, as a needle turns to the pole, Jesus per- 
 ceives within Himself that there is a suffering fol- 
 lower of His thrown outside the synagogue, and He 
 makes His way directly to him. And He "found 
 him." ^ He always does; He^ always will, find the 
 soul that feels itself, for His sake, most alone. 
 
 I was aware that at this point I was on delicate 
 . » John 9 : 22, « John 9 : 35. 
 
CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 121 
 
 ground. For a Brahmin to incur the risk of being 
 put out of the caste synagogue, which he would do 
 if he confessed Christ, is to ask him to face the thing 
 he most fears. If he breaks caste, his co-religionists 
 will burn him in ef&gy in his native village ; they 
 will take away his wife, and reduce her to the abject 
 condition of widowhood ; and consider them both as 
 the offscouring of the earth, the refuse of the uni- 
 verse. ^'But," I continued, ^^ remember that, when 
 this poor man once blind, found himself an outcast, 
 then it was, in that very moment, that Jesus saw the 
 crisis and responded to it. He ' found him ' j stood 
 right before him ; and put to him the query, ^ Dost 
 thou believe on the Sou of God 1 ' ^ Not before had 
 Jesus put to His new disciple a question so theo- 
 logical. The man had not been ready for it before, 
 but now, as a real pupil in Christ's school he is ready. 
 The man replied, ' The Son of God ! Who is He, - 
 sir, that I may believe on Him ? I am disposed to 
 believe anything good and great of this man called 
 Jesus, this prophet, this Sent of God. Art Thou He, 
 the Blessed Stranger, who didst give me sight ? Who 
 is this Son of God, that I may believe on Him ? I 
 will believe, the moment I can know who He is.' " 
 Here is the real truth-lover, the real inquirer, the 
 true pupil in God's school. Nothing less can come 
 to such an one than the full sunrise upon the soul — 
 1 John 9; 35. 
 
122 METHOD IN SOUL- WINKING 
 
 such a sunrise as broke upon the patriarch of old at 
 ^'Peniel,'' meaning 'Hhe face of God." So Christ 
 answers the whole-hearted query by saying, ' ' The Son 
 of God ! Why, thou hast both seen Him, and He it 
 is that talketh with thee j I am He." How otherwise 
 could the man respond than to say, '' Lord, I believe,"^ 
 and he worshipped Him. He is orthodox at last. 
 ^' The man called Jesus" is now seen to be divine. 
 
 Such is the road to real orthodoxy, the experi- 
 mental road, more direct than the speculative way. 
 It may take one a lifetime to find the guide post even 
 to the philosophical road ; but coming to Jesus as we 
 are, even though it be to become an outcast, we find 
 it at once, and the work is done. 
 
 Some years ago in the West a brother minister of 
 mine told me this story. Calling one day on a lady 
 who was a member of his church, the woman's hus- 
 band, who was not a member, came in and pleasantly 
 saluting the pastor, said, ^^ Doctor, we are very glad 
 to see you in our home. My wife is a member of 
 your church, but I am not. Indeed, there are many 
 things in your creed I could not possibly accept, but 
 I believe more than many people suppose." Eeplied 
 the tactful pastor, ^' Would you kindly tell me plainly 
 what you believe more than people suppose?" 
 
 ^^ Oh, I believe that Jesus is the teacher, perhaps 
 the greatest teacher the world ever saw." 
 » John 9; 38. , 
 
CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 123 
 
 ^' Do you really believe that? " asked the pastor. 
 
 ^^Ido." 
 
 ^^Well, then,'' continued the pastor, ^^ would you 
 mind coming to our next prayer meeting, and telling 
 us as much?" 
 
 ^* What! Think of my coming to a prayer meet- 
 ing and doing that ! Would you make a hypocrite 
 of me ? What would the Church people think ? " 
 
 ^'Didn't you speak as an honest man, just now, 
 when you said you believed more than people sup- 
 posed, even that Jesus is the teacher? If you spoke 
 honestly, as I believe you did, I cannot see how there 
 could be any hypocrisy in telling it out among your 
 neighbours and friends. I have heard you say it. 
 Your wife heard it. I think it's down in the Book of 
 Eemembrance above. Why not let all men know it ? " 
 
 "Well," said the man, "that's a new way of put- 
 ting it. I'll think about it." 
 
 And think about it he did, and to so much purpose 
 that he came to a mid-week meeting soon after, and 
 at a fitting moment, arose and repeated the conversa- 
 tion, which the skillful pastor had had with him a 
 few days previously. Then he added, "My friends, 
 in thinking over this matter I find I believe a great 
 deal more than I did when I met the pastor last. I 
 then said I accept Jesus Christ as a great teacher. 
 But I accept Him now as my teacher, and on the whole 
 I accept Him as my Master and Saviour." The man 
 
124 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 was practically converted on his feet. And he went 
 out of that prayer meeting a changed man. Such 
 doing of the truth is always true to Christ's method. 
 This man might have sat down in a great library or 
 in some lecture hall, with a lot of philosophical 
 theorists and speculated endlessly, until his heart was 
 hardened and his conscience seared and the light in 
 him had become turned to darkness. But instead he 
 took Christ's wiser, straighter, immediate method to 
 the realization of who He was, and he came at once 
 to ^^know Him." 
 
 The fourth principle in the method of Christ illus- 
 trated in the narrative, to which I directed my Brah- 
 min hearers, was this : One must dare to stand alone. 
 It takes some coui-age to do this. It is here chiefly 
 that we break down. ^'Conscience doth make 
 cowards of us all." The world makes us cowards. 
 Our family relatives render us craven. Our caste re- 
 lations unman us. This man in the gospel, however 
 ignorant or poor or blind he was, was not a coward. 
 He dared to stand alone, absolutely alone. At a cer- 
 tain stage in the controversy between the Pharisees 
 and the healed man, these proud religionists appealed 
 to the parents of the man and said, ''Is this your 
 son?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " Was he born blind ? " 
 
 "He was." 
 
CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 125 
 
 ** How is it that he now sees? " 
 
 "Oh, we don't know. He is of age ; ask him.'' 
 This they said because they feared the Jews. They 
 forsook their unfortunate child, the last thing a true 
 parent will do. I have heard of a mother who fol- 
 lowed her son through crime, imprisonment and to 
 the scaffold, and when afterwards he was buried in a 
 Potter's field, she begged that she might be buried be- 
 side him. But on this occasion this Jewish mother, 
 sustained by the father, neither of them fit to bear the 
 title of parent, left the poor inquirer after Christ, 
 whose eyes had been opened by His touch, whose in- 
 ward soul had been illumined to the degree of 
 prophet-hood, forsook him that was bone of their bone 
 and flesh of their flesh. For all they cared, they said, 
 "let him be cast out of the synagogue." But the son 
 wavered not. He reached out, believingly, in the un- 
 certainty of an outcast condition, till Jesus came and 
 found him. He knew the meaning of the psalmist's 
 words, "When my father and my mother forsake 
 me, then the Lord will take me up." ^ 
 
 And so, to my Brahmin hearers I could not say less 
 than this: "Should you be thrown out of your 
 caste, in the i)rocess of discovering for yourselves who 
 the Christ is, remember that to be cast oict with Christ- 
 is to be cast in with God." 
 
 But I am asked, ^ ' What of the outcome ? " 
 » Ps. 27 : 10. 
 
126 METHOD IN SOIJL- WINKING 
 
 Well, the very next morning, one of these Brah- 
 mins, an officer of the government, came to the mis- 
 sion house, begging to see me, and proceeded to 
 say, 
 
 "Oh, sir, I thought I must see you this morning, 
 almost before breakfast. I didn't sleep a wink last 
 nighf 
 
 I inquired, "Why not, Mr. E. 1" 
 
 "Oh, that revelation of human nature con- 
 tained in the chapter you expounded ! I never 
 saw it before, sir, on that fashion. Is it true, sir ? 
 Oh, is it true? Must I break my caste in order 
 really to know who Christ is?" 
 
 "Well," I replied, "my brother, that man in the 
 gospel indeed broke his caste. He went out of the 
 synagogue alone, but he met the Christ at the exit. 
 And you will, if you will be as brave as he. In any 
 case, you must dare to stand alone if you would have 
 Christ's full illumination." 
 
 "Oh, then," said he, "pray for me !" 
 
 We knelt together, and after I had prayed he 
 followed me, in an outpouring of heart touching in 
 the extreme. He pleaded with many tears that Christ 
 would not let him die in his sins ; that God would 
 give him grace, even if his Hindu fellows cast him 
 out forever. We had many words of sympathetic in- 
 tercourse together, then and afterwards. He has since 
 passed away, and I can only hope for a blessed outcome. 
 
CHEIST'S METHOD OF SELF-DISCLOSUEE 12? 
 
 Then an hour afterwards there came a second 
 Brahmin, a teacher in the high school, and he 
 said, 
 
 *' Oh, my dear sir, I had to see you also. I think 
 I understand what you were talking about last night ; 
 but how can I know it better, be sure who Christ is, 
 and come into a state of peace "? '^ 
 
 Then he began to hedge and to draw back from 
 any public acknowledgment of what he confessed 
 to me. 
 
 "Well,'^ I said, ^'you must take Christ's direc- 
 tions, and walk in the best light you have, no matter 
 what it costs, or where it leads, and the light is 
 certain." 
 
 I left him in India, struggling with that question. 
 He, however, wrote me weeks afterwards, thanking 
 me for the message of that evening, and begging for 
 patience and prayers still. Then some months later, 
 when Doctor Clough came to this country he told me 
 that the old caste man who had conveyed the invita- 
 tion that I should preach had just died a Christian's 
 death, renouncing at the last Hinduism forever, and 
 owning that he had long been a secret believer. 
 
 Thus among these Hindus, Christ set His seal 
 upon His truth and honoured an exposition of His 
 own method, giving some fruit, even among these 
 Gentiles. 
 
 It is with me a profound conviction that as a 
 
128 METHOD IN SOUL-WINKING 
 
 matter of method in some of the more primary stages 
 of the foreign missionary's work among the heathen, 
 relatively too much emphasis has been placed upon 
 the mere matter of communicating a body of theo- 
 logical truth as such, and far too little use has been 
 made of loyal action upon some one truth already 
 known. In these later days of mission work when 
 great numbers of people even in pagan lands have 
 already single truths enough in mind to enable them 
 to come into ihe realization of Christ, why not induce 
 them immediately to act upon the light they have. 
 It is not true that people in heathendom or elsewhere 
 need to have before them a great variety of abstract 
 theological truths before they can be spiritually re- 
 newed and become inducted into the school of Christ. 
 It is amazing how little truth is essential to salvation. 
 The missionary often can well afford to presume upon 
 the fact that many all about him in regions where the 
 gospel has been preached somewhat widely, already 
 know enough to be saved. The practical thing 
 needed is that by the help of the Spirit in some tact- 
 ful way these should be led to commit themselves to 
 the truth they know. To do this, is in principle 
 faith, is the belief of the heart and the executive act 
 of the entire soul. To those who will thus act, Christ 
 Himself will lift the veil and through His own miracle, 
 
 stand SELF-DISCLOSED. 
 
VII 
 
 THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HAEYEST 
 
 " Behold I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the 
 fields that they are white already unto harvest." — John 4 : 35. 
 
 In the light of what has been said, doubtless the 
 earnest reader has asked, '' But how does this matter 
 of personal effort for individuals bear on the larger 
 problem ^of the salvation of the masses % How may 
 the multitude in a given community be reached ; a 
 tribe of the heathen collectively be Christianized 1 '^ 
 
 These queries are most pertinent. As I have pre- 
 viously stated, it may not indeed be the province of 
 all Christians, however earnest, to initiate great and 
 successful general revivals. Nevertheless, such are 
 the divine expectations respecting the prevalence of 
 Christ's kingdom that we must believe in frequent 
 and even sudden spiritual ingatherings throughout 
 the Gospel era. Ours is the Jubilee age of the 
 Gospel : the period distinctly set forth in the Scrip- 
 tures as "the times of the Gentiles" ; the time of 
 world-wide witnessing. 
 
 There is always a close relation between the start- 
 ing of one soul and the moving of a wide circle of 
 souls Christward. In all the revivals I have ever 
 
 129 
 
130 METHOD IN SOUL-WIIOING 
 
 known a striking characteristic has been the manner 
 in which one new convert has won others by a very 
 contagion of new life. We can never tell how broad 
 may be the sweep of the influence of one true convert. 
 Krishna Pal's renewal in Serampore initiated a wide 
 movement that continues in ever enlarging circles 
 among the Hindus. When Ko Thah Byu in Burma, 
 formerly a poor slave, became a Christian, it did not 
 appear to signify, but it was the inception of the 
 salvation of the Hill tribes of Burma by tens of 
 thousands. More than four thousand converts from 
 one tribe have been won to Christ within the past 
 two years. The fragment of a tract which led 
 Neesima to God became a myriad-tongued witness to 
 all Japan. 
 
 Probably the most characteristic illusion of public 
 Christian workers is the notion they commonly have 
 that they must convert people by masses, through 
 some stroke of genius in public discourse, or marked 
 demonstration in organization. But thinking people 
 are rarely converted en grosse^ however differently it 
 may appear. The very men reputed to have large, 
 popular evangelizing power have at least had their 
 introduction to such power in the practice of win- 
 ning souls one by one in the secret places. This was 
 peculiarly true of Mr. Moody. He was never above 
 the work of constant, personal watching for inquirers. 
 He probably conversed and prayed individually with 
 
THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HAEVEST 131 
 
 more persons than any man of his time. Dr. Torrey, 
 Evan Eoberts, and others, who of late have com- 
 manded much attention, have been foremost in enlist- 
 ing many persons to bring their associates to public 
 meetings, to labour with inquirers singly in inquiry 
 meetings and elsewhere. The greatest evangelists 
 confess themselves powerless without such reinforce- 
 ment. There is no substitute for the one by one way. 
 To save many, we must first save one. If the Church 
 would bring about Hawaiian evangelization, it needs 
 an Oo-Boo-Kiah as well as a Titus Coan for its 
 initiation. If we would bring on the Telugu harvest, 
 there must first be the Prayer-Meeting Hill incident 
 with the Jewetts and two or three native believers in 
 a peculiar and divine fellowship. The Pentecost on 
 the Congo sprang from one repentant man under the 
 story of the Cross as told by Henry Eichards after 
 years of almost fruitless work. A single trophy the 
 converted ^'Africaner" brought to triumph a halt- 
 ing mission in South Africa. The amazing movement 
 in Uganda at one time threatened with extinction 
 even after Mackay's extraordinary apostolate, took 
 on a new life after a few natives had become re- 
 pentant after the awful atrocities perpetrated by 
 King Mwanga. To-day fifty thousand of the Uganda 
 people are discipled to Christ. The great move- 
 ments in Manchuria, Korea, and the Philippine 
 Islands, had their beginnings in a few native con- 
 
132 METHOD IN SOUL-WINNING 
 
 verts. To convert one, therefore, may be to convert 
 a thousand. The law of geometrical ratio prevails. 
 The spark may kindle the forest, — a nation be ''born 
 in a day." 
 
 The works of Augustine and Columba, of Boniface 
 and Ansgar, of Wesley and Whitefield, of Finney, 
 Spurgeon and Moody, will be wrought over again and 
 again in differing forms in enlarging spheres, as 
 individuals being empowered by the Spirit of God 
 impress their message first upon some one soul. 
 
 If in the defections from faith to rationalism, if 
 through increase of worldliness and coldness in the 
 church, there come times when men will say, ' ' Alas ! 
 the great revivals are over" j yet in that very hour, 
 there will be starting in some lad somewhere a new 
 divine fire which will yet envelop a continent with 
 the power of some long-forgotten divine message, and 
 as under another Savonarola, potentates of the earth 
 will be caused to tremble. 
 
 We should indeed remind ourselves that whatever 
 be the means employed, all men will not believe the 
 gospel and be saved. Even under Christ's personal 
 ministry, this was true. ' ' Behold this child is set 
 for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and 
 for a sign which is spoken against ; yea, and a sword 
 shall pierce through thine own soul ; that thoughts 
 out of many hearts maybe revealed," was the testi- 
 mony of the aged Simeon to Mary. The same gospel 
 
THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HAEVEST 133 
 
 which unto some is a ^^ savour from life unto life,'' to 
 others is a '' savour from death unto death.'' 
 
 The Bible does not explain this and we cannot ; 
 sin whose climax is unbelief is in fact spiritual 
 insanity. All faithful preaching of the gospel, even 
 at its best, taking human nature as it is, will result 
 in the hardening of some, and the melting of others. 
 That risk all true labourers for Christ must assume, 
 and leave the result with God. With this allowance, 
 however, for the sad fact which any sound view of 
 Christian evangelism must reckon upon, it is still 
 true that Christ warrants the hope of large and not 
 small fruitfulness to those who engage in His work. 
 
 ''He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing seed 
 for sowing, shall doubtless come again with joy, 
 bringing his sheaves with him." 
 
 Eeferring to the results of His own reconciling 
 death, which He deemed a planting rather than a 
 burial, and the certain resurrection which attested 
 its divine import, Christ said of the sequel, ' ' It 
 beareth much fruit." Then no one need be pessi- 
 mistic respecting the avails of the travail of the 
 Saviour's soul, if only the presentation of truth be 
 rightly made, in the experience and power of it. 
 
 As an object lesson intended exi)ressly to set forth 
 the scale on which Christ expected results from gospel 
 effort. He wrought the two miracles called ''the su- 
 pernatural draughts of fishes." What these signs 
 
134 METHOD IN SOUL-WINNING 
 
 really meant to teach, however, was the supernatural 
 catch of human souls that might be expected when the 
 nets were cast according to His word. Of course, if 
 efforts are made in some form of half-secularized 
 endeavour, only failure can be expected. When the 
 disciples after Christ's resurrection temporarily lost 
 faith in any further divine manifestation of Himself, 
 in impatient petulance they all joined with Peter 
 and said, '' I go a-fishing." Nothing short of a fresh 
 epiphany of Himself rendered them again divinely 
 effective. 
 
 There is on record in the Gospel of John one strik- 
 ing experience in the life of our Lord which is evi- 
 dently intended to encourage His workers to expect 
 large results in evangelism where there is the least 
 promise of it. I refer to the event which occurred at 
 Sychar, when the Saviour met the woman at the 
 well and the revival in Samaria immediately ensued. 
 This certainly was a most unexpected event, a sud- 
 den revival. No field apparently could have been 
 more unpromising. The Samaritans were a commu- 
 nity fairly insulated against Judaistic influence of any 
 sort : prejudice was strong and bitter, as between 
 this half-heathen community and the holy city of 
 Jerusalem. Now there must be a real philosophy at 
 the basis of the extraordinary outcome of this visit 
 of Jesus. 
 
 The point in the lesson is easy to miss altogether ; 
 
THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HAEYEST 135 
 
 The persistent human habit is to trace the analogies 
 between the workings of nature and those of grace. 
 In this instance, however, Christ is showing how op- 
 positely to what we call nature the Spirit works in 
 the realm of grace. It is true as concerns the natural 
 harvest that a period of months must elapse between 
 seedtime and harvest, and so there is a maxim, ^'yet 
 four months and then cometh harvest." The farmer 
 must expect delay in the practical process of gather- 
 ing his grain ; but Christ here is teaching that this 
 need not be the case at all in the matter of winning 
 souls to Himself, and so He speaks a word most sur- 
 prising, '' Behold, I say unto you, look on the fields 
 that they are white already unto harvest." This is 
 so although there has apparently been no seed-sowing 
 at all, nor time for it. The whiteness, of course, was 
 invisible to all eyes but His. But He shortly proved 
 the ripeness by actually garnering the crop. What 
 was it that so whitened those fields ? What sort of 
 prescience caught the vision of Christ to which the 
 disciples were blind ? 
 
 It is not enough to say that Christ was divine, and 
 anything was possible where He was. This was not 
 a miracle strictly speaking, nor did Christ work arbi- 
 trarily for the mere sake of showing His power j and 
 yet His presence on the scene brought the sudden 
 change. We may be confident He wrought the result 
 on principles perfectly consonant with the normal ac- 
 
136 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 tivities of His followers. He meant His achievement 
 to be an object lesson to them, and the inference to be 
 drawn from it is plain that the disciples of Christ also 
 by the Spirit of God may often bring about just such 
 sudden and wide-spread changes in the life of commu- 
 nities, if in themselves they are right towards God 
 and their fellows. Fields are still white, ever white, 
 on many sides in Christendom, and in pagandom also, 
 if only Christ in the person of His workers is there 
 with the anointed eye to see the golden grain. 
 
 Beading between the lines of this remarkable nar- 
 rative, we may discern certain clear principles on 
 which that revival was wrought, principles on which 
 other revivals also may be expected to occur, however 
 discouraging the conditions appear. 
 
 In an important sense Christ brought that revival 
 with Him ; and just as truly we must bring the re- 
 vival to the communities in which we labour. This 
 was not a case in which a reaper happened along ^' in 
 the nick of time," to save the grain ready of itself to 
 fall into the hand. This coming of the Eeaper in the 
 precise way He did, itself yellowed the corn and filled 
 the granary. There are laws higher than natural 
 which control the spiritual seasons. To the King in 
 this realm, October or May in the process of the spir- 
 itual suns was alike productive. In large measure 
 may it not be so likewise in our case ? 
 
 Note some of the principles at the root of this 
 
THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HAEVEST 137 
 
 Samaritan revival which are as applicable to us now 
 as to Jesus then : 
 
 (a) The Divine Eeaper found His supreme satis- 
 faction — His very food — in the accomplishment of the 
 task on which His Father sent Him. He was there- 
 fore one through whom on a plane quite above the 
 natural and apparent, His Father could pour all the 
 energy of His grain-producing power. Working in 
 perfect consistency with the All-Holy, the harvesting 
 order of the world was at its maximum. With us the 
 delays in spiritual harvest are often due to our own 
 spiritual immaturity: we wait not only ''four 
 months," but long years, and no fruit matures. Per- 
 haps we ourselves would be injured by the gratifica- 
 tion of our untimely desires, and we are in no normal 
 relation to the spiritual renewal of our fellows. In 
 case spiritual children were born to us, the requisite 
 moral warmth to nurse and rear them is lacking : but 
 as for Jesus at the well, the passion of His soul went 
 out after the perishing about Him. Hungry though 
 He was, so that His disciples needed to go and buy 
 food, yet He famished unspeakably more for the will 
 of God to be accomplished in Sy char's villagers, and 
 when He saw one soul transformed into a potential 
 messenger of His Father's grace. His Spirit was in- 
 stantly braced to new vigour. His disciples arriving 
 with the food, perceiving that He was already so re- 
 freshed, asked ' ' Hath any man brought Him aught to 
 
138 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 eat 1 ^^ He had really banqueted on viands all invisi- 
 ble to them. His meat was '' to do the will of Him 
 that sent Him, and to accomplish His work '' — a meat 
 so deeply satisfying that He said, "ye know not of 
 it. Not yet were the disciples soul-winners; they 
 were without capacity for so high a task. They were 
 mere partisans in a religious camp ready to break 
 a lance with their rivals, rather than to share with 
 them the Father's grace. The state of the Master's 
 will respecting His Father's purpose for Him made 
 all the difference. 
 
 (p) Then this Master Eeaper established a friendly 
 relation to the woman He met. He found the right 
 point of contact ; He was humanly as well as divinely 
 wise : He used that most uncommon thing — common 
 sense — in relation to another spirit : He did one of the 
 most effective things possible for overcoming aver- 
 sion; He asked a favour. "Give me to drink." 
 Could anything be simpler or more pleasing than 
 handing a cup of cold water to a way-worn traveller ? 
 Thus the key to the woman's heart was won. 
 
 (c) Jesus also disappointed prevailing prejudice. 
 What tact there was in the simple favour asked : He 
 who begged to drink is a Jew, and she who is asked 
 to give it, a Samaritan. She wonders with great sur- 
 prise at the unwonted simplicity. He meant she 
 should. He disarms her suspicion, using the very 
 method which shall shortly move her even against 
 
THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HAEVEST 139 
 
 her fears, to request grace from Him. His method 
 won her to make the plea. 
 
 In our late Civil War, an earnest chaplain one 
 day after a battle came upon a poor wounded soldier, 
 prostrate on the field, apparently dying. The chap- 
 lain knelt beside him and asked ; 
 
 ^'My dear fellow, would you like to have me read 
 the Bible to your' 
 
 "Oh, I don't know,'' replied the soldier, "lam 
 scorched with thirst." 
 
 The chaplain ran to the nearest spring and returned 
 with abundant water ; the man drank with despera- 
 tion, and then he added : 
 
 " My wound is oozing so that it has saturated my 
 clothing, until it sticks to my body." 
 
 The chaplain removed the stained garments, bathed 
 the wound, and then took off his own shirt and put it 
 on the suffering man, and remarked : 
 
 " Now my dear fellow, I hope you feel better." 
 
 The soldier looked up and replied : " Oh, so much 
 better, and now if you have any book that tells a man 
 to act like that, you can read it to me." 
 
 (d) Christ sought for the particle of faith there 
 was in the woman, and when found built upon it. 
 The woman had let drop a suggestion for which the 
 Saviour was alert : ' ' Art thou greater than our father 
 Jacob who gave us the well and drank thereof him- 
 self, and his sons, and his cattle?" Here was the- 
 
140 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 ology enough for the present need. ''She is a be- 
 liever in the patriarch Jacob," mused Christ : "there 
 is faith in the embryo. Starting from that I' 11 lead her 
 to Myself, the well deeper and diviner than all wells 
 of the patriarchs." 
 
 (e) Jesus developed the woman's spiritual thirst : 
 He so testified of the indwelling spring of life that 
 the woman craved a draught from it : 
 
 "Sir, give me this water that I thirst not, neither 
 come all the way hither to draw." 
 
 Emerson somewhere says that human nature is slow 
 to believe that another has a finer power of spiritual 
 discrimination than one's self ; the moment, however, 
 that one is convinced of it, that moment the soul's 
 expectation of the other becomes boundless. Thus 
 this woman could not withhold the expression of her 
 spiritual thirst the moment she was convinced she 
 had met the Master of the soul. 
 
 (/) Christ awoke in the woman conviction for sin, 
 and yet how delicately ! Ere one can taste the water 
 of life, sin must be acknowledged. So Jesus says : 
 
 "Go call thy husband and come hither." The 
 hint was enough. 
 
 "I have no husband." 
 
 "Jesus saith unto her, thou saidst well, I have 
 no husband : for thou hast had five husbands : and 
 he whom thou now hast is not thy husband : this 
 hast thou said truly." 
 
THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HAEVEST 141 
 
 To this searching insight, one answer was inevi- 
 table. 
 
 "The woman saith unto him, Sir I perceive that 
 thou art a prophet. Thou readest my life like an 
 open book, perhaps thou hast pardon and cleansing 
 for me — a grace to offer. '^ 
 
 And now the woman moralizes respecting worship 
 and its sacred places : she becomes religious, which 
 affords the Master the opportunity for declaring the 
 essence of true religion, namely the worship of the 
 Father in spirit and in truth. 
 
 (g) But Jesus also had with Him that day the full 
 answer to the ultimate religious need : He brought 
 her the present Messiah — the Saviour. Led on from 
 point to point, at length the woman in the outburst 
 of her final longing said, "I know that Messiah 
 Cometh (He that is called Christ): when He is come 
 He will declare unto us all things.'^ This seemed to 
 say, "the Messiah, will He ever come, the hope of 
 Samaritan as well as Jew? Oh, that He were here 
 now, then should I know all I now lack.'' 
 
 This outreach of hope of the stricken, convicted 
 woman, Jesus laid hold of and said to her plainly, 
 "that Messiah is here now ; I that speak unto thee 
 am He.'' 
 
 We indeed cannot say, "I am He the Messiah " ; 
 but we can say, ' ' He whom I know as the Messiah is 
 here in my heart and near to you." The sinful world 
 
142 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 thinks of God as afar off, even infinitely distant. Sin 
 itself in us falsifies the situation j but the exact oppo- 
 site is the fact, and it is the disciple's business to 
 deny the last lie of Satan. God is not afar off, nor 
 does any one need to retrace all the weary steps of his 
 life- wandering to get back to God ; he has simply to 
 right-about-face, say, ^'Father I have sinned,'' and 
 God is there : 
 
 '* Closer is He than breathing, 
 Nearer than hands and feet." 
 
 (h) Jesus appreciated the previous seed-sowing of 
 others and utilized it. He explained the suddenness 
 of this revival in part by saying to the disciples : — 
 ^' I sent you to reap that whereon ye have not la- 
 boured : others have laboured and ye have entered into 
 their labour." He knew that however errant from 
 the Jewish faith the Samaritans were, they possessed 
 a certain amount of light ; they had a historic ver- 
 sion of the Pentateuch ; they were worshippers, 
 albeit their temple was on Gerizim and not Moriah ; 
 they cherished hope of the Messiah. By whomso- 
 ever these seeds were sown they were seeds of truth 
 and pregnant with harvest to one who had the 
 insight to discern it. He did not have to wait to 
 undo all the errors of the semi-heathen community 
 to reap some fruit. He thrust in the sickle at once. 
 It is for the lack of discernment of this principle 
 
THE FIELDS WHITE UNTO HARVEST 143 
 
 that many modern ministers and missionaries put 
 farther off from them than they need the day of 
 harvest. To a degree indeed, all are seed-sowers, 
 but their seeding may be largely reaped by others. 
 The wise harvester presumes that other workers have 
 been before him ; that the seed somehow lives be- 
 cause God is watching over it, and he proceeds to 
 harvest. One of the most effective evangelists I 
 ever knew was a man who, while others were wont 
 to say of him, he was '^no preacher,'' nevertheless 
 had the humility and the sense to say, '^It is my 
 business to presume upon the good preaching that 
 long has been done before me. I get men to act on 
 that." And act they did, as I personally observed 
 in an important western city, until about 3,000 con- 
 verts were enrolled in the various churches of the 
 city, many of whose pastors had at first disparaged 
 the skill of the reaper. If it is true that some who 
 are ever learning never come to the knowledge of the 
 truth, it is also true that some who are ever preach- 
 ing lead few or none into personal salvation. It is 
 largely from failure to make the most of the work 
 of their predecessors. 
 
 Perhaps the human qualifications in Jesus were 
 all summed up in this : He was the living truth. 
 
 Christian worker, young minister, novice on the 
 foreign field, seek then first to come into close, 
 gracious relation to even one poor soul waiting by 
 
144 METHOD IN SOUL- WINNING 
 
 the wayside for a spiritual guide. And as this 
 woman at Sychar in the new elation of the discovery 
 of the Christ, forgot her water-pot and went away to 
 the city with the sense of a brimming spring within her, 
 and said to the people, ''Come see a man who told me 
 all things that ever I did— can this be the Christ? '^ 
 again others will believe, not merely because of the 
 saying of the new herald, but they will come to 
 Christ Himself first-hand, and shortly testify, ''we 
 know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world.'' 
 A revival is something which in form or effect, no 
 one can possibly foresee. It has in it always an 
 element of surprise: it is Christ's "behold, I say 
 unto you look on the fields, — the fields you thought 
 blasted, black with death — but they are really white 
 to harvest, whitened while you look, contrary to all 
 you believe or expect, God's own original and 
 strange wonder. Then against all odds, believe in 
 the revival as possible and sudden anywhere, have 
 it within you complete in your own personality, 
 carry it with you wherever you go, as Jesus the 
 Master did, and ere you are aware again and again 
 the angels will strike up with you the song of 
 Haevest Home. 
 
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