"In these days of high pressure," she says, "men demand large profits
and quick returns in every department of our commercial and national
life, and these must be served up with the definiteness and precision
of statistics. This abnormal and feverish haste has entered to some
extent into our religious work, and is felt more or less in all the
pulses of our Church. Whatever may be the reasons for such a course in
regard to worldly callings, its methods and standards are utterly
foreign to the laws of Christ's kingdom, and can only result in
distortions and miscalculations when applied to His work. While
thanking God for every evidence of life and growth, we shrink from
reducing the throes of spiritual life, the development and workings of
the conscience, or the impulse and trend toward God and righteousness,
to any given number of figures on a table. Hence it is with the
greatest reluctance that we endeavour to sum up some tangible proof of
the power of God's Word among our heathen neighbours. While to our
shame and confusion of face it has not been what it might, and would
have been had we been more faithful and kept more in line with the will
and spirit of God, it has to the praise of the glory of His grace
proved stronger than sin and Satan.
"We do not attempt to give in numbers those who are nominally
Christian. Women, lads, girls, and a few men profess to have placed
themselves in God's hands. All the children within reach are sent to
the school without stipulation. One lady of free birth and good
position has borne persecution for Christ's sake. We speak with
diffidence; for as no ordained minister has ever been resident or
available for more than a short visit, no observance of the ordinances
of Baptism or the Lord's Supper have been held and we have not had the
usual definite offers of persons as candidates for Church membership,
We have just kept on sowing the seed of the Word, believing that when
God's time comes to gather them into the visible Church there will be
some among us ready to participate in the privilege and honour.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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