But the great Missionary anticipates an objection from facts to his burning plea for the rightness of an unrestrained evangelism. The proclamation might be universal; but were not the results partial? "Here a little, and there a little"; was not this the story of missionary results even when a Paul, a Barnabas, a Peter, was the missionary? Everywhere some faith; but everywhere more hostility, and still more indifference! Could this, after all, be the main track of the divine purposes--these often ineffectual excursions of the "fair feet" of the messengers of an eternal peace? Ah, that objection must have offered no mere logical difficulty to St Paul; it must have pierced his heart. For while His Master was his first motive, his fellow-men themselves were his second. He loved their souls; he longed to see them blessed in Christ, saved in Him from "the death that cannot die," filled in Him with "life indeed" (ἡ ὄντως ζωή, 1 Tim. vi. 19). The man who shed tears over his converts as he warned them (Acts xx. 31) had tears also, we may be sure, for those who would not be converted; nay, we know he had: "I tell you, _even weeping_ (καὶ κλαίων), that they are the enemies of the Cross of Christ" (Phil. iii. 18). But here too he leans back on the solemn comfort, the answer from within a veil,--that Prophecy had taken account of this beforehand. Moses, and Isaiah, and David, had foretold on the one hand a universal message of good, but on the other hand a sorrowfully limited response from man, and notably from Israel. So he proceeds: [Sidenote: Ver. 16.] =But not all obeyed[178] the good tidings,= when "the word" reached them; for--we were prepared for such a mystery, such a grief--=for Isaiah says= (liii. 1), in his great Oracle of the Crucified, ="Lord, who believed our hearing" (ἀκοὴ),= the message they heard of us, about One "on whom were laid the iniquities of us all"? And as he dictates that word "_hearing_," it emphasizes to him the fact that not mystic intuitions born out of the depths of man are the means of revelation, but articulate messages given from the depths of God, and spoken by men to men. And he throws the thought into a brief sentence, such as would lie in a footnote in a modern book: [Sidenote: Ver. 17.] =So we gather (ἄρα) that faith= comes =from hearing; but the hearing= comes =through Christ's[179] utterance (ῥῆμα);= the messenger has it because it was first given to him by the Master who proclaimed HIMSELF the Way, Truth, Life, Light, Bread, Shepherd, Ransom, Lord. All is revelation, not reverie; utterance, not insight.