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The Superintending Providence of God Mahmud suddenly died, and his edict of expulsion had no ex ecutive to carry it out, and his successor Abdul Medjid sig nalized the succession by the issuing of a new charter of liberty; or, as when in Siam, twelve years later, at another such crisis, God by death dethroned Chaum Klow, the reck less and malicious foe of missions, and set on the vacant throne Maha-Mong-Kut, the one man in the empire taught by a missionary and prepared to be the friend and patron of missions, as also his son and successor, Chulalangkorn! THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS These are but parts of His ways. The pages of the cen tury’s history are here and there written in blood, but even the blood has a golden luster. Martyrs there have been, like John Williams, and Coleridge Patteson, and James Hanning- ton, Allen Gardiner, and Abraham Lincoln, and David Liv ingstone, the Gordons of Erromanga and the Gordon of Khar toum, the convert of Lebanon, and the court pages at Uganda; but every one of these deaths has been like seed which falls into the ground to die that it may bring forth fruit. The churches of Polynesia and Melanesia, of Syria and Africa, of India and China, stand rooted in these martyr graves as the oak stands in the grave of the acorn, or the wheat harvest in the farrows of the sown seed. It is part of God’s plan that thus the consecrated heralds of the cross shall fill up that which is behind of the sufferings of Christ in their flesh for His body’s sake which is the Church. THE DIVINE BENEDICTION .OF MISSIONS The same Superintending Providence is seen in the results of missions. Two brief sentences fitly outline the whole situ ation as to the direct results in the foreign field: First, native churches have been raised up with the three features of a complete church life; self-support, self-government, and self propagation; and second, the richest fruits of Christianity, both in the individual and in the community, have been found
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