The Superintending Providence o f God 13 growing and ripening wherever there has been faithful Gospel effort. Then, as to the reflex action of missions on the church at home, two other brief sayings are similarly exhaustive: first, Thomas Chalmers’ remark that “foreign missions act on home missions, not by exhaustion, but by fermentation;” and second, Alexander Duff’s sage saying, that “the church that is no longer evangelistic, will cease to be evangelical,” The whole hundred years of missions is a historic com- mentary on these four comprehensive statements. God’s Word has never returned to Him void. Like the rain from heaven, it has come down, not to go back until it has made the earth to bring forth and bud, yielding not only bread for the eater, but seed for the sower, providing for salvation of souls and expansion of service. Everywhere God’s one everlasting sign has been wrought; instead of the thorn has come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier, the myrtle tree—t he soil of so- ciety exhibiting a total change in its products, as in the Fiji group, where a thousand -churches displace heathen fanes and cannibal ovens, or as among the Karens, where on opposing hills the Schway Mote Tou Pagoda confronts the Kho Thah Byu Memorial Hall, typical of the old and the new. Along the valley of the Euphrates churches have been planted by the score; with native pastors supported by self-denying tithes of their members. Everywhere the seed of the Word of God be- ing sown, it has sprung up in a harvest of renewed souls which in turn have become themselves the good seed of the kingdom, to become also the germs of a new harvest. CHURCHES AT HOME On the other hand, God has distinctly shown approval of missionary zeal and enthusiasm in the church at home which has supplied the missionaries. Spiritual prosperity and prog- ress may be gauged so absolutely by the measure of missionary activity, that the spirit of missions is now recognized as the spirit of Christ. The Scripture proverb is proven true : “There
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