for they are already white for harvest!”
Why did Paul, for instance, submit to dangers of death often?
Like his divine Master, he believed that a harvest of precious souls
was perishing for lack of Christian reapers.
We conclude then, that the church should feel and act towards the human
race substantially as though all without the gospel were perishing
forever.
We think our true compassion is to face the dire reality,
and thus rouse ourselves and you to that burning activity which alone can
mitigate it.
And now that I see a world threatened by the devouring fire of hell,
while the church slumbers that ought to stay the destruction,
must I not lift up my voice like a trumpet?
Now, have we thought what a plunge this is?
Have we followed with our minds the ruin of one poorest, darkest,
weakest pagan soul, through its progressive depravity and despair,
through its increasing capacities for sinning and suffering,
and through the never-ending, ever-widening vistas of its immortality,
till the woe (of that one soul) is vaster than the wreck of a world?
And do we remember how frequently this ruin occurs?
Every blast of war, or pestilence, or famine which shakes the human crop,
strews hell with (the) precious seed of lost souls as thickly as when
the November wind sweeps the leaves of some trackless wood into its
silent lake...
While we sit here deliberating in cold debate, somewhere in this field of
death every
second of time marks the dying gasp of a human being!
Each stroke is another plunge into the pit,
and a new burst of another everlasting wail
joining the many-voiced (lamentation) of despair.
Oh! terrible world in which we live!
Oh! dread responsibility of this living harvest,
in the reaping of which we must race with death!
- R L Dabney