II.

THE OPENING VISION.

The heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.

-EZEKIEL.

HE first half of the present century may be

THE

said to date the beginning of the modern missionary movement. For ages there had been lit

tle aggressiveness in the Church. Religion was worship, not work. Piety had degenerated into monkish cloistering, or, if sometimes it had other impulse, it exhausted itself in swinging censers and mumbling rituals. Meanwhile the myriads of humanity swept by the doors of church and convent and cathedral to death. The priests were brutish and the people loved to have it so.

Wesley and his small though gallant and devoted corps of helpers, had stirred up a deeper spirituality of life and a holier zeal of endeavor in England, and their influence had reached across the Atlantic and kindled answering zeal in America, but that zeal had expended its force mostly along the Atlantic seaboard. A few adventurous spirits, chosen out of the more robust and determined of the Atlantic pioneers, had scaled the Alleganies and planted far advanced outposts in the

valleys of the Ohio and the Holston, but the men were few and their means limited, and, besides, the fulness of the times had not yet come. The Church was waiting on Providence.

As the years grew on Methodism in America began to accrete and consolidate her potent individvidualism into a compact and powerful organism. She did this under a magnificent leadership. Scarcely Loyola himself had greater ecclesiastical generalship, or a loftier spirit of consecration to his ideal work than had Asbury. His lieutenants were like him, or they soon ceased to be his lieutenants. With a statesman's mental grasp and a warrior's imperious will he was the man for the hour and the crisis of Methodism. With himself, under the great "Captain of our Salvation," as leader and commander of the people, and such men as Jesse Lee, Freeborn Garrettson and William McKendre, followed later by Elijah Hedding, Nathan Bangs and Wilbur Fisk and their hundred equals to carry out his orders on the field, there could be no want of wisdom in design or vigor in execution. But the face of the Church was toward the east. Judson had burst ajar the gates of Burmah, Cox had opened the western door of the Dark Continent, and the churches were preparing to carry another crusade over the plains of the Ori

ent. There was, it must be confessed, a splendid inspiration in the thought that Bethlehem's Star should rise again on India's sky out of the western horizon. No wonder that, for a time, the Church forgot the west, and even the American Church thought and prophesied only of "Africa's sunny fountains and India's coral strands." But God never forgets. His needy children are in His heart and thought forevermore; and in His own good time He will give their need a voice that will awaken His people to deliver and save the perishing. So, suddenly, out of the Rocky Mountains, He peals a call that faces the Church westward as well as eastward. It was on this wise:

From the Mississippi to the western sea there stretched a wild and weird unknown. Dim rumors of its great mountains and broad valleys, teeming with a wild and savage life, had crept a little eastward of the Missippi, but had hardly reached the ear of the Church in her places of power and authority in the cities of the Atlantic. Whether the wild tribes of that vast western region had any idea of God or any susceptibility of progress, none knew; scarcely any inquired. But God has ways to make the church hear when His time has come. "The man of Macedonia" can ever make his "Come over and help us" audible when God bids him speak.

Up among the springs that fountain the Columbia, in one of the smiling valleys of the great mountains, in 1832 the chiefs of the Flat Head Indians are in serious council. They are not painted as for war, nor armed as for the chase. A look of deep reflection is on the faces of the old men; of listening inquiry on those of the younger. They were rehearsing in each other's ears a strange story that wandering trappers had brought to their wigwams. It was the story of the white man's worship; of the book that told him of God and immortality, and of the presence and power of the Great Spirit. The Indian is a worshipper-feeling after God in his dim way, if haply he may find Him; and such a story must needs find and hold his heart.

Through many such councils, in the simple and sincere way of these untaught children of nature, this investigation continued. The conclusion reached was, if there were such treasures even far away they must find them. They selected one of their old sachems, and with him a trusted brave of full years, and two young and daring men, and with the benedictions of those they left behind them the four went out on their sublime search.

How often we are taught that God's messengers are not all commissioned from the schools of the prophets. He has all seasons and all instrumen

talities for His own. The heart of humanity beats round the world, and God can touch that heart anywhere with a thrill of His own inspiration. His providences are beyond our ken, and His kingdom is advanced by means all His own. This was never more wonderfully seen than in the manner in which the Church was first made aware that the great tribes of this far west were repeating the vision and mission of the Magi:-they "saw His star in the east and came to worship Him."

In 1832 St. Louis was a hamlet of the far frontier. It was the resort of hunters and trappers, where they came to dispose of their furs and peltries, and whence they went again to seek other treasures of the forest and mountains. Many weeks after the Indian council among the mountains four Indians walked stealthily down its streets, looking everywhere as for a hidden treasure. Finally they appealed to General William Clarke, of whose name the two older of the company had heard a quarter of a century before, away up in their far mountain home, when he and General Meriweather Lewis had passed through the mountains on their way to the western sea. To him they stated the object of their search. They were received kindly, amply supplied with blankets and ornaments, but neither General Clarke nor