T V. THE FIELD CHOSEN. "Lift up your eyes and look upon the Fields, for they are white already to the Harvest”. -Jesus. HE long, trying journey of Mr. Lee and his companions across the wilderness was ended, and they were within the limits of their appointed field of toil. The whole land was before them, and there was no Lot to divide its inheritance with them. Had there been the work would have been easier and the problem that confronted them less difficult to solve. The great question to be decided was the precise location of their mission. Information was to be obtained and explorations made preparatory to this decision. The country was so large and the sources of information so limited that this was no easy task. Yet time was passing; winter would soon be upon them, and they felt the most anxious solicitude to enter upon the real work for which alone they were in the country before it came. While all felt this solicitude, and most earnestly co-operated with him, yet Mr. Lee, as the responsible superintendent of the work, felt the exigent pressure of the occasion much more severely than did his co-laborers. He must decide at last, and they were only to help him in carrying out that decision. There were no sources of information but his own observations, and the voluntary communications of the gentlemen connected with the Hudson's Bay Company, of whom, for the time being, he and his companions were guests. His plans and purposes were so very different from any conception of theirs as to what the residence of white men among Indian tribes was for that he felt little dependence could be placed on their judgment in the premises, even conceding their kindly feeling towards his professed work-not altogether an easy concession. What to them, and for the purpose for which they were here, as trappers and hunters, might appear as a desirable location, to him and for his purpose might be the most undesirable. A people among whom he might hope to plant a vigorous and permanent Christian work; a people strong and virile enough to give promise of the endurance and ultimate fruitage of the seed he should plant in their hearts, was his first want. But this was not all. Mr. Lee had the prescience of a statesman as well as the zeal of an apostle. He could not but see that future national history was to date from him and from his work. Chris tianity, too, in him and by him was setting up Im manuel's claim to half a continent. And, while in this large sense he was the voice of another Forerunner proclaiming in the wilderness the coming Lord, in a special sense a great Church had intrusted to him her work and fame as the most regnant evangelic force of Christendom in a region larger than forty Palestines, and which, in him, she was pre-empting as her's and her Lord's. What wonder, then, that a decision thus fraught with immeasurable consequences appalled him, or that he should write in his dairy as he contemplated it: "Could I know the identical spot the Lord designs for it, be it even a thousand miles in the interior, it would be a matter of rejoicing. O, my God, direct us to the place where we may best glorify Thee, and be most useful to these degraded red men." Dr. McLoughlin, the superintendent of the in-terests of the Hudson's Bay Company west of the Rocky Mountains, resident at Vancouver, expressed great interest in the question that was so absorbing the attention of Mr. Lee. He was a very intelligent and able man, a giant both in body and mind. Though his opinions had great weight with Mr. Lee, they were not decisive. He listened, meditated, but, remembering that Dr. McLoughlin was the embodiment and representative of a great foreign commercial corporation antago |