t of the
militia, by paying for a substitute. Both forms of service are
obligatory upon each of us. We all, if we know anything of Christ and
His love and His power, are bound, by the fact that we do know it, to
tell it to those whom we can reach. You have all got congregations if
you would look for them. There is not a Christian man or woman in
this world who has not somebody that he or she can speak to more
efficiently than anybody else can. You have your friends, your
relations, the people with whom you are brought into daily contact,
if you have no wider congregations. You cannot all stand up and
preach in the sense in which I do so. But this is not the meaning of
the word in the New Testament. It does not imply a pulpit, nor a set
discourse, nor a gathered multitude; it simply implies a herald's
task of proclaiming. Everybody who has found Jesus Christ can say, 'I
have found the Messiah,' and everybody who knows Him can say, 'Come
and hear, and I will tell what the Lord hath done for my soul.' Since
you can do it you are bound to do it; and if you are one of 'the dumb
dogs, lying down and loving to slumber,' of whom there are such
crowds paralysing the energies and weakening the witness of every
Church upon earth, then you are criminally and suicidally oblivious
of an obligation which is a joy and a privilege as much as a duty.

Oh, brethren! I do want to lay on the consciences of all you
Christian people this, that nothing can absolve you from the
obligation of personal, direct speech to some one of Christ and His
salvation. Unless you can say, 'I have not refrained my lips, O Lord!
Thou knowest,' there frowns over against you an unfulfilled duty, the
neglect of which is laming your spiritual activity, and drying up the
sources of your spiritual strength.

But, then, besides this direct effort, there are the other indirect
methods in which this commandment can be discharged, by sympathy and
help of all sorts, about which I need say no more here.

Jesus Christ's ideal of His Church was an active propaganda, an army
in which there were no non-combatants, even although some of the
combatants might be detailed to remain in the camp and look after the
stuff, and others of them might be in the forefront of the battle.
But is that ideal ever fulfilled in any of our churches? How many
amongst us there are who do absolutely nothing in the shape of
Christian work! Some of us seem to think that the voluntary principle
on