Let me ask the members of Congress, Do you
recognise these sentences at all?"
_Eugene Stock, at Shrewsbury Church Congress._

IT was only a common thing. A girl, very ill, and in terrible pain, who
turned to us for help. We could do nothing for her. Her people resorted
to heathen rites. They prepared her to meet the fierce god they thought
was waiting to snatch her away.

We went again and again, but she suffered so that one could not say
much, it did not seem any use. The last time we went, the crisis had
passed; she would live, they told us with joy. They were eager to
listen to us now. "Tell us all about your Way!" clamoured the women,
speaking together, and very loud. "Tell us the news from beginning to
end!" But, alas! they could take in very little. One whole new Truth was
too much for them. "Never mind," they consoled us, "come every day, and
then what you say will take hold of our hearts." And I had to tell them
we were leaving that evening, and could not come "every day."

[Illustration: Is not the contrast good? The old woman so intelligent,
the baby so inane. She made a picture sitting there, in her crimson
edged seeley, with her dark old face showing up against the darker wall.
She is one of the many we have missed by coming so slowly and so late.
"How can I change now?" she says.]

The girl turned her patient face towards us. She had smiled at the Name
of Jesus, and it seemed as if down in the depths of her weakness she had
listened when we spoke before, and tried to understand. Now she looked
puzzled and troubled, and the women all asked, "Why?"

There, in that crowded, hot little room, a sense of the unequal
distribution of the Bread of Life came over us. The front rows of the
Five Thousand are getting the loaves and the fishes over and over again,
till it seems as though they have to be bribed and besought to accept
them, while the back rows are almost forgotten. _Is it that we are so
busy with the front rows, which we can see, that we have no time for the
back rows out of sight?_ But is it fair? Is it what Jesus our Master
intended? _Can it be really called fair?_

The women looked very reproachful. Then one of them said, looking up at
me, "You say this is very important. If it is so very important, why did
you not come before? You say you will come back again if you can, but
how can we be sure that nothing will happen to stop you? We are, some of
us, very old; we may