ed harvests. One who, at the outset,
could not brook delay in making his first decision, and wait for God to
make known His will in His own way and time, would not on the field have
had long patience as a husbandman, waiting for the precious fruit of his
toil, or have met with quietness of spirit the thousand perplexing
problems of work among the heathen!

Moreover the conviction grew that, could he have followed the lot, his
choice would have been a life-mistake. His mind, at that time, was bent
upon the East Indies as a field. Yet all subsequent events clearly
showed that God's choice for him was totally different. His repeated
offers met as repeated refusals, and though on subsequent occasions he
acted most deliberately and solemnly, no open door was found, but he was
in every case kept from following out his honest purpose. Nor could the
lot be justified as an indication of his _ultimate_ call to the mission
field, for the purpose of it was definite, namely, to ascertain, not
whether _at some period of his life_ he was to go forth, but whether _at
that time_ he was to go or stay. The whole after-life of George Muller
proved that God had for him an entirely different plan, which He was not
ready yet to reveal, and which His servant was not yet prepared to see
or follow. If any man's life ever was a plan of God, surely this life
was; and the Lord's distinct, emphatic leading, when made known, was not
in this direction. He had purposed for George Muller a larger field than
the Indies, and a wider witness than even the gospel message to heathen
peoples. He was 'not suffered' to go into 'Bithynia' because 'Macedonia'
was waiting for his ministry.

With increasing frequency, earnestness, and minuteness, was George
Muller led to put before God, in prayer, all matters that lay upon his
mind. This man was to be peculiarly an example to believers as an
_intercessor;_ and so God gave him from the outset a very _simple,
childlike disposition_ toward Himself. In many things he was in
knowledge and in strength to outgrow childhood and become a man, for it
marks immaturity when we err through ignorance and are overcome through
weakness. But in faith and in the filial spirit, he always continued to
be a little child. Mr. J. Hudson Taylor well reminds us that while in
nature the normal order of growth is from childhood to manhood and so to
maturity, in _grace_ the true development is perpetually backward toward
the cradle: we must