Visible Result

We ought to know better than to despair over the visible result of spiritual endeavor. During a recent visit to Johannesburg I spent a day at one of the gold-mines. There was immense activity, gangs of workers, clouds of dust, hissing steam, deafening stamps, heaps of quartz, torrents of water and cauldrons of slime; but I came away without having seen a single speck of gold. The engineer touched the bottom of a turbid stream, and exclaimed, “There is a particle!” It was however, as invisible to me as the same metal usually is on the collection-plate. Yet, when on the return journey our ship anchored at Southampton, we discharged boxes of gold dust to the tune of a million dollars. Thus to-day our evangelical work proceeds with noise of machinery, smoke and stir, sweat and blood, and a thousand things that are trivial and trying to the carnal eye, but the practical spiritual gain is often unseen.