he might see, one by one, the young men who came, applying for a situation, using the opportunity to inquire into their spiritual state! Only eternity can reveal the good wrought in this unpretentious, unheralded way.

The whole history both of the founder of the Association and of the society he founded illustrates some of the great principles of world-wide missions.

For example, the sovereignty of the Divine leadership. Mr. Williams was of humble origin, the son of a farmer, and reared amid rural scenes. His early life was spent in Somersetshire, where he was apprenticed to a Bridgewater draper, and was converted at sixteen. In 1841, at the age of twenty, he came to London, and became an employee of Hitchcock & Rogers, in St. Paul's Churchyard. In 1853 he married Mr. Hitchcock's daughter, and ten years later became the head of this prosperous business house.

No one could have foreseen that this humble farmer's lad was destined to become one of the greatest benefactors of the race, and to start in motion one of the greatest streams of benign influence that has ever blessed the world. He had no transcendent native gifts or acquired culture. But he was led of God. And when the idea of this primal association dawned on his mind he had no thought beyond the horizon of that mercantile house. When the conception of a broader work naturally was suggested, he had neither social prestige nor money to carry it out. But God gave him favor with the head of the firm, who helped him with advice and, so far as needful, with money, until the inherent reasonableness and usefulness of the plan

gave it the momentum to carry it forward; and since then it has been as a mighty river whose flood could not be restrained.

What an example also of the foreordained fitness of God's workman for his work! Mr. Williams, tho not a man of great mind or large education, had a good average measure of faculty, and refinement of manners; but, above all, a winning spirit and a sunny face. He was an attractive and even radiant personality. His smile was a benediction and his countenance a sermon in itself. No one could know him without both admiring and loving him. Simplicity, sincerity, humility, combined with cordiality, love, and common sense to constitute an exceptional character. To the last he was a center of attraction to young men, and kept his own youthful feeling, genial humor, and profound interest in others, and especially the younger men of society.

Again, he supplies an example of the vast importance of a single step.

All this world-wide movement, now having over seven thousand five hundred branches, and reaching round the world and from pole to pole, depended upon obeying a divinely implanted impulse to speak to another young man about his soul! Had he disobeyed that heavenly vision, all the rest of his possible life work would have at least been delayed, if not forfeited. As it was, he saw one step lead to another, until, after more than sixty years, he beheld a work so astonishing in growth that it led a well-known peer, closely associated with Sir George in many of his labors, to write to a contemporary:

"Few men have lived to see the jubilee of a work they founded, and

fewer still have lived beyond the diamond jubilee. When we think of the ramifications of the work now being carried on by over seven thousand five hundred branches of the Young Men's Christian Association all over the world, I feel justified in saying that few men have been enabled, in a single lifetime, to originate and develop so great an organization. He has lived to see a branch of the Association firmly planted in all the big centers throughout the British empire, including India, and he has also laid the foundation of a great work in China and Japan."

Still further, we have an illustration of what one man may do to serve his race.

How Sir George "served his own. generation by the will of God," none need be told who are familiar with his career. He was active throughout all his life in promoting the Association, and helped it extend until it thus encircled the civilized world. From the original organization of drygoods' clerks, the society spread not only to other young men in London, but throughout the United Kingdom, and then to other countries. The first societies in America were started in Boston and Montreal in 1851, seven years after the start in London. The first of the annual British conferences was held in 1858, and the first Association building was erected in 1866. From 1863 to 1885 Mr. Williams was treasurer of the organization, and in 1885 he became its president.

But the Young Men's Christian Association did not absorb all Sir George's time and attention. Notwithstanding his large business engagements, he took an active interest. in the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the London City Mission, the Sunday-school Union, the

Bishop of London's Diocesan Council, the Young Women's Christian Association, and numerous other noble

causes.

"Always at the front in the

cause of temperance, rescue work, societies for the blind, deaf, and dumb, he was most happy when promoting the temporal and eternal welfare of the people. His name is inseparably associated with Exeter Hall, at one time in danger of becoming a place of questionable amusement, but rescued largely by his efforts, and now the headquarters of the Young.Men's Christian Association, and preserved for the use of religious and philanthropic institutions.

"His motto was, 'It is not how little, but how much we can do for others.' This he carried out with strong conviction, and as a colleague of the late Lord Shaftesbury and Mr. D. L. Moody and others, he was ever the friend and helper of the humblest."

It is not generally known that he organized in his mercantile house, and among the hundreds of clerks, a noble missionary association, known as "St. Paul's Missionary Society," which in January, 1893, celebrated its jubilee, and was therefore as old as the original Young Men's Christian Association, formed among the clerks in the same house. At that anniversary it was the privilege of the writer to give the main address. The report then showed that the society had daily morning prayers, a Bible class, and evangelistic meetings; and systematicaly collected funds for the furtherance of God's Kingdom at home and abroad. At regular and special meetings, missionary addresses are heard, and the contributions of the jubilee year were over

$825, divided among eight societies. It maintains a missionary library.

It must not be forgotten also that Sir George Williams was an example of how a Christian disciple may cultivate fellowship with all believers.

He was himself a strong and conscientious Anglican in his church connections, yet he always sunk all sectarian feeling in a large and liberal. charity.

With Sir George's private and domestic life we are not now concerned. Suffice to say, that here as elsewhere he shone. Genial, loving, unselfish, considerate, he was a model husband and father, and was nowhere loved so much as at home, where he was known best. With a large and princely income, he lived a simple life, surrendering personal luxury that he might the more alleviate poverty and misery. Up to the last he retained his mental faculties, his heart as warm and his manners as kindly as ever.

His last public appearance was in February last, at the sixty-first anniversary of the London Central Young Men's Christian Association. In April he was accorded a great reception in Paris, on the occasion the occasion of the jubilee conference of the Young Men's Christian Association's World Alliance. In responding to the enthusiastic welcome, he said:

"My last legacy-and it is a precious one is the Young Men's Christian Association. I leave it to you, to beloved young men of many countries, to carry on and extend. I hope you will be as happy in the work as I have been, and more successful; for this will mean blessedness to your own souls and to the souls of multitudes of others."

As the health of the veteran founder was failing, lest the work might be weakened at its center, and a slacken

ing of effort take place in remote parts of the world-wide field, Lord Kinnaird, at the unanimous request of the National Council, became associated with Sir George Williams, as deputy-president; and Mr. Howard Williams, his son, consented to aid the work as chairman of the British Committee and British and Colonial Union of Young Men's Christian Associations, whereby his honored father's name and influence will be perpetuated through his son's relations to the entire work of the home field, and of foreign countries.

On October 11th Sir George celebrated his eighty-fourth birthday, and his birthday message forwarded on that date to the Associations of the National Union urged that "increased attention should be given to making the primary agencies of the Associations more efficient for the purpose for which the work exists." Notwithstanding advanced age, Sir George Williams continued to the last to take the keenest interest in all that concerns the highest well-being of young men; and accounts of work done by Associations throughout the world were supplied to him week by week, and his inquiries were always eager as to the progress being made.

The grandest life is not grandly laid out except in the secret counsels of God. The most heroic men have been unconsciously heroic, and it is not infrequent that only future ages. reveal their greatness. After all, one of life's greatest lessons is that which rings out whenever "Big Ben " tolls the hour from Westminster Chimes :

"Lord, through this hour Be thou my guide! For by Thy power

No foot shall slide."

might that I would be glad of a sight of their souls, and would be very gentle with the treasure.

If the unconverted African hides his soul or has mislaid it, the converted African, on the contrary, flaunts it. It is like his robe and the ring on his hand, and the sound of his music and dancing. From the door of his hut he calls: "Come and rejoice with me, for I have found my soul!" And in the gloom of his dwelling his soul shines like a star. It is a cup of blessing and the wine of life. Only God can explain the miracle of resurrection in an African soul: the joy where there has been such misery; the innocence where there has been such vice; the native youth where there has been such age-old iniquity; the immediate access to God where there has been such estrangement. There is a kind of intimacy between God and the reconciled African soul which makes the missionary feel now and then a twinge of the elder brother's jealousy as tho left out of some hap

py secret.

An African Preacher

I have a friend, Ndenga, a licentiate, and such a "spoiled" child of God you never knew. It seems that everything that he asks of God he receives, and with every day comes a satisfactory Christmas stocking. On his having expressed a wish for at teacher of English, God spared no expense and provided the writer, bringing her all the way across the sea and through the forest to satisfy the desire of his child, who duly gives thanks before each lesson. I used to walk to his hut in the evening, certain that he would be busy about a meal direct from the hand of God,

and ready to give me an account of his exceeding success as a fisherman -an especial ordering of Providence. When the mission assigned him to Corisco (which is a long way from Lolodorf), he went away singing, altho he loved his people and us. Away down the hill he went in the early dawn, singing in his joyous falsetto, "Work, for the night is coming!" There is a great community of property between God and Ndenga, but if God denies Ndenga no good thing, neither does Ndenga deny God anything. He once told me that if he but knew music he would use it to no personal or earthly glory, but to the glory of God.

A Hammock Carrier

Besides this essential gaiety there is in the soul of the converted African a sort of childlike wonder. Looking on the world with new vision, it is seen to be very good. A Christian, Bekali, one of my hammock carriers, put this definitely into words when I stopped the hammock one day to pluck a flower. I asked him if he did not think that it was beautiful, and he explained that before his conversion he would not have known that it was beautiful, “but now," said he, “I see― and wonder!" I have seen that wonder in more eyes than his. But never have I seen more brooding tenderness than in the eyes of this Bekali. He broods over Africa-his heart's desire and prayer for her is that she may be saved. At intervals he disappears into the interior, pressed by this passion, and when he emerges and appears again at the station in his old white undershirt and his loin-cloth, the missionaries gather to hear his account of the hundreds who have heard