As if the comfort and convenience of "the workers," and not the danger and misery of the people, were to fix the times of such effort! "But the people will not come," is even now pleaded as an excuse for the omission or abandonment of any imaginable attempt to do good.

As if the people's general disinclination for anything that has to do with God were not the precise reason for His wish to "send out" His servants! "Such a plan would never succeed here," is an almost invariable excuse made for not undertaking anything new.

The General was never blind to differences between this and that locality and population.

But he insisted that no plan that could be devised by those on any given spot, and especially no plan that has manifestly been blessed and used by God elsewhere should be dismissed without proper, earnest trial.
"But that has never been done, or has never done well here," seemed to him rather a reason for trying it with, perhaps, some little modification than for leaving a plan untried.

The inexorable law to which he insisted that everything should bend was that nothing can excuse inactivity and want of enterprise where souls are perishing.