What is that but the professed disciple who does not believe, or takes no part in missions! It would perhaps be harsh and uncharitable to say that such are not believers; but, if so, they are so choked with cares of this world, deceitfulness of riches and lust of other things, that they bring no fruit to perfection. Life everywhere, in plant and animal, shows its maturity and perfection by the power to beget other life like itself. And hence the disciple that does not make disciples, the Christian that has no passion for souls and no power to win souls, who has no work for Christ, who is not himself a seed of God to drop into the soil and yield a crop of other holy lives, should candidly ask whether indeed he is himself a child of God? The new life of God in man is never fully developed until it becomes life-producing, life-begetting. Where there is no seed, there is probably no genuine divine plant.

 Arthur T. Pierson, The Divine Enterprise of Missions (New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1891), 118–119.