When the sowing time comes, the seed must be put in the furrows—it is now or never. When the harvest ripens, the sickle must be immediately put at work; again it is now or never—ripeness borders on rottenness, and the crop which is not reaped is soon not worth reaping. So the world-field presents its crises. When the soil lies fallow and waits for the sower, if he goes not forth with his seed, he loses his chance; and, when the fields are white with harvest, to wait is to forfeit both his chance and his crop. And, in some part of the wide field, it is always a crisis: either the sower or the reaper is in demand, and sometimes both, for sometimes God’s harvests come so fast that the ploughman overtakes the reaper, and the treader of grapes him that soweth the seed.

 Arthur T. Pierson, The Divine Enterprise of Missions (New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1891), 115.