you can find a million calls that have been just the answer of men to the great call of God for volunteers. And God surely values the volunteer above the conscript. Isaiah did not wait for any special coercive call. "Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me." That call was enough to cover him, and he answered it. There is so much work to be done that God cannot go marching through the world looking for individuals, performing new miracles by which each individual is to be thaumaturgically led up to his particular work. God's general way has been to picture before the eyes of His sons the work to be done and to wait for their hearts to leap in response, as Isaiah's leaped: "Lord, let me have a share in this work 'Here am I; send me.'"
Men are indispensable to God to put meaning into the words in which He tries to tell His message to men. Words have no meaning of their own. Words mean only as much as one man puts into them, or another man takes out of them. The meaning of the word does not come from the word; it comes from some life in which the word gets incarnated, or from some other life which interprets the word. What would the word "friend" signify to a man who had never had one? What does "tenderness" mean to one who has never seen a mother and her child? Or
