THE SPORTS. JUDGES AT THE FINISH

CROSSING THE PONTOON BRIDGE

NAVAL LYDDITE GUN FIRING ON THE BOER POSITION

CAMP OF HIGHLAND LIGHT INFANTRY

CONFERENCE OF 1900

REV. JOHN G. PATON

REV. JAMES STEWART

BY JAMES M. WHITON

I

N May, 1792, in the back parlor of a widow in an English village, a dozen men, whose leader was a cobbler, William Carey, a name now illustrious, organized the first missionary society which succeeded in rekindling in the modern Church the zeal of the early Church for the evangelization of the non-Christian world. Sixty-four dollars was the total sum to which their offerings for so vast an undertaking amounted. Fifteen million dollars are now annually devoted by the Protestant Churches of Christendom to extend the beginning made that day-a sum annually increasing with the increase of opportunities.

Among the sequels to that village parlor meeting was the formation in 1795 of the London Missionary Society, and in 1810 of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, societies still in the lead to-day. Six young men desirous of entering the missionary field addressed a memorial in 1810 to the General Association of the Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts for counsel and encouragement. This the Association was not loth to give, but prudence was thought to require the striking of two names off the list "for fear of alarming the Association with too large a number." To-day the Protestant Churches of Europe and America are sustaining a missionary force of more than fourteen thousand of their own countrymen and countrywomen, besides four times as many native assistants.

In 1808-09 the pen of one of the brightest wits of the time was heaping ridicule and scorn, in the Edinburgh" Review," upon the "little detachments of maniacs" who had been seized with the "delirious" idea of converting Hin

dus to Christianity. In 1871-72 the British Secretary of State for India said in an official report: "The Government of India cannot but acknowledge the great obligations under which it is laid by the benevolent exertions made by missionaries . . . preparing them [the natives] to be in every way better men and better citizens of the great empire in which they dwell." In 1812 the petition of the American Board for a charter of incorporation was, on its first presentation, rejected by the Massachusetts Legislature. The main objection to it, that "it was designed. to afford the means of exporting religion, whereas there was none to spare from among ourselves," was answered by declaring that "religion was a commodity of which the more we exported, the more we had remaining." Of this the records of this missionary century have furnished steadily accumulating proofs in the expansion and development of the American Churches.

This brief retrospect is reassuring to some, corrective to others, who on the threshold of the twentieth century of

RT. REV. WILLIAM RIDLEY