In order to complete the history of this organizing era in the church, we must return to the humble but memorable figure of Samuel J. Mills. It was his characteristic word to one of his fellows, as they stood ready to leave the seclusion of the seminary for active service, "You and I, brother, are little men, but before we die, our influence must be felt on the other side of the world." No one claimed that he was other than a "little man," except as he was filled and possessed with a great thought, and that the thought that filled the mind of Christ--the thought of the Coming Age and of the Reign of God on earth.[256:1] While his five companions were sailing for the remotest East, Mills plunged into the depth of the western wilderness, and between 1812 and 1815, in two toilsome journeys, traversed the Great Valley as far as New Orleans, deeply impressed everywhere with the famine of the word, and laboring, in cooeperation with local societies at the East, to provide for the universal want by the sale or gift of Bibles and the organization of Bible societies. After his second return he proposed the organization of the American Bible Society, which was accomplished in 1816. But already this nobly enterprising mind was intent on a new plan, of most far-reaching importance, not original with himself, but, on the contrary, long familiar to those who studied the extension of the church and pondered the indications of God's providential purposes. The earliest attempt in America toward the propagation of the gospel in foreign lands would seem to have been the circular letter sent out by the neighbor pastors, Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles, in the year 1773, from Newport, chief seat of the slave-trade, asking contributions for the education of two colored men as missionaries to their native continent of Africa. To many generous minds at once, in this era of great Christian enterprises, the thought recurred of vast blessings to be wrought for the Dark Continent by the agency of colored men Christianized, civilized, and educated in America. Good men reverently hoped to see in this triumphant solution of the mystery of divine providence in permitting the curse of African slavery, through the cruel greed of men, to be inflicted on the American republic. In 1816 Mills successfully pressed upon the Presbyterian "Synod of New York and New Jersey" a plan for educating Christian men of color for the work of the gospel in their fatherland. That same year, in cooeperation with an earnest philanthropist, Dr. Robert Finley, of New Jersey, he aided in the instituting of the American Colonization Society. In 1817 he sailed, in company with a colleague, the Rev. Ebenezer Burgess, to explore the coast of Africa in search of the best site for a colony. On the return voyage he died, and his body was committed to the sea: a "little man," to whom were granted only five years of what men call "active life"; but