The work to be done in 1820 was formidable and the means seemingly contemptible. What could a handful of young men and women accomplish, coming from a distant land whose very existence was discredited, to an empire whose political and religious systems had been fossilized for centuries, where schools, books and Bibles were unknown? For these inexperienced youth from the land of the Pilgrims, reared in the air of civil and religious liberty, trained to hate all despotism, political or ecclesiastical, and to love a free press, free schools, and absolute freedom of conscience, to attempt to change public opinion and renovate society, to reform the Oriental churches and liberalize Islam, seemed a forlorn and desperate venture. Seventy years have passed. Sultans have risen and fallen. Patriarchs and Bishops remain, but Turkey is not what it was in 1820, and can never retrograde to those days of darkness. That little evergreen tree planted by Pliny Fisk's grave in the suburbs of a town of eight thousand population has grown to be a stately cypress tree in the very center of a city of ninety thousand people. Overlooking it is a female seminary, a large church edifice, a Sunday school hall, a printing house, which sends out more than twenty millions of pages annually. That little iron door to the east opens into a vault containing thirteen thousand electrotype plates of various editions of the Arabic Scriptures. Within a radius of two miles are four Christian colleges, seven female seminaries, sixty boys' day schools, thirty-one girls' schools, seventeen printing presses, and four large hospitals. The boys' and girls' schools belong to the Protestants, Catholics, Greeks, Muslims and Jews, and sixteen thousand children are under instruction. Scores of Muslim girls are as familiar with the Old Testament prophecies with regard to Christ as are our Sunday school children at home. Bibles, hymn books and Christian literature, as well as scientific, historical and educational works, are scattered over the city and throughout the land. Young Syrian women, formerly shut up in ignorance and illiteracy, now enjoy the instruction of home libraries and useful periodicals, and even carry on discussions in the public press and write books of decided merit.... THE OUTCOME. I. The Gospel has triumphed in securing in a great measure to the people of Turkey that most precious treasure, religious liberty and freedom of conscience. In 1820, every Ottoman subject had a right to remain in his own sect and to think as his fathers thought before him. Muslim could remain Muslim, Greek remain Greek, Armenian Armenian, and Maronite Maronite. Each sect was a walled enclosure with gates bolted and barred, and the only possible egress from any was into the fold of Islam.