heresy, such as the Arian Bishop Ulfilas, by whom were converted to the faith those mighty Gothic tribes which formed the first elements of European Christendom, and whose deeds Augustine regarded, notwithstanding their errors, as the glory of the Christian name.[28] It may be by teachers immersed in superstitions as barbarous, as completely repudiated by the civilized world, as were those of the famous Roman Pontiff who sent the first missionaries to these shores. Sometimes the change has been effected by the sight of a single picture, as when Vladimir of Russia was shown the representation of the Last Judgment; sometimes by a dream or a sign, known only to those who were affected by it--such as the vision of the Cross which arrested Constantine on his way to Rome, or changed Colonel Gardiner’s dissolute youth to a manhood of strict and sober piety. Sometimes it has been by the earnest preaching of missionaries, confessedly ill-educated and ill-prepared for the work which they had to accomplish; sometimes by the slow infiltration of Christian literature and Christian civilization; the grandeur, in old days, of Rome and Constantinople; in our days, the superiority of European genius, the spread of English commerce, the establishment of just laws, pure homes, merciful institutions. We do not say that all these means are equally good or equally efficacious. St. Paul, in his argument with Agrippa, did not mean to say that “almost and altogether,” that “much and little,” were the same; he did not mean that it was equally good that Christ should be preached in strife or in good-will; he did not mean that a good end justified bad means, or that we may do evil that good may come; he did not mean to justify the falsehoods which are profanely called pious frauds, nor the persecutions which have been set on foot by those who thought to do God service, or the attempt to stimulate artificial excitement by undermining the moral strength and manly independence of the human spirit. God forbid! But what he meant, and what we mean with him, is this: In true Christian missions, in the conversion of human souls from dead works, from sin, from folly, from barbarism, from hardness, from selfishness, to goodness and purity, justice and truth, the field is so vast, the diversity of character in men and nations is so infinite, the enterprise so arduous, the aspects of Divine truth so various, that it is on the one hand a duty for each one to follow out that particular means of conversion which seems to him most efficacious, and on the other hand to acquiesce in the converging use of many means which cannot, by the nature of the case, appear equally efficacious to every one. Such a toleration, such an adoption of the different modes of carrying on what John Bunyan called “the Holy War,” “the Siege of Man’s Soul,” must indeed be always controlled by the determination to keep the high, paramount, universal end always in view; by the vigilant endeavor