Levi Parsons and Pliny Fisk, writing from Smyrna to the Board rooms in February, 1820, said, “In all the populous Catholic and Mohammedan countries on the north and south side of the Mediterranean there is not a single Protestant missionary. In all the Turkish empire, containing perhaps twenty million souls, not one missionary station is permanently occupied and but a single missionary besides ourselves.” This one man did not long remain. Besides the English work among the Jews and Turks in Constantinople and Palestine, the evangelization of the Turkish empire was left from the first to the American Board. In later years the Disciples of Christ and the Seventh Day Adventists have sent a few missionaries into the country, but their work has been almost exclusively among the Protestants and has resulted only in dividing churches already organized. The Church Missionary Society of England has had some work in Bagdad, and a Scotch society in Aden and the Reformed Church of the United States has recently begun operations upon the southern coast of Arabia. With a few other minor exceptions, the Turkish empire north of Syria has been generally conceded to be the distinctive mission field of the American Board of Missions. When the division of fields took place in 1870 between the American Board and the newly organized Presbyterian Board of Missions, southern Syria and Persia were assigned to that Board, while the American Board retained northern Syria and all the rest of Turkey. In European Turkey the same Board is in sole charge of all the evangelical work for and among the Bulgarians south of the Balkans, the Methodist Episcopal Board of the United States having a work among the same people north of the Balkans. Thus Macedonia and Bulgaria south of the Balkans, Asia Minor, Armenia, Koordistan, northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia are left the sole field of the American Board, with the few exceptions mentioned above. This has put upon it a responsibility and placed before it an opportunity such as few mission agencies in modern times have had to face. XIV. BEGINNINGS IN REFORM