A further proof how widespread is this notion will appear from a recent article in the March number of the _Missionary Review of the World_ for the year 1892. The writer states it as frankly as words and repetition can express it, quite unconscious that there is anything wrong about it. The article is on “Missionary Fellowship.” It is not written by a missionary; no missionary could possibly write such rank nonsense. This is what he says: “Suffering, after all, is the test of missionary character.... It is not so much what the missionary does as what he is, and what he is can be shown only by _suffering_ for the Gospel’s sake.” He goes on to say that it is Judson’s and his wife’s sufferings in Burma, more than their missionary labours, that “canonise them as martyrs of modern missions”; and there is a good deal more “high falutin’” of the same kind. To my mind this is a false and absurd ideal—mischievously false. Men have gone on thinking it, and occasionally saying it, until they fail to see the falsity and absurdity; but if we think for a moment we must admit that the Bible tells us that every missionary’s _work_, every Christian’s _work_, must be the test of the man, and not his sufferings, and gives no countenance whatever to this error. Our sufferings are matters for which we are not personally answerable in any way, except as we may cause them ourselves; otherwise they are beyond our control, and can be therefore no test of the man. Judson would have been one of the very greatest of missionaries, all the same, if he had never seen the inside of a Burmese prison. His lifetime of earnest evangelistic labours, his Burmese Bible, his two dictionaries, his Burmese grammar, his other precious literary remains, and the many souls saved through his instrumentality, and long since gone to glory—these are the enduring monuments that entitle him to our reverence, and constitute that bright example which some of us are humbly trying to follow. His sufferings were indeed severe, but to dwell upon them, and laud them as being of far more importance than his work, not only does an injustice to the memory of the man himself, but it feeds a false ideal, and keeps from view the real purpose for which we go to the heathen. The sooner we give up this nonsense _entirely_, and take our stand upon truth and common sense, the sooner shall we find the sound, and only sure basis for that increase of missionary enthusiasm, which is so much needed at the present time. So long as our enthusiasm is based upon any such shadowy and precarious foundation as the sufferings of missionaries, whether supposed or real, so long will the results disappoint us.