In several respects there is a marked contrast in the position of ministers and missionaries. Ministers labour in their own language, among their own people, amidst home surroundings and associations; while missionaries have to part with loved relatives and to betake themselves to a foreign land, where they have to learn a foreign language, often languages, at the cost of much time and of wearying application, have for years, as in the greater part of India, to bear a severe climate, are called to prosecute their work among a strange, an unsympathetic, and sometimes a hostile people, and, what is felt by family people to be the greatest trial of all, they have to send their children to England, and to live separate from them for years. Some of these trials missionaries share with their fellow-countrymen, who from secular motives go to foreign lands, but others are peculiar to their vocation. While I mention the trials of a missionary career I cannot forget the trials of ministerial life at home. We should require to shut our eyes to patent facts if we were to ignore the privations many excellent men are called to endure, and the varied difficulties they have to encounter from the character and circumstances of the people among whom they labour, from the peculiarities of our times, and from the abiding qualities of human nature, as it is now constituted. Missionaries are not rich, but they have adequate support, for good or evil are not dependent for it on the goodwill of those to whom they minister, and receive it as regularly as if it came from an endowment. With children sent home for education they have times of great pressure, but much has been done to aid them in meeting this additional expense. Viewed merely as to the comfort of living, and ease of mind as to support, the advantages are not all on the side of the home minister. To counteract the advantages of the missionary's position to which I have referred, it must be remembered the average career of service in India is short--some returning very soon, and others after a few years. Those who return after years spent abroad, and yet in the prime of life, are rightly expected to enter the list of the home ministry; but the work they have left and that on which they are entering are so different, that the mental habits acquired in the one are felt to be a poor preparation for, and often even an obstacle to, efficiency in the other. [Sidenote: SPIRITUAL CHARACTER INDISPENSABLE.]