The religious societies of London, whose character adorns the English capital, eclipsing its artistic and commercial splendour, chiefly belong to the present century. The London Missionary Society, however, for preaching the Gospel of Christ among the heathen, began as early as 1795. The declaration of the Society was signed at the Castle and Falcon, Aldersgate-street. In the year 1709 was formed, also, the institution by which the present volume is issued--the Religious Tract Society. Commencing with small beginnings, it has, through the prospering hand of God upon its labors, been privileged to proclaim the unsearchable riches of Christ in one hundred and ten languages and dialects; and, in the course of half a century, to circulate its varied messengers of mercy to the vast amount of five hundred millions of copies. Since the conclusion of the eighteenth century, London has undergone an unprecedented change, upon which the limits of this volume will not allow us to touch. The city, which is still swelling every year, in a degree which, if Horace, Walpole were living, would fill him with greater surprise than ever, is really new London. Few of the principal streets exhibit the appearance they did fifty years ago, and the architectural alteration is but a type of the social one. The superior sanitary arrangements, the more efficient police, the better education of most classes of society, the augmented provision for religious instruction and worship, the more decidedly evangelical tone of preaching in the metropolitan pulpits, and the increase of real piety amongst the population, must strike everyone, on even a superficial comparison of the past and present; and when we consider the great change wrought in half a century, it inspires encouragement in relation to the future. The impulse which things have received of late has been so mighty, that there is no calculating the acceleration of their future progress. Thus the remembrance of the past yields advantage, and we pluck hopes, "like beautiful wild flowers from the ruined tombs that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland for the living forehead."--_Coleridge_. On taking a longer reach of comparison, an amount of wonder is inspired not to be adequately expressed. Had some sage in the Roman senate, two thousand years ago, proclaimed that the day would come, when an obscure town, situated on the Thames, a river scarcely known then to the Latin geographer, would vie with the city in which they were assembled on the Tiber, nay, eclipse it, and wax in glory while the other waned, that prediction would have strangely crossed their pride, and would have been indignantly pronounced incredible. Yet that day has come. The British town, then a mere inclosure, containing a few huts, has swelled into a city teeming with a population of above two millions, crowded with public buildings and costly habitations, filled with commerce, wealth, and luxury, the