"Here was a young woman of extraordinary beauty of person, of still more noticeable symmetry and completeness of mental endowment, sweetness and nobility of disposition, brightness and elasticity of temperament; quickly, keenly sympathetic with others' joys and sorrows--but who had never known a grief of her own; converted in infancy, reared in one of the happiest of earnest Christian homes, and favored with as fine social and educational advantages as the country affords; with too much sense to be affected by mere 'romance,' yet deeply alive to all the poetry alike in literature and in real life; and withal, from early childhood, with a spiritual imagination exquisitely alive to the realness and the nearness of unseen things, and the all-controlling sweep of the motives springing therefrom;--rarely does one meet a young person better fitted at once to enjoy and to adorn what is best in American Christian homes. At the age of twenty-four she marries a young man just out of the seminary, and goes forth with him beyond the frontiers of civilization, into the very heart of savage Indian tribes. What a sacrifice; what a venture; what certain-coming solicitudes, perils, cares, deprivations, hardships, loneliness, and mountainous discouragements! And there for the short period of less than five years she lives, when suddenly the young missionary is left alone, longing for the 'touch of a vanished hand and the sound of a voice that is still.' "Now, a case like this must set one to studying over again what, after all, is the true philosophy of life, and what, on the whole, is the wisest economy of personal forces in the church's work of Christianizing the world. As helping to a right answer, let us note a few facts:-- "1. It costs to save a lost world; and nothing is wasted that serves well that end. God himself has given for this purpose the choicest, the highest, and the best which it was possible for even him to give.