Nothing is more difficult than to view, in the nakedness of mere truth, any object remote from personal observation, which has once filled the imagination with images of vastness and mystery. Thus it often happens that benevolent schemes are robbed of their fair chance of success by the fond illusions which are suffered to swell out an empty bulk, so as to hide from view the real difficulties that ought to be deliberately met. And thus it is usual for the timid to amuse their inaction by contemplating spectral forms of danger or obstruction that exist only in the mind. Hindrances and impossibilities may even yield a sort of delight to the imagination, by the aspect of greatness and terror they assume; at least while we resolve to view them only at a distance. And in such cases he must be singularly destitute of poetic feeling, or singularly conscientious and abstinent in the use of language, who, in describing the proposed enterprise, does not impart to the mere facts a form and coloring of unreal greatness and wonder. This sort of illusiveness and exaggeration unquestionably belongs to the subject of Christian missions to China. Who does not feel that the high numbers of its dense and far-spread population, amounting perhaps to more than a sixth part of the human family, and the yet unpenetrated veil of mystery which hangs over the origin of the people, and over their actual condition, and even over the geography of the country; and then the singularity of the national character, and the anomalous construction of the language, altogether raise a mist of obscurity which rests in the way of the inquirer who asks—Is the attempt to introduce Christianity among these millions of our brethren utterly vain and visionary? The natural exaggerations which infest this subject have indeed been sensibly reduced within the last few years: twenty years ago cautious and sagacious Protestants would have thought themselves bound, in deference to common sense, to deride the idea of converting China to the faith of Europe. What the _De propaganda_, with its store of accommodating measures might attempt, none who must adhere to the guileless methods of Christian instruction would undertake: or even if an enterprise of this sort were commenced, it must be allowed a date of five hundred years for achieving any considerable success! But better information, and the actual accomplishment of the initiatory process, must now, by the least sanguine minds, be deemed greatly to have lessened the improbabilities of such an attempt, and to have shortened the date of our Christian hopes. What has been accomplished of late by the assiduity, and the intellectual vigor, and the moral intrepidity of a few individuals, has turned the beam of calculation; and it is now rational to talk of that which, very recently, might not have been named, except among visionaries.