People are apt to look scoffingly at the man with a mission, but it is the men and the women with missions who have in fact made the world what it is to-day. “A crank,” said some wit, “is a little thing that makes revolutions.” The saying is as true as it was in the times of Jesus Christ, that God has “chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” If there is one word in our language more misunderstood than any other, it is the little word “Faith.” We have been told by the cynical that faith is the capacity for believing that which we know to be untrue, and the misinterpretation of this term by the orthodox clergy is responsible for the derision which has been cast upon it. Worst of all sinners within the fold of the Church has been the evangelical contingent. “Believe,” they tell us, “all the dry-as-dust dogmas of orthodox theology, and you will win eternal salvation.” This is not, we may be sure, the sense in which Jesus used the word. Neither is it the sense in which, in a magnificently eloquent passage, the word was employed by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he spoke of those who “through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions; quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, and turned to flight the armies of the aliens.” The faith of Jesus and the faith of his apostles and followers is the faith that implies and includes the power to achieve. It is what we call in the ordinary language of the day “self-confidence,” but it is not the confidence in the _lower_ but in the _higher_ self; it is the confidence which comes of the conscious placing of ourselves _en rapport_ with what Prentice Mulford called “the Infinite Life” and the “Divine Source.” This power is the secret of all great achievement. The _faith_ of the orthodox, on the other hand, corresponds to the _credulity_ of the man in the street. It is the will-o’-the-wisp that leads fools to sacrifice the reality for a chimera. It was in condemnation and in ridicule of such folly as this that Omar Khayyám bade his friends “take the cash and let the credit go.” It was in the spirit of this true self-confidence and self-reliance that Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland entered upon the daring project of their life’s work. It was this spirit of faith that enabled them to carry it at length to a triumphant conclusion—successful in spite of those imperfections inevitably incidental to a work of the kind, achieved under the defective conditions of present-day humanity.