"What is Romance? The world well lost for an ides." I know no better definition; and Romance in this sense is perpetually illustrated in the history of the Church. The highest instance-save One--is, of course, the instance of the Martyrs. When in human history has Romance been more splendidly displayed than when the young men and maidens of Pagan Rome suffered themselves to be flung to the wild beasts of the arena sooner than abjure the religion of the Cross? And close on the steps of the Martyrs follow the Confessors, the "Martyrs-Elect," as Tertullian calls them, who, equally willing to lay down their lives, yet denied that highest privilege, carried with them into exile and imprisonment the horrible mutilations inflicted by Severus and Licinius. In days nearer our own time, "many a tender maid, at the threshold of her young life, has gladly met her doom, when the words that accepted Islam would have made her in a moment a free and honoured member of a dominant community." Then there is the Romance of the Hermitage and the Romance of the Cloister, illustrated by Antony in the Egyptian desert, and Benedict in his cave among the Latin hills, and Francis tending the leper by the wayside of Assisi. In each of these cases, as in thousands more, the world was well lost for an idea. The world is well lost--and supremely well lost--by the Missionary, whatever be his time or country or creed. Francis Xavier lost it well when he made his response to the insistent question: "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Henry Martyn lost it well when, with perverse foolishness as men accounted it, he sacrificed the most brilliant prospects which a University offers to preach and fail among the heathen, and to die at thirty, forsaken and alone. John Coleridge Patterson lost it well when, putting behind him all the treasures of Eton and Oxford, and powerful connexions and an opulent home, he went out to spread the light of the Gospel amid the isles of the Pacific, and to meet his death at the hands of the heathen whom he loved and served. These, indeed, are the supreme Romances of Renunciation, but others there are, which, though less "high and heroical," are not less Teal and not less instructive. The world was well lost (though for a cause which is not mine) by the two thousand ministers who on "Black Bartholomew," in the year 1662, renounced their benefices in the Established Church sooner than accept a form of worship which their conscience disallowed. And yet again the world was gloriously lost by the four hundred ministers and licentiates of the Church of Scotland who, in the great year of the Disruption, sacrificed home and sanctuary land subsistence rather than compromise the "Headship of Christ over His own house."