When Dr. House parted with his parents in the New York harbour, it was with the mutual expectation of never seeing each other again. The separation was intensified in its realism by the slowness of communication. His message announcing safe arrival in Siam did not reach his parents until thirteen months after his departure. Their response to this message was one which stirred his emotions to the depths and made him oblivious of all around him; it told of his father and mother and cousins kneeling together upon receipt of the news and offering thanksgiving for the beginning of his missionary work. The many friends who wrote letters to him doubtless never understood what joy they gave him by their messages. After receiving a consignment of mail he writes: “Their letters do cheer, do strengthen, do inspire new resolves, and make me ashamed of my unworthy service.” He records with expressions of esteem the names of those from whom he receives communications by each mail; and to one who knows something of the home church these names stand as a roster of zealous workers, names of families that continue to the present day. The affectionate interest of the people was more than individual; it came to be almost a community interest. The “monthly concert of missions” saw the old session house filled with people eager to hear the latest letter from their own foreign missionary. On his part he kept in mind the day of these church gatherings and, allowing for the difference of time, he estimated that his Monday morning hour of devotions corresponded with the Sunday evening at home, and surmised “in our little session room at Waterford many a fervent prayer was going up for me and my fellow labourers from those whose prayers will prevail at the throne of grace.” It is not surprising that the home church grew mightily in the grace of giving and developed a generosity which, long before forward movements, attained a standard of giving more to beneficence than to their own work and led the Presbytery in their gifts to the foreign work. Arthur T. Pierson, D.D., who served the church as pastor 1863-9 and later became one of the most powerful public advocates of missions, bore this testimony to their zeal, on the occasion of the church’s centennial in 1904: “I owe much of my own enthusiasm for missions to my six years in this church. It was most active and aggressive in this department of service. It had its own missionary in the field, and kept in living contact with him by correspondence, gifts and prayer. This missionary atmosphere I breathed with immense profit, and I was compelled either to lead my people in missionary work or to resign my pastorate. My real missionary education began here in a church far ahead of me in intelligence and enthusiasm for God’s work.”