Again, as long as a person thinks he is making a _great sacrifice_ in leaving home, friends, and his business, and going as the Lord's messenger among the benighted of earth, he would better remain at home. If he is really God-called, the day will come when he will realize something of the inestimable privilege of being His ambassador to nations in darkness without any knowledge of the Light of Life. All earthly things will be lost sight of and his heart will burn within him to lift up Christ among the heathen. He will gladly go through anything, that the blessed Gospel may be proclaimed to the ends of the earth. Some one may inquire, "What should I study to prepare me for the mission field?" A careful study of these pages will, we think, answer that question. But to sum it up we would say, anything, everything you can, both in school and out; one never knows until he reaches the field what he may meet with. The Bible of course, first, last, and always, and all the knowledge with it one can acquire; then too temporal work of various kinds, medicine, nursing, hygiene, farming, building, teaching, housekeeping, and mission methods. If one has acquired a fair knowledge of these and thinks he is well prepared, then let him be humble enough to acknowledge that he knows only the A B C's of mission work; and that when he has reached his field of labor, the Lord, and perhaps some of His messengers already in the field, will help him to put together into words the letters he has learned, and he may add to it day by day as the occasion may require. If one has this humility and willingness to adapt himself to the work, after reaching the field, it will supply much of his lack of knowledge along some lines. My object in writing thus plainly is not to frighten any one of God's children from the work of the Lord; but rather to help each one carefully to count the cost, and to disabuse anyone's mind of false notions of mission work. Judging from the stability and perseverance of those already connected with the work, we have reasons to believe that all did count the cost; but the work is only begun, and we trust many more will come to swell the ranks and push on the work into the darker regions. It has been a little over a century since the first missionaries began their work along the coast of South Africa; but it is only within the last half century that there has been much visible fruit of the work done. Even then the missionary labors have been chiefly along the coast of the continent and along the navigable rivers which are the natural highways into the interior. Much of Central Africa is still unpossessed. In the report of the last Great Missionary Conference it was estimated that there are ninety millions of the population of Africa as yet untouched by the Gospel. Stupendous figures, indeed, to say nothing of the many millions whose knowledge of the Gospel is as yet very superficial!