But a hopeful work of this sort, anywhere in the mines, could scarcely be conceived of but for faith. The difficulties are unique, and are very great. Our Home Missionary Society finds no other service so fraught with discouragements, as that in these regions. The toil required is very hard, and the returns are very scanty. Some churches have been thrifty, and one or two are thrifty still; but outside a less number of points than you could count on the fingers of one hand, they are either dead or perpetually dying; preserved from utter extinction only by persistent pastoral service, sustained mainly by missionary aid. But the difficulties encountered in such work among our own people, will be greatly enhanced in labor among the Chinese. Miners are always migratory, but the Chinese miners most of all; and migration tends to barbarism, among the Chinese most of all. Miners depend upon luck. There is no possibility of knowing what there is in a piece of ground till you have worked it through, and gotten it out. A single day may show your season’s work to be a success, or may doom it as a failure, and what that day will disclose no sagacity will enable you beforehand to determine. Such occupations nurse the gambling spirit, favor spendthrift habits, and tend almost irresistibly to poverty. And this is specially true of the Chinese. In certain seasons of the year, miners are apt to be waiting and idle; in others, when the golden harvest must be gathered, if at all, working to excess; and in either case, the moral effect is evil, not less so with Chinese than others. American miners, with a few noble exceptions, seem to know little about the Christian Sabbath. It used to be, and in some parts of California it still is, the day for cleaning-up, for coming to the central village for trading, for gambling, for getting drunk; but even this distinction in the more prominent mining districts is passing away, and the wheels of labor roll remorselessly over the laborer’s best boon, the weekly day of sacred rest. How much less can we hope for the help of Sabbaths in reaching with the Gospel the Chinese? And yet, there they are, by the hundreds and the thousands, precious souls, bought with the blood of Jesus. Must we let them die, without a single hand stretched out, a single voice uplifted for their rescue?