It may be the dictate of expediency, but certainly it is not that of frankness and honesty, to speak to our benefactors only smooth things. There _are_ shades as well as lights in missionary work. The tide is not always rising. The sun is not always at noon. And if possible, those who sustain the work ought to be made able to see the shadows and to understand the disappointments; ought to be admitted to acquaintanceship with even the mistakes which we, the workers, make. Daylight throughout our operations is essential. Without this, there are bred “bureau distempers,” petty falsities, self-seekings and the whole brood of faults into which even renewed natures get sometimes betrayed. One of the chief beauties and glories of the statements presented this year, both at Portland and at Cleveland, was their manifest frankness—the pains evidently taken to set before the people _all_ the facts so far as the opportunity allowed. But I am making a long preface. “What humblings have been prepared for you?” my readers are asking. One of our Chinese brethren, converted as we believed, and baptised some years ago—a young man in some respects specially capable and specially pleasing, who knows the way of life well, and can explain it clearly to his less instructed countrymen, is found to have been gambling on (for them) a large scale, and, at first, with rare success. Rumor has it that not less than $3,000 had flowed from the depleted purses of his countrymen into his own; but that blind to the fact that the tide might turn, he had continued his sin until it left him stranded and wrecked. Inquiry shows this rumor to be founded on facts. We are made to blush at the congratulations the heathen Chinese have been proffering over the good-luck of the gambling Christian. We get the heart-ache as we see how sin breeds sin, how falsehood and profanity follow in the train of these dishonest gains. The heart-ache deepens as we see some others of our brethren swept away by sympathy or friendship, or possibly by some less amiable consideration into partial complicity with his wrong. It transpires that with several others as with this brother, there has been a forgetfulness of the assembling of themselves together, a self-assertion and self-trust, a disposition to debate but not to pray, a cooling of brotherly love and Christian zeal, all of which fore-shadowed like dishonors to be heaped upon the name of Christ, unless a breath of God’s dear spirit should soon inspire in them a freshened life.