But I wish now to call attention to the efforts of the church in modern times to preach the gospel in Africa. There are now, so far as I can ascertain, forty-one societies engaged in missionary work there. The number of missionaries employed by them in Africa, foreign and native, is 1,086. These have endured the malaria of the climate and the dangers from hostile people, and some of them have shown the most heroic spirit of self-sacrifice. They have been preceded by others, who have laid down their lives in the work, and the living stand on the graves of the dead, expecting soon to follow. A measure of success has attended and rewarded this zeal, and a few favored examples can be found of men who have long endured the climate and have seen the good work grow upon their hands. But the results, as a whole, have been discouraging. Christianity has found a precarious footing along the shores of the continent while, as yet, in the vast interior the missionaries are compelled to follow at a tardy pace the footsteps of the explorers. Africa is yet unevangelized. The causes of this are not far to seek. The white missionaries from Europe and America succumb under the fatal malaria, or are deterred by the unreasoning and deadly hostility of the natives. The missionaries are a foreign people, with different color, features and habits. They are known to the natives as coming from nations that have plundered and enslaved them. They come as a superior race, unable to meet the natives on the basis of a common brotherhood. A gulf yawns between them. The Christianization of Africa needs a new impulse from some other quarter. On the other hand, and in sharp contrast with all this, is the rapid progress of Mohammedanism in Africa. This progress has been noted by the modern explorers, but has been recently brought more distinctly to the attention of Europe and America. Dean R. Bosworth Smith, in the _Nineteenth Century_ for December, 1887, thus states the extent to which Mohammedanism covers Africa: "It is hardly too much to say that one-half of the whole of Africa is already dominated by Islam, while, of the remaining half, one-quarter is leavened, and another is threatened, by it. Such is the amazing, the portentous problem which Christianity and civilization have to face in Africa, and to which neither of them seems as yet half awake."