We hope the day may come before many years when historians will see in the records of the struggles, misfortunes, and triumphs of the church a theme for the employment of brilliant pens as tempting as they now find in the clash of armies and the intrigues of statesmen. Scholars have devoted to our records the patient investigation of years; the general history of the church has been summarized for popular reading in most of the principal modern languages; and for the use of theologians and students there are elaborate and costly collections. Individual biographies of saints and preachers innumerable have been written for the edification of the devout. Sketches of local church history, more or less complete, have occasionally appeared--sketches, for instance, like _The Catholic Church in the United States_, by De Courcy and Shea; Shea's _History of the Catholic Missions_ among the Indian tribes of America, and Bishop Bayley's little volume on the history of the church in New York. But a work of a different kind, broader in its design than some of these excellent and useful publications, more limited in scope than the dry and costly general histories, still awaits the hand of a polished and enthusiastic man of letters. Why should not the same eloquence and learning be devoted to the religious history of the great countries of the globe that Macaulay, and Motley, and Froude have expended upon the political revolutions of states and the intricate dramas of diplomacy? Why should not some glowing pen do for the pioneers of the cross what Prescott did for the pioneers of Spanish conquest in the new hemisphere? Properly told, the church history of almost any country of the world, of almost any period in Christian times, would be a narrative not only of religious significance, but of thrilling interest. No men ever passed through more extraordinary adventures, considered even from a human point of view, than the missionaries who penetrated into unknown lands or first went among unbelieving nations. No contest between hostile kingdoms or rival dynasties ever offered a more tempting theme for dramatic narrative and glowing description than the contest which has raged for eighteen centuries and a half, between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, in all the different quarters of the civilized world. Think what a brilliant writer might make of such a subject as the church history of Germany! Think what has yet to be done for the churches of England and Ireland and France, when the coming historian rescues their chronicles from the dusty archives of state and the gloom of monastic libraries, and causes the old stories to glow with a new light, such as Gibbon threw upon the records of the declining empire!