Another striking fact was the form which the independence of the body took on—the results which it reached. It might be called the Missionary Reform Conference. From the first it was clear that this branch of church work would receive a push forward on new lines. The single large debate of the session was over the proposition to locate a regular bishop in India. The bishops opposed it vigorously. The special adherents of “presbyter writ large” opposed it. And yet the measure received a majority of votes, and was defeated only by “dividing the house” and getting a lay majority against it to kill a clerical majority for it. After that defeat by a formal device for distributing a minority so as to give it veto power, the Conference had its own way. It made Chaplain McCabe Missionary Secretary, and elected William Taylor a Missionary Bishop for Africa, and it lifted Daniel Curry, who had led the movement for an Episcopal residence in India, sheer over the heads of all the editorial staff and set him down in the chair of the _Quarterly Review_. Each of these facts means more than meets the eye. Chaplain McCabe is the prince of collection-takers. The best man in the church to raise money is set to increasing missionary collections. William Taylor has been a bishop for thirty years—a bishop _de facto_—he is now bishop _de jure_ in Africa. We doubt whether he will confine himself to Africa; but it will certainly require all of Africa to hold him. The Liberian grave-yard ceases to be the Methodist Africa. Bishop Taylor will lay siege to the whole continent—the Nile, the Soudan, the Congo, the Cape, as well as Liberia. Nor is this all. He believes in self-supporting missions, and will give a great impetus to the movement toward self-directing independence in all missions. Some time or other a mission must become a church; that time, many believe, is at hand in India, Africa and Europe. The reversal of judgment in Dr. Curry’s case is a conspicuous proof of the independence of the Conference. Eight years ago he was retired from the _Christian Advocate_ at New York for insubordination. Part of his offense was a singular freedom of pen on this same subject of missions. For example, he once wrote (concerning the return visits of missionaries in the other hemisphere): “We need a few graves of missionaries in heathen soil,” or words of this significance. The General Conference was persuaded to vote him out in 1876; but the act emancipated the paper, and under Dr. J. M. Buckley it is independent in a wider sense than Dr. Curry ever dared to make it. And now with the burden of seventy-five years upon him, Dr. Curry succeeds the other venerable Daniel as the editor of the chief and only universal organ of the denomination. “Whedon on the Will” will probably cease to be the conspicuous feature of the _Quarterly Review_, and if it should drop out of the “course of study” for young ministers, the loss might be a gain.