It is the London Missionary Society which has covered the largest surface of the earth with its missions, and it is not invidious to say that its records register a larger range of conquests over heathenism and idolatry than could be chronicled in any age since the first apostles went upon their way. We have only to remember the Sandwich Islands,[17] and the crowds of islands in the Southern Seas, with their chief civiliser, the martyr of Erromanga; Africa, from the Cape along through the deep interior, with Moffatt and Livingstone, whose celebrated motto was, “The end of the geographical feat is the beginning of the missionary enterprise;” China and Robert Morison; Madagascar and William Ellis, and many other regions and names to justify our verdict. Footnote 17: (The civilisation and Christian character of these Islands is largely, due to the labours of the missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.—ED.) In 1799 the Church Missionary Society came into existence. “What!” said the passionate and earnest Rev. Melville Horne, in attempting to arouse the clergy to missionary enthusiasm; “have Carey and the Baptists had more forgiven than we, that they should love more? Have the fervent Methodists and patient Moravians been extortionate publicans, that they should expend their all in a cause which we decline? Have our Independent brethren persecuted the Church more, that they should now be more zealous in propagating the faith which it once destroyed?” And so the Church Missionary Society arose;[18] and in 1804, the Bible Society; in 1805, the British and Foreign School Society; in 1799, the Religious Tract Society, which, since its foundation, has probably circulated not less than five hundred millions of publications. The Wesleyan Missionary Society—which claims in date to take precedence of all in its foundation in the year 1769—was not formally constituted till 1817.[19] Footnote 18: See Appendix Footnote 19: (The great missionary organizations of America belong to the early part of this century. The First day or Sunday-school Society was formed in 1791; the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1810; the American Baptist Missionary Union in 1814; Methodist Episcopal Missionary Society in 1819; the Philadelphia Adult and Sunday-school Union (which, in 1824, was merged in the American Sunday-school Union) in 1817; the Protestant Episcopal Board of Missions in 1821. Of Continental Societies, the Moravian Missionary Society was formed in 1732; the Netherlands Missionary Society in 1797; the Basle Evangelical Mission in 1816. Appendix.—ED.) Every one of these, and many other such associations, alike show the vivid and vigorous spirit which was abroad seeking to secure the empire of the world to the cause of Divine truth and love.