I. FOREIGN MISSIONARIES.--In considering the question of duty to enter the foreign field, the first inquiry necessarily relates to qualification, since without this no mere desire or emotion in regard to the work can have any weight. As among the more obvious requisites for the missionary work the following may be mentioned: 1. _A sound body._ Most of our mission-fields are in the East, in an enervating climate, and under conditions such as severely test the vigor of the physical constitution. No person already enfeebled by disease or seriously predisposed to disease should venture into the foreign field, as the probabilities would all be against his ability to labor there. On this point, it is obvious, skilled medical advice should be sought. 2. _Common sense._ The practical administration of the affairs of the mission, temporal as well as spiritual--its building, its finances, its business contracts and relations, the whole management--usually falls upon the missionary, and requires large practical tact and sagacity. In a new field he has no reliable advisers and must depend on his own judgment in deciding on all the temporal concerns of the mission. In the older fields, while some of the business cares may be devolved on native helpers, he must still move among the native churches as a practical and influential adviser, guiding their affairs, settling their difficulties, and correcting their mistakes. An unpractical, visionary mind, however scholarly and brilliant, is obviously unfitted for such a position. 3. _Facility in learning to speak in a foreign tongue._ A foreign language, and most of all an Oriental language, is difficult to acquire, especially so as to use it readily and fluently in common speech. Some men of good abilities have here failed in the foreign field, and, though useful perhaps in other departments, have never been effective in preaching. There should be, at least, an ordinary aptitude for language sufficient to ensure that with persevering effort the man will be able to master and use the vernacular of the people. 4. _Power as a preacher._ Preaching, among the heathen as elsewhere, is the grand means of evangelization, and the conditions of power in it are everywhere essentially the same. The missionary must be "apt to teach," with a ready command of his faculties for argument and illustration, and a mastery of the art of putting things. In the conversational method of preaching in heathen lands, he is often obliged to meet in popular argument acute and profound reasoners, when his defeat before the people might prove a serious check to the Gospel. 5. _Faith, energy, and perseverance._ At these outposts of Christianity a timid, wavering spirit, faint-hearted and irresolute, will be sure to fail. Courage, determination, energy, alone will achieve permanent results. Carey and Judson waited years with unfaltering confidence for the first convert, and without