There was William Williams, first a surgeon and then, after graduating at Oxford, ordained for work in the Colonies. He went to New Zealand in 1825, when its people were a race of cannibals, not one of whom professed Christianity. He lived to see the whole country more or less fully evangelised. His wife died as recently as 1896, and his son, baptised in 1829 with the children of one of the most savage of the Maori chiefs, became Bishop of Waiapu in the land the father did so much to open up. William Williams had a brother, Henry Williams, who preceded him in the field. So great was the influence he won that, on the news of his death reaching two Maori camps, in which rival tribes were preparing to meet in battle, they at once proclaimed a truce, attended his funeral, and settled their differences in peace. [Illustration: (_Photo: G. P. Abraham, Keswick._) MR. EUGENE STOCK. (_Editorial Secretary of the Society._)] [Illustration: (_From Photo: supplied by the Church Missionary Society._) THE LIBRARY AT THE MISSION HOUSE.] There was Ludwig Krapf, whose name, with that of John Rebmaun, should ever be joined with the origins of our growing empire in Eastern Equatorial Africa. He began his missionary work in Abyssinia, had to leave as the result of French intrigues, sailed down the East African coast in an Arab boat, and in 1844 settled at Mombasa. From the knowledge of the interior gained by Krapf and his companion, came the chain of African discovery which issued, as long afterwards as 1875, in the publication, through Mr. H. M. Stanley, of Mtesa's appeal for missionaries for Uganda. How little could Krapf ever have dreamed of the vast results, political as well as spiritual, that would flow from that early disappointment, his expulsion from Abyssinia! There was David Hinderer, who, upon the other side of Africa, did so striking a work in the Yoruba country. The prosperity of his evangelistic labours, the virtual imprisonment in which he and his wife--half-starved and in deadly peril--were for five years in the town of Ibadan, and the ultimate discovery that their work stood the severe tests of isolation and persecution, go to make up one of the most interesting chapters in the history of African missions. There was George Maxwell Gordon, the pilgrim-missionary of the Indian frontier, a pioneer who saw little direct fruit of his labours, yet left missions where none had been. Acting as chaplain to the British forces shut up in Kandahar, he was killed, when seeking to succour the wounded, in August, 1880. But this is a list that might be almost indefinitely extended, and still would seem invidious. Let us come to some striking pages in the Society's history; again, of necessity, passing by many of the most impressive as well as some of the most familiar.