What is a mission? In a book of the mission edited by the Society of St. John the Evangelist, at Cowley, Oxford, I read—1. It is a special call from God. “Jonah preached a mission to Nineveh, and the whole city repented and was saved. Lot preached one night to Sodom, but they would not hearken, and were destroyed by fire.” 2. It is a time of special grace. The men who have devoted twelve days to a mission in London have taken a bold and brave step in connexion with the Church of England. As much as Sodom or Nineveh, London, with its pauperism, and vice, and crime; with its nobles stooping to the foul companionship of the jockey and the courtesan; with its high-born daughters rushing to see _Formosa_ at Drury Lane; with its merchant princes deeming it no disgrace to be honest as the world goes, or as the times will allow—needs if it would be saved from the fearful fate of Sodom, or the decline of Nineveh, that it should be specially preached to and called on everywhere to repent. For twelve days, then, some hundred churches have been open nearly all day long, in addition to the Sunday services, which have been conducted as usual. At All Saints, Margaret Street, for instance, the first service began at a quarter to seven in the morning, and the last did not close till past nine P.M. Church people are not partial to innovations. It was only this week a lady was complaining to the writer that in the parish in which she resided a week-evening service had been introduced. As if two services on a Sunday were not quite enough. And truly, as times go, she had reason to complain. Two such sermons as one generally hears read in that lackadaisical, sing-song manner, which seems to be the only thing clerical the raw curate picks up at Oxford or Cambridge, are quite enough. If such were the preachers employed in the recent mission (I see their number is set down at forty-eight), it must have proved a failure. At All Saints, so far from the mission being a failure, it has been, I should think, a success. I have always respected the Ritualistic clergy; I have always given them credit for honestly attempting to develope the Catholic element, of which there is a considerable leaven, in the historical English Church; I have always felt that amongst them rather than amongst popular evangelical preachers, whose favourite haunts are the drawing-rooms of dowagers, or Broad Churchmen, the delight of sceptical peers, are to be found the men most ready to take up the cross and bear the yoke; but I had no idea they could preach, or if they did that men of sense could listen. I have found out my mistake. I have been one of the thousands who have listened to Mr. Body, of Wolverhampton, and I never heard or saw within the walls of a church a man so absorbed in his message, so carried away with its import, so imbued with a sense of its Divine reality. I may also add that a more awkward-looking, ill-favoured clergyman I never saw ascend the pulpit stairs.