This marvellous man was, indeed, a missionary of the most up-to-date kind. Nine years of preparation he gave himself, mastering Arabic, studying and writing on Christian philosophy, learning geography, the pioneer 500 years before his day of twentieth-century missionary study! And all this with scarcely a friend who believed that his missionary call was anything more than a piece of chimerical fanaticism! [Sidenote: 2. Service.] Long years of hard and lonely service followed, preaching to Moslems, holding friendly discussions with them, writing Christian pamphlets for them, then standing before the leaders of the Roman Church--popes and kings and councils, lecturing before universities on behalf of the Moslem world and the new crusade of love, alternately missionary and missionary deputation! Looking back over these years, he said: 'I had a wife and children; I was tolerably rich; I led a secular life. All these things I cheerfully resigned for the sake of promoting the common good and diffusing abroad the common faith. I learned Arabic. I have several times gone abroad to preach the Gospel to the Saracens. I have, for the sake of the faith, been cast into prison and scourged. I have laboured for forty-five years to {145} gain over the shepherds of the Church and the princes of Europe to the common good of Christendom. Now I am old and poor, but still I am intent on the same object. I will persevere in it till death, if the Lord permits it.' Like some young man, full of the burning fire of a fresh enthusiasm, he sets out for Africa at the age of fifty-six. Yet, like that same young man, he is very human. And it seems to bring Lull very near us when we read that at the last, as his ship was about to cast loose from Genoa, his courage fails and the ship sails without him. 'The agony that his soul was suffering oppressed his body, out of measure even unto death, so much so that his friends carried him away from a second ship in which he had embarked, certain that his life could not last out the voyage. News of yet a third ship was brought, and he finally determined to push forward. From that moment, he tells us, he "was a new man."' [Sidenote: 3. Death.] In North Africa he remains two years, disputing, winning, shepherding; is imprisoned, sentenced to death, and finally banished. But only to fresh labour. Much has yet to be filled in to the closing years {146} of this long, hard life. He is preaching in Crete, he is exhorting Christians in Armenia, he is back in Africa again, he is shipwrecked on the coast of Italy, then back again in Bugia, in North Africa, where at last a raging mob drags him, like Stephen. outside the city wall and stones him to death on June 30th, 1315. 'The Son of God goes forth to war, A kingly crown to gain; His blood-red banner streams afar; Who follows in His train?