[Sidenote: Call to the Church.] In a famous despatch published in the {170} _Daily Telegraph_, on November 15, 1875, Stanley challenged the Church of Christ to plunge boldly into the heart of Africa, and make the countries of the still pagan tribes south of the Great Lakes centres of light for the whole Dark Continent. The challenge was accepted and the implied prophecy has come true. [Sidenote: Missions in Central Africa.] The Universities' Mission to Central Africa (founded in response to an earlier appeal from Livingstone) has built its cathedral at Zanzibar, on the site of the old slave market, and its work has spread inwards through Nyassaland. The Livingstonia Mission, founded by the Free Church of Scotland after Livingstone's death, has, in a short space of twenty years, seen wild, warlike tribes, whose chief concern was warfare and slaughter, settle down into hard-working Christian communities. In Uganda, the Mission founded by the Church Missionary Society a little later, has seen the growth of a Church of 98,000 Native Christians supporting its own 3,000 Native Christian workers and sending its own missionaries into the heathen countries around. {171} But in each place they were only just in time; and other regions which were not occupied, the Moslem is winning to-day. Thirty years before Livingstone's death, the great German Krapf, working for the Church Missionary Society, had seen the danger, and had challenged the Church to forge a chain of Mission stations from east to west to bind the Moslem to the north. Many links of that chain have not yet been forged, and the Moslem has streamed down into the Southern Continent till there is hardly a section of Africa in which he may not be found. [Sidenote: The Niger and Hausa Land.] Away in the West in the vast Niger districts the same unequal race is going on, but Christendom was later in the field. In 1899, before our British troops had subdued the Hausa states, a little party led by Bishop Tugwell had penetrated 700 miles, even up to Kano. Here the Moslem ruled the land and brooked no interference with his raiding or his slavery. He was engaged in bringing the simple unorganized pagan tribes to heel. Christian missionaries were the last people he wanted. For many months the little defenceless party {172} found no rest for the soles of their feet. If they pitched their tent they were quickly ordered to remove it, the alternative being the executioner's sword. At last, in a little village, they pitched their camp in simple faith among a people of whom not one but wished them gone. Death, and the many fevers of West Africa have worked sad havoc in their ranks, but bravely they kept on, though often one man alone 'held the fort' in Gierku.