[Sidenote: A Labor Not in Vain.] Says Doctor Warneck: “It has been a laborious work of patience that the missionaries have done in these great countries, industrially so poor,--a work made difficult by the great inconstancy of the Hottentots and the strong opposition of the Herero, as well as by the entanglements of war,--and more than once in Herero Land the workers were on a point of withdrawing. But German fidelity at last carried the day. Now the whole of the great region from the Orange River to beyond Walfisch Bay, far into the interior of Great Nama Land and Herero Land and even up to Ovambo Land is covered with a network of stations. All the points that could be occupied have been made mission stations and the whole population has been brought under the educative and civilizing influence of Christianity.” The Rhenish Society has also a mission in the southern part of Cape Colony. Its first station was at Stellenbosch, near Cape Town, established in 1829. The society has now in all a membership of twenty-one thousand four hundred Christians. A number of its churches are financially independent. Here as everywhere there are discouraging backslidings into the old sins of drunkenness and impurity, but even so the light has shone and will shine with increasing brightness. [Sidenote: The Discovery of Diamonds.] The _Berlin Missionary Society_ began work in South Africa in 1834, first among the Koranna people between the Orange and Vaal Rivers, and later, in 1838, in Cape Colony itself, its first station being at Peniel. At first few foreigners penetrated into this district between the Orange and the Vaal, but in 1870 when diamonds were discovered, Cape Colony, in spite of the protests of the Orange Free State to which it had belonged, annexed it. At once thousands of adventurers poured in, both black and white. In 1860 the missionaries went north into the Transvaal. The Berlin Mission is the largest in South Africa. Its last report names fifty-eight stations and one thousand sub-stations. The Christian community, which numbers sixty thousand is organized in five synods of Cape Colony, the Zulu-Xosa district, Orange River Colony, South Transvaal and North Transvaal. Among the notable Lutheran missionaries of the Berlin South African mission have been _Merensky_, a famous writer upon missionary subjects, _Grützer_, who gave forty-nine years of devoted service to the mission, _Wuras_, who gave fifty and Doctor _D. Kropf_ who did valuable work as a translator. Another Berlin missionary of large achievement describes his early experience, writing in 1889: