Some cynic has sneeringly remarked that ‘nothing is so false as facts, except figures.’ Statistics, however, can do a good deal, but they can never convey a really accurate impression of the true results of mission work. Facts and figures can tell much; but they do not and cannot tell folks’ feelings, nor can they even tell all they imply. Foreign missions properly conducted can never be a failure: that is a moral impossibility; for that means the failure of Christianity. Professing Christians may fail to realize their privileges and their responsibilities, and so fail in their duty to the work of extending the kingdom of Christ to the ends of the earth, and thus fail to carry out the divine command: ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature’; but foreign missions can never be a failure. Bishop Butler taught us, even in student days, that it was a moral impossibility that ever evil could be triumphant over good, in a world where God was the moral Governor. There are still some people, however, who have no belief in foreign missions, or home missions, or missions of any kind. Some say they only believe in home missions, while there are others who are always pitting home missions against foreign missions, forgetting that they are but the two branches of the same great work. The late Bishop Brooks of America said that a man who opposed foreign missions in the interests of home missions was like a man who had murdered his own father and then appealed to the judge for mercy because he was an orphan! Where would we have been, and what would have been the state of our native land to-day, but for foreign missions? Our forefathers the Britons were cannibals. St. Jerome tells of seeing some of them in Gaul when he was a boy; and he says, we are told, that they had great flocks and herds in their own land, but that they preferred a ham of the herdsman to that of any of their flock. These were our ancestors, so that we have little to be proud of, but much to be thankful for which the Gospel brought us--light, liberty, privileges, and blessings we should never have known but for foreign missions. Foreign missions can never be a failure. Directors may die, princes and great men in the church may fall, and missionaries may be martyred; but the Great Head of the church lives and works. He was dead, but is alive for evermore, and has the keys of death and of Hades. He lives and rules and reigns for ever and ever, and while He lives and reigns His work must make progress. Amid the wreck of thrones and the falling of dynasties, the revolutions of empires and the death of sovereigns, the onward rush of successive generations, and the march of sweeping centuries, God’s work must and shall prevail.