Following these early victories of the Christian faith came on, as all know, ages of darkness, dreary centuries, during the progress of which the power of the church gradually waned, and, with respect to purely spiritual activities, seemed to die away. The voice of exhortation ceased to be heard. Christian song was hushed. Even prayer closed its supplicating lips, and the church, overladen with corruption, worldliness, and human ambition, passed into the thick darkness of the long and disastrous eclipse of the Middle Ages. But amid the widespread darkness enveloping the world, even the ages known as the “Dark Ages” were not without their gleams of light. Among the Saracens and in the lands of the Orient, always were to be found heroic men and women toiling ceaselessly for the conversion of heathen nations to the Christ. Later on, subsequent to the thirteenth century, and especially during the centuries immediately following the discovery of the New World, the desire for the Christianizing of the world flamed into an all-absorbing passion. The tremendous labors of Xavier, of Loyola, and their followers, in every quarter of the globe, have long been the wonder and admiration of the world. Checked in Europe by the rise of the great Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church turned its energies to the acquisition of spiritual power in other lands, and with enormous success. Along the banks of the St. Lawrence, amid the wilds of Canadian forests, far away on the shores of the Great Lakes, thence southward to the Ohio, along the Mississippi, even to the Gulf; in far Cathay, in Ceylon, in Japan, in China, in Africa,—everywhere its missionaries could be found, heedless of hunger, of cold, of peril, reckless even of life, if by any means, whether by life or by death, they might “sprinkle many nations” and establish the holy emblem of the Christian faith. [Illustration: BAPTIST MISSION SCHOOL, JAPAN.]