Absorbed in the struggles going on in their own lands, Protestants made but little effort for the extension of the gospel in foreign fields, save the few but successful attempts made by the Moravians of Germany, always the most zealous of all Protestant bodies in lines of missionary service. What, however, was lacking in the way of missionary effort in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has been more than made good in the glorious nineteenth, the distinctive missionary century of the Christian era. In the room of seven societies organized for world-wide gospel evangelization at the end of the last century, there are now in Europe and America between seventy and eighty organizations, employing a force of nearly three thousand American and European missionaries, and perhaps four times that number of native assistants. Full $10,000,000 are annually raised among the Protestant bodies alone for missionary service, while the great Roman Catholic Church prosecutes its work with a zeal equally unflagging. A brief survey of the progress of a hundred years of missionary effort will make it clear to all minds that the day is not far distant when the declaration of the prophet, “The earth shall be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, even as the waters cover the sea,” shall have abundant and magnificent realization. At the beginning of this century, every island of the vast Pacific was closed against the gospel. To-day, nearly every one is under the influence, more or less extended, of Christian civilization. India, from Cape Comorin to the Punjaub, from the Punjaub to the Himalayas, from the Himalayas to Thibet,—at whose gates the gospel is now knocking,—has been covered with a network of mission stations, schools, colleges, and churches, closer by far in its interlacings than that which at the close of the third century had spread itself over the vast empire of the Cæsars. Of the Indian Archipelago, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, the Celebes, New Guinea, not to mention smaller groups of islands, are feeling the new life ever imparted by the advent of the Cross. Japan, too, hungry for reform, and full of the stir of the age, by granting entrance to the gospel, has within its borders already a numerous Christian population with scores of evangelical congregations. The same is true of the hermit nation, Corea. In the lands of Islam, from Bagdad to the Balkans, from Egypt to Persia, and throughout all Turkey, are to be found centres of missionary enterprise, the vast influence of which is now being sensibly felt in the changing life of those remarkable peoples. In Burmah, and recently in Siam, after years of patient and apparently hopeless service, fields are everywhere “white unto the harvest.” China, most populous of all heathen lands, is open to missionary effort from Canton to Peking, from Shanghai to Hon-Chow. Africa also, once, in its northern sections at least, the home of the learning, the art, the science, the religion of the