numbers are not recklessly increased. If they seek for education, and in seriousness come to regard it as a necessary of life, they will secure it. If they persuade themselves that the overcrowding, which is the shame of our cities, is a thing intolerable, overcrowding will cease. If they are inspired with an earnest desire to convert into homes houses which are now the haunts of disease and crime, they can themselves effect the change. Gradually as their moral nature and their hopes are raised, their physical well-being will improve, for they will no longer submit themselves to physical misery. And in no other way can it improve.

They need not fight the battle alone. Employers of labour have duties, too seldom recognized, towards such as toil and spin in their service. The State can give powerful aid when the strength of public opinion supports its action. From whomsoever it comes, the test of all efficient help is whether it tends to raise the character of the people, to excite in their minds better hope, and to give them higher ideas of a worthy life. If we are sure of this result, let us proceed with courage, no matter how great an array of vested interests and sacred rights be set up against us. But schemes of relief or reform which take no account of these ultimate effects, will only breed the misery which they are intended to remove.

G. P. MACDONELL.

ART. VI.-A Hundred Years of Foreign Missions.

(1) An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens, in which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings are considered. By WILLIAM CAREY. Leicester. 1792.

(2) The Missionary Review. Published at Princeton, N.J., United States of America. 1885.

(3) Zur Statistik der evangelischen Mission. Von D. R.

GRUNDEMANN, Gütersloh. 1886.

A HUNDRED years ago two writers, Edmund Burke and William Carey, made a survey of the world, or the greater part of it, outside of Christendom as it then was. Moved by considerations of the purest philanthropy, though unconsciously misled by that evil genius Philip Francis, Burke spoke the greatest of all his Indian orations in support of the abortive

Bills of Fox to supersede the East India Company by seven imperial commissioners, and to provide for the better government of the Empire in a way which would have anticipated the reforms of 1858. After a geographical and statistical picture of India and the East, which for lucidity and vividness has never been equalled, Burke denounced the desolating selfishness of the Company's administration in language which the most recent and impartial historian * has unanswerably vindicated

With us no pride erects stately monuments which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced and which adorn a country out of its own spoils. England has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ourang-outang or the tiger.

him.

That was spoken at the close of 1783. Two months before, Ryland had baptized in the river Nen, a little beyond Dr. Doddridge's meeting-house at Northampton, a poor journeyman shoemaker,' who was destined to wipe out the reproach, alike by his personal action and by summoning to his aid all over the world the aggressively evangelical forces of England and Scotland, America and Germany. William Carey was even then as much exercised in spirit regarding the misery and darkness of the whole non-Christian world as Burke was with the wrongs of its Eastern peoples. Brooding day and night in his cobbler's shed and his village school, in the morning hour which he gave to his garden and in the rude chapel where he preached to the peasants, Carey felt the fire so burn within him that in 1786 he wrote out the results of his meditation and his research in his now famous and rare 'Enquiry.'

had

The shoe

What the orator had done for India the shoemaker did in detail for the whole world. The motive which in Burke been philanthropic enthusiasm, dashed with political passion, was with Carey a spiritual longing expressed in the humblest and most self-sacrificing consecration. maker's reading was even wider, and his survey more scientific, while his English was scarcely less pure than that of the Taking up the four divisions of the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, in succession, he tabulated in four columns the details of their countries, area, population, and

statesman.

*

Professor J. B. Seeley, in his Expansion of England,' p. 235. 1883.

6

religion. What he had at first written on a very large map consisting of several sheets of paper pasted together by himself,' as described by Andrew Fuller, he embodied in these tables, and expanded into the eighty-seven printed octavo pages of his treatise. Written at Moulton village, in the intervals between shoemaking, teaching a day school, and ministering to a congregation, his Enquiry' lay beside him in manuscript for six years, until a prosperous tradesman of Birmingham gave him ten pounds to print it. Nor was he idle with his voice all these six years. In almost every public service, at every meeting with his brother ministers of Northamptonshire, his persistent zeal so far overcame his inborn humility and made it more truly chilklike, as to lead him to press for a practical reply to the question, Whether the command given to the apostles to teach all nations was not obligatory on all succeeding ministers to the end of the world, seeing that the accompanying promise was of equal extent ?

The publication of the Enquiry," in 1792, was followed in the same year by the foundation, at Kettering, of the first purely Foreign Missionary Society in England. The coming year, 1892, will therefore be the first centenary, and the jubilee was observed in 1842 by thousands around the little back parlour at Kettering, where the Baptist Missionary Society was founded by twelve Midland preachers subscribing £13 2s. 6d. to evangelize the world. But William Carey's first missionary action dates from the same year, 1783, as Burke's first attempt at India reform. That action was consecrated, in 1784, by the Northamptonshire monthly concert for prayer for the spread of the gospel to the most distant parts of the habitable globe.' And the working and the praying culminated, so far as Carey was concerned, in the missionary census of the human race which he made in the year 1786. The time is opportune for us to compare with his world-survey, and with Burke's review of India at the same period, the latest results of evangelical missions from Christendom. What, so far as facts and figures can estimate or express the working of a Divine promise and a purely spiritual force, are Foreign Missions doing for the race the close of these hundred years?

When we speak of a hundred years of missionary action, however, we must keep in view that for the first half of that period little apparently was done at home and less abroad. The century may be divided most accurately into the welldefined periods; (1) Pioneering, or preparation, from 1786 to 1835; (2) sowing in the soil prepared and gathering the first

fruits from 1836 to 1885. To these we may add that we are apparently, by a process of spiritual evolution, entering on the time of harvest, when both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together, even before the eternal balance is struck and the promised reward is adjudged. We speak of the past hundred years of foreign missionary enterprise, but, so far as any general and earnest activity by reformed Christendom is concerned, we mean the last fifty years.

The first breath of the foreign missionary spirit of modern times may be said to have arisen outside the churches which were dying or dead, and may claim to have called them back to life. The missionary succession is clearly traceable from Wicliff, through Hus, and the old Moravian Church, to the German Pietists and the Austrian refugees, to whom Zinzendorf gave an asylum in Saxon Silesia. That movement had branched out into two-the Danish-Halle Mission in South India, and the Moravian Mission to the negro slaves, the Indians, and the Eskimos of the two Americas. John Wesley was undoubtedly influenced by the Moravians.

But

we are inclined to assert for the English Missions begun by Carey an origin independent altogether of that. We find it in the parallel movement which, in October, 1746, led certain ministers in the West of Scotland to send out an invitation to Christians to form what they called a 'Concert to promote more abundant application to a duty that is perpetually binding-prayer that our God's kingdom may come, joined with praises.' That invitation reached Jonathan Edwards in New England, who thereupon published his Humble Attempt to Promote Explicit Agreement and Visible Union of God's People for Extraordinary Prayer for the Revival of Religion and the Advancement of Christ's Kingdom on Earth.' And that book influenced Carey and the Northamptonshire Baptists to the eight years' prayer which resulted in the first Missionary Society in 1792. All efforts previous to his, whether in South India or in America, had been confined to what we may call the dying or non-propagating races of mankind, or had lingered in the obscure outworks of the citadel of heathenism. Captain Cook's three voyages in the South Seas so attracted Carey that his first desire was to begin work there, on the same comparatively narrow lines. The Spirit, which suffered not the first Christian missionary to confine himself to Asia, but drove him to Europe, trained the shoemaker all sciously, and sent him to the very heart of India, that he might attack the citadel of Satan itself. First in time of all modern Englishmen, Carey was above all first in the policy,

uncon

the methods, the organization of a mission which should so grapple with Brahmanism as to involve in its downfall the Buddhist and other cults of Southern and Eastern Asia; should lay wide and deep the foundations at once of a Christian Church and of civilized nations.

The first half of our century of missions is nearly covered by Carey's apostleship. Seven years after he wrote the Enquiry' he landed at Calcutta. Seven years he spent in the swamps of the northern districts of Bengal, mastering Sanskrit and Bengali, making his first translation of the New Testament, and teaching vernacular schools, but without a native convert. The beginning of the year 1800 saw him establish in the Danish town of Serampore, under a foreign flag, the mission which his consecration, his genius, and his toil have made one of the most illustrious in the annals of the Christian Church. Other fourteen years were passed in efforts which led to the first breach in the intolerance and the monopolies of the East India Company, made by the Parliamentary Charter of 1813. He was spared-while founding twenty-seven native churches, publishing nearly forty translations of Holy Scripture, establishing a college and hundreds of schools, and initiating the great scientific, philanthropic, and administrative reforms which are now bearing rich fruit— to see the toils of his pioneering triumphant in the legislation of Lord William Bentinck, with the aid of Macaulay and Alexander Duff. He died in 1834, forty-eight years after he had, in the Enquiry,' sowed the seed not only of the Church of India, but of the whole growth of Christendom ever since.

Every step which Carey took in Bengal was a new incentive to the awakening churches at home. Not only had he to do their work in the far East, but he had to keep rousing or stimulating them to play worthily their part in the new crusade:-acting, as Dr. Chalmers said when delivering a public charge to Duff, not by exhaustion, but by fermentation. Foreign Missions brought Home Missions to the birth, and both have since wrought together as the poles of electricity. The Periodical Accounts' of the Serampore Mission brought in rapid succession the great missionary societies of Christendom into existence. Grandest of all in the catholicity of its constitution and the universality of its aim, the London Missionary Society was first founded in 1795. The Edinburgh or Scottish Missionary Society, led by James Haldane and his then Presbyterian friends, was the next to follow in 1796, and to send out to West Africa the first Scottish missionary, Peter Greig, a gardener of Donibristle, like Robert Moffat