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107-119

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Tabular View of the Missionaries of the Bombay Mission,

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INTRODUCTION.

MODERN Missions have become a fact and a power in the world. Their results, for the last fifty years, put to shame alike the timid faith of the Church and the scornful predictions of the infidel opposer. A recent vigorous writer in India, with the fruits of Protestant Missions around him there, and looking only at their temporal results, very justly remarks: "We are tired of listening to nonsense about the small results of missionary work, the enormous revenue expended, the inadequate return secured. In the midst of the mighty events now passing over Asia, though every throne is rocking, and every dynasty crumbling into dust, though the Tartar lords are ceasing from the face of the earth, and the great struggle of the North and the South seems rapidly approaching, there is no event more wonderful than the progress of the mission power. Within one poor half-century the unregarded effort of a few fanatics, with a visionary cobbler' at their head, has become the strongest of social levers. If a third of the human race are now in internecine struggle among themselves, it is because a missionary instructed a poor Chinese lad sick in his hospital."

This last remark refers to the internal conflict then waging in China, the end of which is not yet.

Our writer might have added, if the degraded islanders of the ocean have been raised from their ignorance and pollution and blessed with a written language, and with all the arts and sciences of civilized life, it is the result of missions. If the vast regions of Central Africa are being opened up to the light of science and civilization, it is because missionary zeal impels the explorer.

India is the great land of idolaters, and in regard to India,

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