Foreign missions were in their early and vigorous growth eighty years ago.  I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands.  The Missionary Herald was taken in a great number of families and read with great avidity.  Many of the readers were people who not only devoutly prayed “Thy Kingdom come,” but who were willing to stick to a rag carpet, and deny themselves a “Brussels,” in order to contribute more to the spread of that Kingdom.  Wealth has increased to a prodigious and perilous extent; but the percentage of money given to foreign missions is very far from what it was in the day of my childhood.  It is a growing custom for ministers to utter a prayer over the contribution boxes when they are brought back to the platform before the pulpit; I suspect that it in too many cases should be one of penitential confession.

While I was a student in the Princeton Seminary we had a visit from the veteran missionary, Levi Spalding, who sailed from Boston to Southern India in the very first band which invaded the darkness of Hindooism He was as nearly like my conception of the Apostle Paul as anyone I ever beheld.  He told us that when he was a youth and his heart was first drawn to the cause of missions, he told his good mother that he had decided upon a missionary life (which was then thought equivalent to a martyrdom), and she was perfectly overcome.  He said to her:  “Mother, when you gave me as an infant to God in baptism, did you withhold me from any service to which I might be called?” She assented in a moment—­went to the old chest—­from it she took a half-dollar (all the money she possessed in the world), and, handing it to him, said:  “Levi, you may go, and this starts you on your education.”  On his way over to India his preaching converted all the sailors, including the ship’s carpenter, “whose heart was as hard as his broadaxe.”  That was the stuff our first missionaries were made of.  The tears flowed down our cheeks as we listened to Spalding’s recital, and the result of his visit was that more than one of our students volunteered for the work of foreign missions.

It was also my great privilege during that Princeton course to put eye upon a man who, by common consent, is regarded as the king of American missionaries.  On my way from Princeton to Philadelphia in the Christmas week of ’45 I found among my fellow passengers a gentleman with a very benign countenance, and to my great delight I learned that he was Adoniram Judson, who was on his final and memorable visit to his native land, and was received everywhere with the most unbounded and reverent enthusiasm.  He had begun his work in Burmah in 1813, but under great difficulties.  During the first six years he made no converts; he defied the demon of discouragement and labored on with increased faith and zeal, and then came an abundant