The history of Europe during the first part of the present century, is a history written in blood.  It is one of war in all its desolating horrors, and also in all its glorious achievements and victories in the cause of European liberty and national independence.  Never was war so universal.  It raged in every part of the earth.  For years, the Peninsula was a great battlefield.  Belgium and the plains of Germany were saturated with blood.  Allied hosts conquered France.  Armies crossed the Alps and ravaged Italy, and were buried beneath the snows of Russia.  The contest was waged from the Baltic to the Bosphorus.  The old battle-fields of Greece, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Persia, and the Crimea, were again disturbed.  War swept the peninsula of India to the confines of Cashmere.  It penetrated beyond the walls of China, and visited the islands of the Eastern Archipelago; touched the coasts of Arabia, and swept round Africa, from the Cape to Algiers.  It marched through the length and breadth of the great Western Continent, from the St Lawrence to the Mississippi, and from Central to Southern America.  Every kingdom experienced its horrors but our own; every capital was entered by the enemy but our own! During all this terrible period, our Sabbath services were never broken by the cry of battle.  The dreadful hurricane raged without, but never for a single hour disturbed the peace of our beloved island-home.  No revolution from within destroyed our institutions, and no power from without prevented us from improving them.  The builders of our spiritual temples did not require to hold the sword.  Our victories, with their days of national thanksgiving, and our anxieties, with their days of national fasting, tended to deepen a sense of religion in every heart.  Men of God, in rapid succession, rose in all the Churches.  A pious laity began to take the lead in advancing the cause of evangelism.  In Parliament there was one man, who, by the purity of his private life, the noble consistency, uncompromising honesty, and unwearied philanthropy of his public career, along with his faithful published testimony for the truth as it is in Christ, did more, directly and indirectly, than any other of his day for the revival of true religion, especially among the influential classes of our land:  that man was William Wilberforce.

But without dwelling upon the fact of the great revival which has occurred in the Protestant Church during the present century, let us notice one of its more prominent results.  We mean the increased activity manifested by all its branches in advancing the Redeemer’s kingdom.