Of the East India Company’s chaplains, Claudius Buchanan alone had the courage to advocate in India the missionary cause; and his sermon preached upon the subject in 1800, in Calcutta, was then generally deemed a bold and daring step.  Hindustan was closed by the East India Company against the missionaries of the Christian Church.  China, too, seemed hermetically sealed against the gospel.  The Jesuit mission had failed.  Christianity was proscribed by an imperial edict.  Protestant missions had not commenced.  The language of the nation, like its walls, seemed to forbid all access to the missionary.  In Africa there were but few missionaries, and these had lately arrived at the Cape.[A] In the black midnight which brooded over that miserable land, the cry of tortured slaves alone was heard.  New Zealand, Australia, and the scattered islands of the Southern Seas had not yet been visited by one herald of the gospel.  A solitary beacon gleaming on the ocean from the missionary ship Duff had indeed been seen, but not yet welcomed by the savages of Tahiti.  The mission was abandoned in 1809, and not a convert left behind!  No Protestant missionary had preached to those Indian tribes beyond the Colonies, who wandered over the interminable plains which stretch from Behring’s Straits to Cape Horn.  Mohammedan States were all shut up against the gospel; and to forsake the Crescent for the Cross, was to die.  In this thick darkness which covered heathendom, the only light to be seen—­except in India—­was in the far north, shed by the self-denying Moravians,—­a light which streamed like a beautiful aurora over the wintry snow and ice-bound coasts of Greenland.  To this gloomy picture we must add the indifference of the Protestant Church to God’s ancient people.  No society then existed for their conversion; and of them it might indeed be said, “This is Israel, whom no man seeketh after!”

[Footnote A:  The first missionary to South Africa was George Schmidt, sent by the Moravian Brethren in 1736.  He laboured alone with some success till 1743, when he was compelled by the Dutch East India Company to return to Europe.  The mission was resumed in 1792, when three additional missionaries sailed for the Cape.  A few others joined them in 1798.  At the beginning of the century, the converts amounted to 304.  The illustrious Dr Vanderkemp, along with three other missionaries, were sent to South Africa by the London Missionary Society in 1799.  The only attempts made to Christianise Western Africa previous to 1800 were by the Moravians in Guinea, in 1737; but all the missionaries, eleven in number, dying, the attempt was abandoned; and by the Scottish Missionary Society, in 1797, who sent thither six missionaries.  One (Greig) was murdered, another (Brunton) returned, and went to Tartary; the rest, we believe, went to oilier spheres of labour.  The Church Missionary Society entered upon this field in 1801.]