The world is well lost—­and supremely well lost—­by the Missionary, whatever be his time or country or creed.  Francis Xavier lost it well when he made his response to the insistent question:  “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Henry Martyn lost it well when, with perverse foolishness as men accounted it, he sacrificed the most brilliant prospects which a University offers to preach and fail among the heathen, and to die at thirty, forsaken and alone.  John Coleridge Patterson lost it well when, putting behind him all the treasures of Eton and Oxford, and powerful connexions and an opulent home, he went out to spread the light of the Gospel amid the isles of the Pacific, and to meet his death at the hands of the heathen whom he loved and served.

These, indeed, are the supreme Romances of Renunciation, but others there are, which, though less “high and heroical,” are not less Teal and not less instructive.  The world was well lost (though for a cause which is not mine) by the two thousand ministers who on “Black Bartholomew,” in the year 1662, renounced their benefices in the Established Church sooner than accept a form of worship which their conscience disallowed.  And yet again the world was gloriously lost by the four hundred ministers and licentiates of the Church of Scotland who, in the great year of the Disruption, sacrificed home and sanctuary land subsistence rather than compromise the “Headship of Christ over His own house.”

One more instance I must give of these heroic losses, and in giving it I recall a name, famous and revered in my young days, but now, I suppose, entirely forgotten—­the name of the Honble. and Revd.  Baptist Noel (1798-1873).  “His more than three-score years and ten were dedicated, by the day and by the hour, to a ministry not of mind but of spirit; his refined yet vigorous eloquence none who listened to it but for once could forget; and, having in earliest youth counted birth and fortune, and fashion but loss ‘for Christ,’ in later age, at the bidding of the same conscience, he relinquished even the church which was his living and the pulpit which was his throne, because he saw danger to Evangelical truth in State alliance, and would go forth at the call of duty, he knew not and he cared not whither.”

After these high examples of the Romance of Renunciation, it may seem rather bathetic to cite the instance which has given rise to this chapter.  Yet I cannot help feeling that Mr. William Temple, by resigning the Rectory of St. James’s, Piccadilly, in order to devote himself to the movement for “Life and Liberty,” has established a strong claim on the respect of those who differ from him.  I state on p. 198 my reason for dissenting from Mr. Temple’s scheme.  To my thinking, it is just one more attempt to stave off Disestablishment.  The subjection of the Church to the State is felt by many to be an intolerable burden.  Mr. Temple