It is probable that a High School or Seminary for girls will be opened by Miss Kip in Tripoli during the coming year.

The preceding schedule can give but a faint idea of the struggles and toil, the patient labors, disappointments and trials of faith through which the women of the American Mission have passed during the last forty years, in beginning and maintaining so many of these schools for girls in Syria.

Did I speak of trials?  The Missionary work has its trials, but I believe that its joys are far greater.  The saddest scenes I have witnessed during a residence of seventeen years in Syria, have been when Missionaries have been obliged to leave the work and return to their native land.  There are trials growing out of the hardness of the human heart, our own want of faith, the seeming slow progress of the gospel, and the heart-crushing disappointments arising from broken hopes, when individuals and communities who have promised well, turn back to their old errors “like the dog to his vomit” again.  But of joys it is much easier to speak, the joy of preaching Christ to the perishing,—­of laboring where others will not labor,—­of laying foundations for the future,—­of feeling that you are doing what you can to fulfil the Saviour’s last command,—­of seeing the word of God translated into a new language,—­a christian literature beginning to grow,—­children and youth gathered into Schools and Seminaries of learning, and even sects which hate the Bible obliged to teach their children to read it,—­of seeing christian families growing up, loving the Sabbath and the Bible, the sanctuary and the family altar.—­Then there is the joy of seeing souls born into the kingdom of our dear Redeemer, and churches planted in a land where pure Christianity had ceased to exist,—­and of witnessing unflinching steadfastness in the midst of persecution and danger, and the triumphs of faith in the solemn hour of death.

These are a few of the joys which are strewn so thickly along the path of the Christian Missionary, that he has hardly time to think of sorrow, trial and discouragement.  Those who have read Dr. Anderson’s “History of Missions to the Oriental Churches,” and Rev. Isaac Bird’s “History of the Syria Mission,” or “Bible Work in Bible Lands,” will see that the work of the Syria Mission from 1820 to 1872 has been one of conflict with principalities and powers, and with spiritual wickedness in high and low places, but that at length the hoary fortresses are beginning to totter and fall, and there is a call for a general advance in every department of the work, and in every part of the land.

Other agencies have come upon the ground since the great foundation work was laid, and the first great victories won, and in their success it becomes all of God’s people to rejoice; but the veterans who fought the first battles, and overcame the great national prejudice of the Syrian people against female education, should ever be remembered with gratitude.