what it costs to look up the precious souls among the cocoanuts and bread-fruit.” There are people who think Dickens's idea in drawing that picture was to pooh-pooh the work of missions abroad while there remains any trace of destitution at home. Happily, we live in better times. The “Poor Joes” of the twentieth century have far more people to look after them than had those of fifty years ago, and it is a gratifying fact that the growth of missionary philanthropy has advanced in proportion to the increase of home benevolence. So far from hindering, each stimulates the other.
In dealing with phases of Church work, the achievements of the C.M.S. both invite and deserve the most careful attention. The C.M.S. has a most interesting history. Its beginnings were small. It was laid upon the hearts of a few earnest clergymen—among them John Venn, Rector of Clapham; John Newton, Rector of St Mary, Woolnoth, once a slave-dealer and open evil liver; and Charles Simeon, of Cambridge—that the Church ought to set seriously to work on the evangelisation of people outside the British possessions or “plantations,” as they were called at that time. The S.P.C.K. had been established in 1698, the S.P.G. in 1701, the Baptist Missionary Society in 1795, and the London Missionary Society in 1795, but up to that period there was no strictly Church of England society which made it its exclusive object
