advertisers, bill distributors, &c., &c., also lend their help, while thousands the world over are praying for a blessing.
"Yet with all this stupendous amount of united effort, and all this freely consecrated wealth, with the unique and remarkable gifts of the evangelists themselves, and the rich blessing of God poured upon their labours, what is the utmost the movement can accomplish in the way of reaching the population of the metropolis?
"Fifteen separate missions, in widely different parts of London, will each affect say 25,000, and the whole campaign consequently 375,000. If it extend to sixteen separate missions, then 400,000 persons may hear the message of salvation from these evangelists. This is the utmost that can be hoped for as regards numbers, and may justly be considered a glorious result of the work of one year, the rest of which must needs be more or less devoted to rest.
"But 400,000 is not one-tenth part of the population of London and its suburbs, which is reckoned now at about five millions.
"It would, therefore, take Messrs. Moody and Sankey, and their fellow-workers of every description, twelve years of such intense, arduous, unremitting, and united labour, to carry the gospel to all the people living in London and its suburbs, and it would cost moreover a fabulous sum of money!
"Nor is that all! The inhabitants of London are all nominal Christians to begin with; they can all read; they all have the Bible, they all have some knowledge, however defective, of its contents. Mr. Moody can freely speak to them of the love of God without stopping to explain what love is, or that God is not a bit of painted and gilded wood. He can allude to the good Samaritan or the prodigal son without pausing to tell the stories. He has only to put a finishing touch as it were to a work already more than half done. Other men laboured, and he enters into their labours. Christian mothers. Christian teachers, Christian friends. Christian books and papers, Christian laws and customs. Christian preachers and teachers, have already enlightened the mind and awakened the conscience, and prepared the way of the Lord in the souls to which Mr. Moody preaches and Mr. Sankey sings; and they will continue to water the word when the evangelists are gone. Give them, on the contrary, an audience as unprepared as the crowd that gathers in the street of a Chinese town or an African marketplace, and what would they accomplish by a fortnight's meetings?
"Nor is that all! Moody speaks and Sankey sings to men and women in their own tongue wherein they were born. What if they had first to acquire, and then, with difficulty and many a blunder, to use a foreign idiom? and what, if that idiom, even when fully acquired, contained no words expressive of such ideas as goodness, holiness, love, peace, purity, heaven, or even of His character, according to our conception of the Divine being?
"If it would take the evangelists and all their friends twelve years to evangelize London—and that giving only a fortnight's meetings to each section—how long would it take them effectually to evangelize a similar population of heathen Chinese or Africans? "They could not do it effectually in the term of their natural lives! And what if one or two men had to attempt it without friend or helper of any kind, and in spite of adverse climate and bad health, and poverty and loneliness, and every conceivable discouragement?"
We will now resume our argument. There are, as is well known, eighteen provinces in China Proper. As we cannot expect all our readers to be familiar with their extent and position, we would venture to suggest their reference to the map of China, as they follow our remarks. It will be seen that six of the provinces are on the sea-border; and that of the remaining twelve, Hu-peh is the most central. In these seven provinces, as we have mentioned, 91 Protestant missionaries were to be found from England, America, and Germany in 1865, when the China Inland Mission was formed. That number
