It has been my endeavour in the ensuing narratives to bring together such of the more distinguished Missionaries of the English and American nations as might best illustrate the character and growth of Mission work in the last two centuries. It is impossible to make it a real history of the Missions of modern times. If I could, I would have followed in the track of Mr. Maclear’s admirable volume, but the field is too wide, the material at once too numerous and too scattered, and the account of the spread of the Gospel in the distant parts of the earth has yet to be written in volumes far exceeding the bulk of those allotted to the Sunday Library. Two large classes of admirable Missions have been purposely avoided, —namely, those of the Jesuits in Japan, China, and North and South America, and those of the Moravians in Greenland, the United States, and Africa. These are noble works, but they are subjects apart, and our narratives deal with men exclusively of British blood, with the exception of Schwartz, whose toils were so entirely accepted and adopted by the Church of England, that he cannot but be reckoned among her ambassadors. The object, then, has been to throw together such biographies as are most complete, most illustrative, and have been found most inciting to stir up others—representative lives, as far as possible—from the time when p. vithe destitution of the Red Indians first stirred the heart of John Eliot, till the misery of the hunted negro brought Charles Mackenzie to the banks of the fever-haunted Zambesi.
