Excerpt from The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
At its first meeting but five persons were present, and at its second but seven. Its receipts, the first year, were but a thousand dollars. Now its meetings are like the going up of the tribes to Jerusalem; and its annual receipts are three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Then it had no mis sions, and it was not known that any heathen country would be open to them. Now its mission stations belt the globe, so that the sun does not set upon them. And the whole world is open. It has collected and disbursed, with no loss from defalcation, and no suspicion of dishonesty, more than eight mil lions of dollars. It has sent out four hundred and fifteen ordained mission aries, and eight hundred and forty-three not ordained; in all, twelve hundred and fifty-eight. These have established thirty-nine distinct missions, of which twenty-two now remain in connection with the Board; with two hundred and sixty-nine stations and out-stations, employing four hundred and fifty eight native helpers, preachers, and pastors, not including teachers. They have formed one hundred and forty-nine churches, have gathered at least fifty-five thousand church-members, of whom more than twenty thousand are now in connection with its churches. It has under its care three hundred and sixty-nine seminaries and schools, and in them more than ten thousand children. It has printed more than a thousand millions of pages, in forty different languages. It has reduced eighteen languages to writing, thus forming the germs of a new literature. It has raised a nation from the lowest forms of heathenism to a Christian civilization, so that a larger pro portion of its people can read than in New England. It has done more to extend and to diffuse in this land a knowledge of different countries and people than any or all other agencies, and the reaction upon the churches of this foreign work has been invaluable. - pp. 16, 17.
Greatly to the embarrassment and sorrow of its projectors, but to their subsequent joy and gratitude, a double seed, withthe elements Of a divergent growth, was planted at the very outset. Two of the first missionaries of the Board became Baptists on their way to India. An appeal was thus made to another numerous and powerful body of Christians to sustain their new-born brethren in the work to which they had conse crated themselves. Thence originated the Baptist Missionary Union, whose history runs along with that of its elder sister in letters of light, illustrated by the Christian heroism of Judson and the noble women who successively bore the cross at his side, by the gentleness and courage, the incredible endurance and triumphant death, Of Boardman, and by numerous other honored names, which formed the subject of one of our papers in an earlier volume of this journal.
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