Permit me, at the outset, to announce my opinion, that the claims of the nearer and the more distant work are never incompatible, nor can they, under any wise management of missionary affairs, come into conflict. Both are equally embraced in the comprehensive commission which makes every evangelical Church essentially missionary: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature." In this, the fundamental law of the Church, there is no room for raising questions about the remoteness or the proximity of those whose conversion is intrusted to our Christian zeal and fidelity. Such calculations enter very properly into commercial speculations; but it strikes me that they are essentially out of place in the economy of the Gospel. Our great chart and directory, torture it as we will for responses indulgent to our sloth, affords no data by which we can accurately determine within what limits we may confine our evangelizing efforts, or beyond what degrees of latitude or longitude we are at liberty to leave sinners to perish.

”