The History of the Church Missionary Society - Its Environment, Its Men and Its Work #264860

If, as we earnestly hope, the completion of one hundred years of effort and of blessing is but the introduction to and the starting-point of the greater efforts and fuller blessings which our Heavenly Father has in store for us, it is surely right that we should be reminded of the faith and perseverance of the early founders of our Society, which enabled them to surmount obstacles from which our path is free, and overcome difficulties of which we have little conception. The expansion of England, the stages of its development from the little kingdom of Alfred to the Empire within whose bounds nearly a third of the human race own allegiance to Queen Victoria, has for us all an absorbing interest. Little less marvellous, even more absorbing, is the record of the steps by which God has led us on our way. What joy it is to tell how there has been given to us day by day and year by year that of which we have had need: how door after door has been opened, and one after another has been raised up to enter in or to go out and take up the work that lay to our hand to do.