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536 would go out into different parts of the empire, it was reasonable to expect that they would carry their preferences and ideas with them, and that this would almost inevitably result in the establishment of those forms of Christianity with which they had been familiar. It thus came to pass at an early day that a question was raised among our missionaries as to the possibility, and even probability, of our being obliged to extend our boundaries, especially on the western side of the Ganges, which at that time limited our progress in that direction. Dr. Butler was among the first, if not indeed the very first, to perceive the inevitable tendency of a work like ours, situated as it then was, to move forward without much regard for artificial barriers, and I can very well recall a proposition which he made near the close of 1863, for us to establish a mission station at a point on the western side of the Ganges, where there seemed to be a special call for us. In my own mind the proposal did not meet with a moment's favor. It seemed to me that we were already staggering under burdens which we could not carry, and that a great many long years, if not generations, must elapse before we could think of moving so far beyond our chosen limits. Nearly every one in the Mission looked with equal disfavor upon the proposal, and no one dreamed that within the short space of seven years our missionaries, after a careful canvass of the whole subject, would deliberately resolve to cross that river, which lay on our westward border like another Rubicon, and open work in a field which thereafter was to have no permanent boundary until it reached the sea.

Such an enlargement was inevitable from the first, although none of us were able at that early day to anticipate what afterward happened. If a similar attempt were to be made at the present time, if a body of twenty men, inspired with an enthusiastic confidence in the success of their work, moved by an ardent zeal for God and for the salvation of souls, and profoundly believing that the testimony with which they were intrusted was to be carried to the uttermost parts of the earth—if