Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/560

550 assumed. He began the work among a people speaking one language; his successors preach in sixteen different tongues. He entered a field containing seventeen million souls; his successors are planting missions among three hundred and twenty-five million—one fifth of the human race. He lives to see his younger brethren coursing up and down as messengers of life and peace in a vast region which contains two and a half times as large a population as was comprised in the whole Roman Empire in the days of Barnabas and Paul. His sole assistant, Joel T. Janvier, still survives, but he is now a patriarch in the midst of a great host of men and women whom God has raised up to bear a noble part in the work. Instead of timid, doubting men, who at first came at long intervals to inquire concerning the way of life, the inquirers of the present day are numbered by the thousand. All the year round they stand before us, twenty thousand strong. Truly God has vindicated the counsel of his servant, verified the promises in which he trusted, and crowned his life with tokens of blessing, such as seldom fall to the lot of toilers in the Master's vineyard.

III. Statistical Exhibit in 1894.—Thus far Bishop Thoburn's article, connecting the past and the present, clearly shows “what God has wrought” among the heathen through the instrumentality of our Church. It now remains for me to present the results in statistical tables to enable our readers to comprehend the standing and significance of this great religious movement, and then weigh their own duty in regard to it. God's chosen instruments have evidently been “building better than they knew,” for even here, before the first generation has passed away, we are allowed to behold, with adoring amazement, the divine growth of the precious seed, which they sowed with tears amid the dark and trying scenes of thirty years ago.

English rule some time since nobly struck off the shackles with which the Hindoo code and Brahmin pride had bound the common people of India, leaving them free to do the best they could for themselves. These downtrodden millions never