it, at
its second meeting, proceeded effective measures for the promotion of
education in the ministry, and, under the conviction that "western as
well as eastern regions are given to the Son of God as an inheritance,"
large plans for home missions at the West.

Thus the great debt which the English Congregationalists had owed to the
Baptists for heroic leadership in the work of foreign missions was
repaid with generous usury by the Congregationalists to the Baptists of
America. From this time forward the American Baptists came more and more
to be felt as a salutary force in the religious life of the nation and
the world. But against what bitter and furious opposition on the part of
the ancient ignorance the new light had to struggle cannot easily be
conceived by those who have only heard of the "Hard-Shell Baptist" as a
curious fossil of a prehistoric period.[255:1]

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions continued for
twenty-seven years to be the common organ of foreign missionary
operations for the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, and the Dutch
and German Reformed churches. In the year 1837 an official Presbyterian
Board of Missions was erected by the Old-School fragment of the
disrupted Presbyterian Church; and to this, when the two fragments were
reunited, in 1869, the contributions of the New-School side began to be
transferred. In 1858 the Dutch church, and in 1879 the German church,
instituted their separate mission operations. Thus the initiative of the
Andover students in 1810 resulted in the erection, not of one mission
board, timidly venturing to set five missionaries in the foreign field,
but of five boards, whose total annual resources are counted by millions
of dollars, whose evangelists, men and women, American and foreign-born,
are a great army, and whose churches, schools, colleges, theological
seminaries, hospitals, printing-presses, with the other equipments of a
Christian civilization, and the myriads of whose faithful Christian
converts, in every country under the whole heaven, have done more for
the true honor of our nation than all that it has achieved in diplomacy
and war.[255:2]

The Episcopalians entered on foreign mission work in 1819, and the
Methodists, tardily but at last with signal efficiency and success, in
1832. No considerable sect of American Christians at the present day is
unrepresented in the foreign field.

In order to complete the history of this orga