ege, carried
with them into exile and imprisonment the horrible mutilations
inflicted by Severus and Licinius. In days nearer our own time,
"many a tender maid, at the threshold of her young life, has gladly
met her doom, when the words that accepted Islam would have made her
in a moment a free and honoured member of a dominant community."
Then there is the Romance of the Hermitage and the Romance of the
Cloister, illustrated by Antony in the Egyptian desert, and Benedict
in his cave among the Latin hills, and Francis tending the leper
by the wayside of Assisi. In each of these cases, as in thousands
more, the world was well lost for an idea.

The world is well lost--and supremely well lost--by the Missionary,
whatever be his time or country or creed. Francis Xavier lost it well
when he made his response to the insistent question: "What shall
it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own
soul?" Henry Martyn lost it well when, with perverse foolishness
as men accounted it, he sacrificed the most brilliant prospects
which a University offers to preach and fail among the heathen,
and to die at thirty, forsaken and alone. John Coleridge Patterson
lost it well when, putting behind him all the treasures of Eton and
Oxford, and powerful connexions and an opulent home, he went out
to spread the light of the Gospel amid the isles of the Pacific,
and to meet his death at the hands of the heathen whom he loved
and served.

These, indeed, are the supreme Romances of Renunciation, but others
there are, which, though less "high and heroical," are not less
Teal and not less instructive. The world was well lost (though for
a cause which is not mine) by the two thousand ministers who on
"Black Bartholomew," in the year 1662, renounced their benefices
in the Established Church sooner than accept a form of worship
which their conscience disallowed. And yet again the world was
gloriously lost by the four hundred ministers and licentiates of
the Church of Scotland who, in the great year of the Disruption,
sacrificed home and sanctuary land subsistence rather than compromise
the "Headship of Christ over His own house."

One more instance I must give of these heroic losses, and in giving
it I recall a name, famous and revered in my young days, but now,
I suppose, entirely forgotten--the name of the Honble. and Revd.
Baptist Noel (1798-1873). "His more than three-score years and
ten were dedicated, by the day and by