pes on the church tower as a
token of victory. It has now become quite customary to invite female
missionaries, and other godly women, to address audiences composed of
both sexes in our churches; the padlock has been taken off the tongue of
any consecrated Christian woman who has a message from the Master. I
invited Miss Willard and Lady Henry Somerset to advocate the Christian
grace of temperance from my pulpit; and if I were still a pastor I
should rejoice to invite that good angel of beneficence, Miss Helen M.
Gould, to deliver there such an address as she lately made in the
splendid building she has erected for the "Naval Christian Association."

Foreign missions were in their early and vigorous growth eighty years
ago. I rode in our family carriage to church with Sheldon Dibble and
Reuben Tinker, who were just leaving Auburn Theological Seminary to go
out as our pioneer missionaries to the Sandwich Islands. The _Missionary
Herald_ was taken in a great number of families and read with great
avidity. Many of the readers were people who not only devoutly prayed
"Thy Kingdom come," but who were willing to stick to a rag carpet, and
deny themselves a "Brussels," in order to contribute more to the spread
of that Kingdom. Wealth has increased to a prodigious and perilous
extent; but the percentage of money given to foreign missions is very
far from what it was in the day of my childhood. It is a growing custom
for ministers to utter a prayer over the contribution boxes when they
are brought back to the platform before the pulpit; I suspect that it in
too many cases should be one of penitential confession.

While I was a student in the Princeton Seminary we had a visit from the
veteran missionary, Levi Spalding, who sailed from Boston to Southern
India in the very first band which invaded the darkness of Hindooism He
was as nearly like my conception of the Apostle Paul as anyone I ever
beheld. He told us that when he was a youth and his heart was first
drawn to the cause of missions, he told his good mother that he had
decided upon a missionary life (which was then thought equivalent to a
martyrdom), and she was perfectly overcome. He said to her: "Mother,
when you gave me as an infant to God in baptism, did you withhold me
from any service to which I might be called?" She assented in a
moment--went to the old chest--from it she took a half-dollar (all the
money she possessed in the world), and, handing it to him, said: "L