ect in 1800, in Calcutta, was then generally
deemed a bold and daring step. Hindustan was closed by the East India
Company against the missionaries of the Christian Church. China, too,
seemed hermetically sealed against the gospel. The Jesuit mission had
failed. Christianity was proscribed by an imperial edict. Protestant
missions had not commenced. The language of the nation, like its
walls, seemed to forbid all access to the missionary. In Africa
there were but few missionaries, and these had lately arrived at the
Cape.[A] In the black midnight which brooded over that miserable land,
the cry of tortured slaves alone was heard. New Zealand, Australia,
and the scattered islands of the Southern Seas had not yet been
visited by one herald of the gospel. A solitary beacon gleaming on the
ocean from the missionary ship _Duff_ had indeed been seen, but not
yet welcomed by the savages of Tahiti. The mission was abandoned in
1809, and not a convert left behind! No Protestant missionary had
preached to those Indian tribes beyond the Colonies, who wandered over
the interminable plains which stretch from Behring's Straits to Cape
Horn. Mohammedan States were all shut up against the gospel; and to
forsake the Crescent for the Cross, was to die. In this thick darkness
which covered heathendom, the only light to be seen--except in
India--was in the far north, shed by the self-denying Moravians,--a
light which streamed like a beautiful aurora over the wintry snow and
ice-bound coasts of Greenland. To this gloomy picture we must add the
indifference of the Protestant Church to God's ancient people. No
society then existed for their conversion; and of them it might indeed
be said, "This is Israel, whom no man seeketh after!"

[Footnote A: The first missionary to South Africa was George Schmidt,
sent by the Moravian Brethren in 1736. He laboured alone with some
success till 1743, when he was compelled by the Dutch East India
Company to return to Europe. The mission was resumed in 1792, when
three additional missionaries sailed for the Cape. A few others joined
them in 1798. At the beginning of the century, the converts amounted
to 304. The illustrious Dr Vanderkemp, along with three other
missionaries, were sent to South Africa by the London Missionary
Society in 1799. The only attempts made to Christianise Western Africa
previous to 1800 were by the Moravians in Guinea, in 1737; but all the
missionaries, eleven in number, dying, the at