uctions to his starting.

At first his friends gave him credit for being mad, for people are
somewhat slow to believe in disinterested self-sacrifice; and the idea
of a clergyman with a comfortable living in Norway, who had, besides, a
wife and four small children, voluntarily resolving to go to a region in
which men could be barely said to live, merely for the purpose of
preaching Christ to uncivilised savages, seemed to them absurd. They
little knew the power of the missionary spirit, or rather, the power of
the Holy Spirit, by which some great men are actuated! But, after all,
if in the world's experience many men are found ready to take their
lives in their hands, and cheerfully go to the coldest, hottest, and
wildest regions of earth at the call of duty, or "glory," or gold, is it
strange that some men should be found willing to do the same thing for
the love of God and the souls of men?

Be this as it may, it is certain that the soul of good Hans Egede became
inflamed with a burning desire to go as a missionary to Greenland, and
from the time that the desire arose, he never ceased to pray and strive
towards the accomplishment of his purpose. His thoughts were first
turned in that direction by reading of Christian men from his own
country, who, centuries before, had gone to Greenland, established
colonies, been decimated by sickness, and then almost exterminated by
the natives--at least so it was thought, but all knowledge of them had
long been lost. A friend in Bergen who had made several voyages to
Greenland aroused Egede's pity for his lost countrymen, some of whom, it
was supposed, had sunk back into paganism for want of teachers. His
thoughts and his desires grew, and the first difficulty presented itself
in the form of a doubt as to whether it was allowable to forsake his
congregation. Besides, several near relations as well as wife and
children were dependent on him for sustenance, which increased the
initial difficulty.

But "where there's a will there's a way" is a proverb, the truth of
which Hans Egede very soon began to exemplify. Not least among this
good man's difficulties seemed to be his modesty, for he was troubled
with "extreme diffidence and the fear of being charged with
presumption."

At last, in the year 1710, he determined to make a humble proposal to
Bishop Randulph of Bergen, and to Bishop Krog of Drontheim, entreating
them to support at court his plans for the conversion of the