political rule. Italy has
already begun the construction of 400 miles of railway in Tripoli. In
Algiers and down through the Sahara toward the Sudan the steel lines
are being laid by France. God is evidently preparing his people for a
great advance among Mohammedans. The great question now is whether his
Church will be equal to the emergency.

II. THE MULTIPLYING AGENCIES OF THE KINGDOM

=The Number and Growing Efficiency of Missionary Societies.=--More
than two hundred years ago Bartholomew Ziegenbalg and his colaborer
Pluetschau were ordained missionaries to India in the city of
Copenhagen; and two years later, in 1707, at Tranquebar, the first
Protestant Church of the non-Christian world was established in South
India among the Tamil people. Later the great Schwartz and others
carried on the work resulting in the founding of the missionary work
of the present day in India.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century there were two important
missionary organizations in Great Britain. On the continent the
Lutherans and Moravians were struggling heroically in the carrying on
of their missionary operations. There were scarcely more than a dozen
missionary societies altogether in the whole world, either well
established or just beginning. It was a very small and feeble list of
organizations compared with that of the present day. The Edinburgh
Missionary Conference reported that there were 994 missionary
organizations in Christendom in 1910. These have nearly all come into
existence within the century.

Among the indications of increased efficiency the following may be
named:

1. Unity and Cooeperation. It has been well said that "The three dominant
notes of our time are unity, reality, and universality." That there is a
growing spirit of unity in the home Church is illustrated by the way the
mission boards are cooeperating in the work of the interdenominational
missionary movements, by the growing number of interdenominational
training-schools for missionary candidates, and by organizations like
the Home Missions Council and the Conference of Foreign Mission Boards
in which there is interchange of ideas and plans and methods among the
leaders of the home and foreign missionary activities.

Nowhere have Christian unity and practical cooeperation made greater
progress than in the foreign missions of American Churches. In several
lands there are now conspicuous illustrations of the practical working
of this spirit