attractive and convincing way, the special truths and the
supreme excellence of our faith. The number is annually increasing, both
among native Christians and in the non-Christian community, of those who
can read and whose taste for books is growing.

This method of approach to the mind of the people has peculiar advantages
of its own. The prejudices connected with Christian instruction, as it
proceeds directly from the lips of the teacher or preacher, does not exist
in connection with tracts and books. These printed messengers of truth and
salvation quietly and effectively do their work in the silent hours of the
night and in the secret recesses of the woods or of the solitary chamber.
And this message is the more effective because it may be read and pondered
more than once, until its truth grips the soul in convicting and saving
power.

The power of the printed page, as a Christian messenger in India, is
second to none at present; and its influence will multiply mightily as the
years increase. Missions and individual missionaries should enter more
fully into this work; none needs increasing emphasis more than this; and
none has larger hopes of preeminence in the great work of India's
redemption. Missionary societies also should devote more men, than in the
past, to the creation of a strong Christian literature.

And even where missions are too weak to publish anything of their own and
are unable to write books or tracts; there is a wide field of usefulness
open to them in a thoroughly systematic and energetic work of distributing
the existing literature produced by the great societies. In some missions
this work of circulating Scriptures and Christian books has been reduced
almost to a science and has become an exceedingly efficient help to the
cause in those districts. Other missions have yet to learn the importance
and blessing of this activity.

(_e_) Medical Work.

This department of missionary effort has a wide sphere of usefulness.
Though not so urgently necessary now as in former times in India, owing to
the ubiquitous and efficient Government Medical Department, it is
nevertheless popular and very useful. This is specially so when the whole
work and its agency are brought into full subjection to the Christian, as
distinct from the purely humanitarian, motive. No other department is more
capable of being utilized as an evangelizing agency; and in many missions
its influence is thus widely felt. Ever