For the need of system seems to me one of the great morals to be deduced
from the lives I have here collected. I confess that I began them with
the unwilling belief that greater works had been effected by persons
outside the pale of the Church than by those within; but as I have gone
on, the conviction has grown on me that even though the individuals were
often great men, their works lacked that permanency and grasp that Church
work, as such, has had.

The equality of rank in the ministry of other bodies has prevented the
original great founders from being invested with the power that is really
needed in training and disciplining inferior and more inexperienced
assistants, and produces a want of compactness and authority which has
disastrous effects in movements of emergency. Moreover, the lack of
forms causes a deficiency of framework for religion to attach itself to,
and this is almost fatal to dealing with unintellectual minds.

On the whole, the East Indian Missions have prospered best. Schwartz was
the very type of a founder, with his quiet, plodding earnestness, and
power of being generally valuable; and the impression he made had not had
time to die away before the Episcopate brought authority to deal with the
difficulties he had left. Martyn was, like Brainerd before him, one of
the beacons of the cause, and did more by his example than by actual
teaching; and the foundation of the See of Calcutta gave stability to the
former efforts. Except Heber, the Bishops of the Indian See were not
remarkable men, but their history has been put together as a whole for
the sake of the completion of the subject, as a sample of the
difficulties of the position, and likewise because of the steady progress
of the labours there recorded.

The Serampore brethren are too notable to be passed over, if only for the
memorable fact that Carey the cobbler lighted the missionary fire
throughout England and America at a time when the embers had become so
extinct that our Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had to borrow
workers from Denmark and Germany. Indeed, Martyn's zeal was partly
lighted by Carey, though the early termination of his labours has forced
me to place his biography before that of the longer-lived Baptist
friends--both men of curious and wonderful powers, but whose history
shows the disadvantages of the Society government, and whose achievements
were the less permanent in consequence. The Burmese branch of