rvice of their Lord. It
would be easy to select from the home field ministers who, in unwearied
labour, self-denial, and privation for Christ's sake, greatly excel the
ordinary run of missionaries; and it would be equally easy to select
from the foreign field missionaries who greatly excel most of their home
brethren.

In several respects there is a marked contrast in the position of
ministers and missionaries. Ministers labour in their own language,
among their own people, amidst home surroundings and associations; while
missionaries have to part with loved relatives and to betake themselves
to a foreign land, where they have to learn a foreign language, often
languages, at the cost of much time and of wearying application, have
for years, as in the greater part of India, to bear a severe climate,
are called to prosecute their work among a strange, an unsympathetic,
and sometimes a hostile people, and, what is felt by family people to be
the greatest trial of all, they have to send their children to England,
and to live separate from them for years. Some of these trials
missionaries share with their fellow-countrymen, who from secular
motives go to foreign lands, but others are peculiar to their vocation.

While I mention the trials of a missionary career I cannot forget the
trials of ministerial life at home. We should require to shut our eyes
to patent facts if we were to ignore the privations many excellent men
are called to endure, and the varied difficulties they have to encounter
from the character and circumstances of the people among whom they
labour, from the peculiarities of our times, and from the abiding
qualities of human nature, as it is now constituted. Missionaries are
not rich, but they have adequate support, for good or evil are not
dependent for it on the goodwill of those to whom they minister, and
receive it as regularly as if it came from an endowment. With children
sent home for education they have times of great pressure, but much has
been done to aid them in meeting this additional expense. Viewed merely
as to the comfort of living, and ease of mind as to support, the
advantages are not all on the side of the home minister. To counteract
the advantages of the missionary's position to which I have referred, it
must be remembered the average career of service in India is short--some
returning very soon, and others after a few years. Those who return
after years spent abroad, and yet in the prime