The labours and sacrifices of the converted natives are more striking than in any other missions.  Many islands have been converted solely by means of a native agency, and are superintended by native preachers only.  Let us take the Sandwich Islands as illustrating what has been accomplished for the natives, and by them.  The American Mission was commenced in 1824.  These islands have been converted long ago to Christianity, so that not a vestige of idolatry remains, and not only do they support their own clergy and schools, but have their own Bible and Foreign Missionary Society.  They raise for these objects about L4000 per annum, and support six missionaries to the heathen islands around them.  The communicants in the islands amount to upwards of 25,000, and the children who attend the common schools to a still greater number.

[Footnote A:  The first idol which, a catechist from Raratonga, who visited London in 1848, ever beheld, was in the Museum of the London Missionary Society.]

If we turn our eye to the great Western Continent, we see the gospel preached to its wandering Indian tribes; while the condition of Mexico and of California affords every prospect of the rapid extension of truth through kingdoms long benighted.

Mohammedan countries have also been opened to the missionary.  Through the influence of Lord Aberdeen and Sir Stratford Canning, the Sultan was induced in 1844 to give religious toleration to his subjects; so that now, for the first time, a Mussulman may change his faith without incurring punishment.  Several societies labour in Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor, Greece, and Constantinople.  The Euphrates is being dried up.  The Mohammedan power is tottering, and ready to fall!  When it dies and is buried, who will wear mourning at its funeral?

And how strange is the meeting between the distant East and West, the distant past and near present, visible in the fact, that it is missionaries from America who now unveil to the dwellers in the land of the Chaldees, and to the wanderers among the mountains which shadow the birth-place of the human race, that blessed faith and hope which dwelt in Abram, as he journeyed at the dawn of history from that old land, and which has returned thither again in Christian men embued with Abram’s faith, after having accompanied civilisation around the globe?  God’s blessing has signally attended the American mission among the Nestorians.  The revival of religion in their schools and churches has been great and glorious.

May we not exclaim, What hath God wrought!  Yet how can any statistics carry to our hearts a sense of what has been done for immortal souls by the gospel during this eventful period?  What homes have been made happy by it; what families united in the bonds of love; what sick-beds soothed; what dying beds cheered; what minds illumined, and what hearts filled with joy unspeakable, and full of glory!