by the devotees of physical science.  God’s Word is explored in our day—­the same clay which has seen the great work of the Revised Version of the Scriptures begun and completed—­with no less ardour than God’s world.  And what vast additions have been made to our knowledge of this earth!  We have seen Nineveh unburied, the North-West Passage explored, and the mysterious Nile stream at last tracked to its source.  To compare a fifty-years-old map of Africa with one of the present day will a little enable us to estimate the advances made in our acquaintance with the Dark Continent alone; similar maps including the Polar regions of North America will testify also to a large increase of hard-won knowledge.

[Illustration:  David Livingstone.]

[Illustration:  Sir John Franklin.]

Exploration—­Arctic, African, Oriental and Occidental—­has had its heroic devotees, sometimes its martyrs.  Witness Franklin, Burke and Wills, and Livingstone.  The long uncertainty overhanging the fate of the gallant Franklin, after he and the expedition he commanded had vanished into the darkness of Arctic winter in 1845, and the unfaltering faithfulness with which his widow clung to the search for her lost husband, form one of the most pathetic chapters of English story.  The veil was lifted at last and the secret of the North-West Passage, to which so many lives had been sacrificed, was brought to light in the course of the many efforts made to find the dead discoverer.  As Franklin had disappeared in the North, so Livingstone was long lost to sight in the wilds of Africa, and hardly less feverish interest centred round the point, so long disputed, of his being in life or in death—­interest freshly awakened when the remains of the heroic explorer, who had been found only to be lost again, were brought home to be laid among the mighty dead of England.  The fervent Christian philanthropy of Livingstone endeared him yet more to the national heart; and we may here note that very often, as in his case, the missionary has served not only Christianity, as was his first and last aim, but also geographical and ethnological science and colonial and commercial development.  We have briefly referred already to some of the struggles, the sufferings, and the triumphs of missionary enterprise in our day:  to chronicle all its effort and achievement would be difficult, for these have been world-wide, and often wonderfully successful.  Nor has much less success crowned other agencies for meeting the ever-increasing need for religious knowledge, which multiply and grow in number and in power.  Witness, among many that might be named, the continuous development of the Sunday School system and the immensely extended operations of the unsectarian Bible Society.

[Illustration:  John Ruskin. From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry.]