Preface

I COUNT it a privilege to introduce the fascinating story in the following pages to what, I hope, will be a large circle of readers, both in this country and in Canada.

Among the many Missionary books which the present day has produced, I can recall none which contains so complete and so vivid a description of the commencement and development of a Mission in a single life-time as Mr. Hines has given in the description of his own experiences.

Forty-one years ago, a young farmer, obedient to the call of God, he offered himself to the Church Missionary Society, and describes the circumstances with a freshness of memory that will appeal to many others, both interviewed and interviewers.

Then, by a manifestly Divine Providence, he was directed to the very place where his gifts and knowledge were best fitted to find a field for useful employment.

He has lived to see heathenism all but extinct in the country to which he went. He has been the means of planting Christian Churches and schools in many places, as well as of teaching the Indians settled habits and profitable industries, and, best of all, he has seen a native ministry raised up and many proofs of a keen Missionary spirit among them and their people.

The story is the more attractive from being in the form of a personal narrative, which it naturally takes. The writer carries his hearers along with him in his lively pictures of the country and its people; the trials and perils, discouragements. and difficulties, successes and sorrows of a long life of Missionary service.

Still more would I commend it as one of the many evidences which our God is giving us in these unsettled days of the stability of His Word and the unfailing power of that old Gospel "unto salvation to every one that believeth."

H. E. Fox,
Prebendary of St. Paul's and late Hon. Secretary to the C.M.S.

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