PREFACE.

T is not an unusual thing in the present day to hear people exclaim, The dark times of persecution have long since passed away! They belonged

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to the earlier period of the Church's history. Now every one can serve God as he pleases without fear of molestation, imprisonment, torture, and death." To a casual observer this may appear to be the case. In Great Britain, in Protestant Germany, in France, and in all other countries illumined by the

light of the Gospel ray, "Freedom to worship God" is the watchword Occasionally, perhaps, one hears of a solitary instance where coercion has been used, and the victim forced into adopting a strange creed. But such cases are rare, and one naturally turns to the "dark places of the earth," to those spots where, as yet, the "Sun of Righteousness has not arisen with healing on His wings "-to the haunts of ignorance, vice, and superstition-and there one is not surprised to hear that, when the Message of Salvation is proclaimed and converts come forward boldly to profess their faith in a once Crucified, but now Living and Glorified Redeemer, persecutions have broken out, that the Christians newly gathered into the fold of the Good Shepherd have had

to submit to losses and privations, and even, it may be, to cruel torments and a martyr's death.

In civilized countries, however, where religious toleration is the boast of the people, such terms as "martyrdom" and "persecution " are, one is told, obsolete. The words of the Saviour disprove the assertion, "I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am

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come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and daughter-in-law against her motherin-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his Own household." Especially has this been the case with the Jews. "Every Israelite who joins the Church is regarded as a traitor to his race and an ally of those who consider the cruci

fixion the climax of national guilt.' All ties of kindred and friendship are ruptured or ignored, and he is looked upon as an outcast and an apostate. So recently as about twelve months ago the following paragraph appeared in an article in the Boston Morning Star, in which the progress of Evangelistic work amongst the Jews was discussed: "The bitterness of the proscription, to which every convert is subjected by his Jewish relatives and countrymén, is said to be without any parallel in modern times, unless among the Turks and Hindus. Pathetic and well-nigh tragic instances are transpiring in Brooklyn and New York to-day which vividly recall the age of martyrdom, both by the fury of the persecution and by the Divine glory of the faith and