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The Fundamentals Not only is the missionary duty inherent in the nature of Christianity and in the Christian conception of God, i. e., in the real character of God, but it is imbedded in the very pur pose of the Christian Church. .There were no missionary or ganizations in the early Church. No effort was made to pro mote a missionary propaganda, but the religion spread at once and everywhere. The genius' of universal extension was in the Church. “We may take it as an assured fact,” says Har- nack, “that the mere existence and persistent activity of the individual Christian communities did more than anything else to bring about the extension of the Christian religion.” Bishop Montgomery in his little book on “Foreign Mis sions” recalls Archbishop Benson’s definition of four ages of missions, “First, when the whole Church acted as one; next, when missions were due to great saints; thirdly, to the action o f governments; lastly, the age of missionary societies.” The Church at the outset was a missionary society. The new Christians were drawn together spontaneously by the uniting power of a common life, and they felt as spontaneously the outward pressure of a world mission. The triumphant prose cution of that mission and the moral fruits of this new and uniting life were their apologetics. They ¿id not sit down within the walls of a formalised and stiffened institution to compose reasoned arguments for Christianity. The new re ligion would have rotted out from heresy and anaemia in two generations if they had done so. As an old writer of the Church of England has put i t : “The way in which the Gospel would seem to be intended to be alike preserved and perpetuated on earth is not by its being jealously guarded by a chosen order and cautiously communicated to a precious few, but by being so widely scattered and so thickly sown that it shall be impossible, from the very extent of its spreading, merely to be rooted up. It was designed to be not as a perpetual fire in the temple, to be tended with jealous assiduity and to be fed only with special oil; but rather as a
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