Excerpt from Presbyterian Home Missions: An Account of the Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A The work of home missions in this country has been, in large measure, identical with the work of the Church and, accordingly, the history of home missions is, in large part, the history of the Church. If it is true that the organized work of home missions, as now represented by our Board, is only a hundred years old, it is because up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, all church work was literally home missionary work. To live was to be aggressive. The older East was then a frontier region and settled pastors were forced to be missionaries or they failed. Moreover, the truth that foreign missions and home missions are one, and not two, has its proof in the primitive stages of American Christianity. The Indians were aliens though they were the aborigines, and Edwards and Brainerd and Whitman were as truly foreign missionaries, as were Speer and Loomis among the Chinese of San Francisco. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.