Another writer, Dr. D.L. Leonard, historian of the century of missions, says:
"The closing years of the eighteenth century constitute in the history of Protestant missions an epoch indeed, since they witnessed nothing less than a revolution, a renaissance, an effectual and manifold ending of the old, a substantial inauguration of the new. It was then that for the first time since the apostolic period, occurred an outburst of general missionary zeal and activity. Beginning in Great Britain, it soon spread to the Continent and across the Atlantic. It was no mere push of fervor, but a mighty tide set in, which from that day to this has been steadily rising and spreading."—"A Hundred Years of Missions," p. 69.
The time of the prophecy had come, and the hand of providence was bringing into being agencies that have spread light and knowledge over all lands.
"Look where the missionary's feet have trod—
Flowers in the desert bloom; and fields, for God,
Are white to harvest. Skeptics may ignore;
Yet on the conquering Word, from shore to shore,
Like flaming chariot, rolls. Ask ocean isles,
And plains of Ind, where ceaseless summer smiles;
Speak to far frozen wastes, where winter's blight
Remains;—they tell the love, attest the might
Of Him whose messengers across the wave
To them salvation bore, hope, freedom gave."
—Horace D. Woolley.
The organization of foreign missionary enterprise was quickly accompanied by the establishment of Bible societies for a systematic work of translating and world-wide distribution of the Scriptures. In 1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society was organized. Students of the prophetic word felt at the time that these agencies were coming in fulfilment of the prophecy. One writer of those times said:
"The stupendous endeavors of one gigantic community to convey the Scriptures in every language to every part of the globe may well deserve to be considered as an eminent sign even of these eventful times. Unless I be much mistaken, such endeavors are preparatory to the final grand diffusion of Christianity, which is the theme of so many inspired prophets, and which cannot be very far distant in the present day."—G.S. Faber, D.D., "Dissertation on the Prophecies," Vol. II, p. 406 (1844).
Now the Word of God, in whole or in part, is speaking in more than five hundred languages, and it is estimated that these tongues, at least in their spoken form, can make the divine message comprehensible to ninety-five per cent of the inhabitants of the earth.
The work of modern missions, that had its birth as the time of the end came, is one of the great world factors today. Nearly thirty million dollars a year are given for Protestant missions, and a force of more than twenty thousand foreign missionaries is in the field, not counting the many thousands of native missionaries and helpers. Truly the time of the end is proving to be an era of increasing light and knowledge.