MISSAL 



'ie for damages for misrepresenta- 

 tion unless the statement was either 

 made fraudulently, with knowledge 

 of its falsity, or was a warranty. 



Missal OR MASS-BOOK. Office 

 book of the R.C. Church. It contains 

 the service for Mass throughout the 

 year. Revised and printed under 

 Pius V, when the Council of Trent, 

 1570, ordered its use in all churches 

 that could not claim uses of their 

 own of 200 years' standing, it was 

 again revised in 1604 and 1634. Of 

 the nine service books used by the 

 Church of England before the 

 Reformation, that known as the 

 missal was in four parts : the 

 antiphonary or gradual, contain- 

 ing parts to be sung by the choir 

 at high mass ; the lectionary, or 

 book of the epistles ; the evangelis- 

 tarium, or book of the Gospels ; 

 and the sacramentary, containing 

 the prayers. The first mention of a 

 missal is found in the 8th century. 

 A plenary missal for use of priests 

 appeared in the llth or 12th cen- 

 tury. There are various missals for 

 different rites or uses, Ambrosian, 

 Sarum, Hereford, Lincoln, York, 

 Bangor, etc. See Prayer Book. 



Missel Thrush OR MISTLE 

 THRUSH (Turdus viscivorus). Com- 

 mon British song-bird. Nearly re- 



5450 



MISSIONS 



Missel Thrush, a common song-bird 

 of the British hedgerows 



By courtesy of Macmillan A Co , 



lated to the song thrush, but dis- 

 tinguished from it by its larger size, 

 greyer colour, more prominent 

 spots on the under parts, and the 

 greyish white tips to the lateral 

 tail feathers, it is the largest of the 

 British song-birds and is most 

 abundant in Ireland. In the N. of 

 Scotland it is rather rare. Its song 

 is most notable in the winter, 

 especially in wet weather, giving it 

 its local name of stormcock. It 

 nests in trees early in the spring, 

 and two or even three broods are 

 reared in the season. It feeds on 

 worms, grubs, snails, insects, and 

 the berries of many plants, par- 

 ticularly the mistletoe, whence its 

 name. See Eggs, colour plate. 



Missenden, GREAT AND LITTLE. 

 Two parishes and villages, Bucking- 

 hamshire, England. They lie 9 m. 

 S. by E. of Aylesbury, on the Met. 

 and G.C. Rlys. Missenden Abbey, 

 a seat at Great Missenden, em- 

 braces the cloisters of the 12th cent, 

 abbey. Pop., Gt. 2,600, Lit. 1,300. 



MISSIONS: A CHRISTIAN ACTIVITY 



J. H. Oldhara, Editor, The International Review of Missions 



In connexion with this subject see the articles on the various 

 Christian denominations, e.g. Baptists ; Church of England ; Con- 

 gregationalism ; Wesleyan Methodists, etc. See also biographies of 

 Carey ; Chalmers, Livingstone, and other missionaries 



The word mission (Lat. mittere, 

 to send) refers in a general sense to 

 a body of persons sent on an er~and. 

 It is thus used for those sent to 

 represent their country abroad, e.g. 

 the British mission in China, and for 

 persons sent for a particular pur- 

 pose and for a short time. In the 

 plural, however, it is used almost 

 solely for bodies of men and women 

 sent by religious organizations to 

 work among the unconverted. Such 

 missions are often divided into 

 home and foreign, but it is the 

 latter which forms a special chap- 

 ter in the history of the Christian 

 Church. There are also missions, in 

 the same sense, sent out by 

 Mahomedans, Buddhists, and 

 others. 



Missions and the Crusades 



The history of Christian missions 

 i alls into two periods. The first was 

 from the Apostolic age until about 

 A.D. 1100, when most of Europe 

 was Christian except remote 

 regions in the N.E., and the 

 Mahomedan part of Spain. The 

 Crusades tended to replace mis- 

 sions by attempts to convert the 

 heathen and Moslems by the 

 sword, a process ruthlessly carried 

 on in Prussia, Lithuania, Esthonia, 

 etc., and missionary work lan- 

 guished, though it never ceased. 



The second period began with 

 the era of exploration and Euro- 

 pean expansion that opened in the 

 latter part of the 15th century, when 

 missionaries, mainly Franciscan 

 and Dominican, accompanied the 

 Spanish and Portuguese expedi- 

 tions. The Society of Jesus, 

 founded in 1534, was from the 

 first a missionary order, including 

 among its original members Francis 

 Xavier (1506-52), the ardent 

 apostle of India and the Far East. 

 Considerable successes were 

 achieved in the 17th century in 

 India, China, Japan, Indo-China, 

 the Philippines, where the entire 

 population became nominally 

 Christian, in parts of Africa, and in 

 N. and S. America, but much of 

 the work was superficial. The 

 18th century witnessed a slackening 

 in most of the mission fields, and 

 it was not until the second quarter 

 of the 19th century that a new 

 missionary expansion of the Roman 

 Catholic Church began. 



The leaders of the Protestant 

 Reformation were too much pre- 

 occupied with controversies at 

 home to undertake missionary 

 effort abroad, and as authority 



over the lands discovered by the 

 explorers was committed by the 

 pope to Spain and Portugal, these 

 territories were closed to Protes- 

 tant missions. It is nevertheless 

 remarkable that not only were the 

 leaders of the Reformation in- 

 different to the claims of the non- 

 Christian world, but the leading 

 theologians explicitly denied the 

 missionary obligation. In the 17th 

 century the Dutch East India Co. 

 was enjoined by its charter to care 

 for the conversion of the heathen, 

 and the efforts of its preachers met 

 with some success in Ceylon and 

 the Malay Archipelago, though the 

 work was mostly perfunctory. 



The labours of John Eliot on 

 behalf of the American Indians 

 were an expression of the pure 

 missionary spirit, of which the 

 times afford no other outstanding 

 example. In Great Britain the 

 Society for Promoting Christian 

 Knowledge was founded in 1698 

 and the Society for the Propaga- 

 tion of the Gospel in 1701, but no 

 important work among non-Chris- 

 tians was initiated by either society. 

 In the 18th cent, the two outstand- 

 ing missionary efforts were the 

 Danish Mission in India inspired by 

 the Pietist movement in Germany 

 under Hermann August Francke 

 of Halle, and associated with Zie- 

 genbalg (1683-1719) and Schwartz 

 (1726-98) ; and the work of Mora- 

 vian missionaries, under the guid- 

 ance and inspiration of Count von 

 Zinzendorf (1700-60), among the 

 negroes of the West Indies, the 

 Greenlanders, the N. American In- 

 dians,and the Bushmen of S. Africa. 

 Wesleyan and Baptist Missions 



The modern missionary move- 

 ment had its beginnings in the 

 closing years of the 18th century. 

 The zeal of the early Methodists 

 found expression in isolated efforts 

 to reach the heathen, though the 

 Wesleyan Methodist Missionary 

 Society was not organized till 1813. 

 The Baptist Missionary Society 

 was founded in 1792 and William 

 Carey went to India as its fiist 

 missionary. The London Mis- 

 sionary Society was formed in 

 1795, the Church Missionary So- 

 ciety in 1799, and the British 

 and Foreign Bible Society in 

 1804. From 1817 the Society for 

 the Propagation of the Gospel 

 began to take an active share in 

 foreign missionary work. The first 

 American missionary society, the 

 American Board of Commissioners 



