The London Missionary Society, on its establishment in 1795, directed its first efforts to the islands of the Pacific; in which the missionaries, after a long period of toil, under accumulated hardships, have witnessed triumphs of the Gospel the most signal, among a race of barbarians and cannibals, which it has ever fallen to the province of history to record. The attention of the Society was next directed to the vast and important field of Southern Africa, then wholly unoccupied, except by the United Brethren of Germany. The small Moravian church of Herrnhut sent forth her missionaries more than a century ago, first to the negroes of the West, and then to the fur-clad inhabitants of Greenland.

In July, 1736, George Schmidt, with something of that zeal which fired the bosom of Egede, the pioneer of the mission to Greenland, left his native country for that of the Hottentots. He was the first who, commissioned by the King of kings, stood in the vale of Grace, (Genadendal,) at that time known by the name of Bavian's Kloof, (the Glen of Baboons,) and directed the degraded, oppressed, ignorant, despised, and, so far as life eternal is concerned, the outcast Hottentots, to the Lamb of God, who tasted death for them.