of Presbytery (or Classis if you choose so to call it), and I think you and
they should have been allowed to form a Presbytery there,
and manage all your own affairs, and that your Boards at
home should be content to consider themselves a committee
to raise and send on the funds. But it is hard for the D.
D's and big folk at home to come to that. They think they must manage
everything, or all will go wrong; while how little it is that they can
be brought to know or realize of the real nature of the work abroad; and
then it is the old battle of patronage over again. Those who give the
money must _govern_, and those who receive it must give up
their liberty, and be no longer Christ's freemen."

This is only a specimen, one of many, of the mistaken
impressions abroad in the Church concerning the views and
doings of your Missionaries. May we not, _must_ we not, correct
them? The letter also illustrates the evils resulting from allowing
mistaken impressions to remain in the Church uncorrected. There has long
been an impression in our Church that the A.B.C.F.M. interfered with the
ecclesiastical affairs of our missions. We have been informed that several
of our young men, before our Church separated from that Board, were
deterred thereby from devoting themselves to the foreign Missionary work.
The writer of the above letter, probably having more of the Missionary
spirit, was not willing, on that account, to give up the work, but was
led to offer himself to the Board of a sister Church. The
Mission at Amoy, and our Church, have thus been deprived
of the benefit of his labors by means of an erroneous impression.
When we learned the fact of such an impression existing in this country,
we endeavored to correct it. In our letter of 1856, to General Synod, we
called particular attention to the subject. Here is a part of one sentence:
"It seems to us a duty, and we take this opportunity to bear