In 1858 the Dutch church, and in 1879 the German church, instituted their separate mission operations.

Thus the initiative of the Andover students in 1810 resulted in the erection, not of one mission board, timidly venturing to set five missionaries in the foreign field, but of five boards, whose total annual resources are counted by millions of dollars, whose evangelists, men and women, American and foreign-born, are a great army, and whose churches, schools, colleges, theological seminaries, hospitals, printing-presses, with the other equipments of a Christian civilization, and the myriads of whose faithful Christian converts, in every country under the whole heaven, have done more for the true honor of our nation than all that it has achieved in diplomacy and war.[255:2] The Episcopalians entered on foreign mission work in 1819, and the Methodists, tardily but at last with signal efficiency and success, in 1832.

No considerable sect of American Christians at the present day is unrepresented in the foreign field.
In order to complete the history of this organizing era in the church, we must return to the humble but memorable figure of Samuel J.Mills.

It was his characteristic word to one of his fellows, as they stood ready to leave the seclusion of the seminary for active service, "You and I, brother, are little men, but before we die, our influence must be felt on the other side of the world." No one claimed that he was other than a "little man," except as he was filled and possessed with a great thought, and that the thought that filled the mind of Christ--the thought of the Coming Age and of the Reign of God on earth.[256:1] While his five companions were sailing for the remotest East, Mills plunged into the depth of the western wilderness, and between 1812 and 1815, in two toilsome journeys, traversed the Great Valley as far as New Orleans, deeply impressed everywhere with the famine of the word, and laboring, in cooeperation with local societies at the East, to provide for the universal want by the sale or gift of Bibles and the organization of Bible societies.

After his second return he proposed the organization of the American Bible Society, which was accomplished in 1816.
But already this nobly enterprising mind was intent on a new plan, of most far-reaching importance, not original with himself, but, on the contrary, long familiar to those who studied the extension of the church and pondered the indications of God's providential purposes.