First Sentence

"In a seminal statement of the policy which dominated the nineteenth-century evangelizing of the Christian Missionary Society (CMS), Henry Venn, the society's chief secretary in its formative years, 1841-72, couches his celebrated 'three-self' principles in these terms: If the elementary principles of self-support and self-government and self-extension be thus sown with the seed of the Gospel, we may hope to see the healthy growth and expansion of the Native Church, when the Spirit is poured down from on high, as the flowers of the fertile field multiply under the showers and warmth of summer."