not establish missions, even though they sometimes desired to do so. The first necessity was a body of people with the degree of commitment needed to live on someone else’s terms, together with the mental equipment for coping with the implications. Such commitment was in turn most likely to arise in the wake of powerful religious influences. Times of religious renewal were nec-essary for the recruitment of a sizeable company of such people, and the maintenance of a succession of them. A tradition of mental training, how-ever, was also needed; charismatic inspiration alone would not suffice, and indeed the plodder might succeed better with a new language and a new soci-ety than the inspired preacher. The second need was for a form of organization which could mobilize committed people, maintain and supply them, and forge a link between them and their work and the wider church. Since in the nature of things both their work and the conditions in which they carried it out were exceptional, the necessary structures could not readily emerge in very rigid regimes, whether political or ecclesiastical. They needed tolerance of the exceptional, and flex-ibility. The third factor necessary to overseas missions was sustained access to overseas locations, with the capacity to maintain communication over long periods. This implies what might be called maritime consciousness, with mar-itime capability and logistical support. All three factors were present in the first, Catholic, phase of the missionary movement. The Catholic Reformation released the spiritual forces to produce the committed worker, the religious orders offered possibilities of extension and adaptation which produced the structures for deploying them, and the Portuguese enclaves and trading depots provided the communication net-works and transoceanic bases. When in the course of the eighteenth century the Catholic phase of missions began to stutter, it was partly because the three factors were no longer fully in place. The Protestant movement developed as the Catholic movement weakened. It began, not at the end of the eighteenth century (that is a purely British per-spective) but at the end of the seventeenth; not in England, but in Germany and Central Europe. Its main motors were in Halle and Herrnhut, though, just as German Pietism drew on the English puritan tradition, it had a puri-tan prologue. William Carey’s Enquiry did not initiate it; the object of that