ABSTRACT
When Eugene Stock came to write his great history of the Church Missionary Society in 1899, he was faced with an arduous task, but one that did not seem to offer insuperable problems of organization or presentation. The internal structures and procedures of the society, with which Stock, as editorial secretary, had been intimately involved for a quarter of a century, provided the work with a unified, coherent, and satisfying structure. Despite the solidity of this great project, something of the vulnerability and fragmentariness that one might say is the nature of missionary work, does come through again and again in Stock's narrative. The project was conceived by Stock as an institutional history, the history of a great institution, an institution whose very existence for its first forty years was precarious, but which had become a force to be reckoned with in the life of the Church of England.
