About the Missionary Review

The Missionary Review of the World began, in 1877, as one man’s answer to a problem he had seen firsthand: mission reporting that never rose above the walls of a single denomination. That man was Rev. Royal Gould Wilder, and by the time he started the Review he had already spent a life earning the right to say so.

Wilder was born October 27, 1816, in Bridport, Vermont, one of twelve children in a family that, by his own biographer’s account, “knew what it was to struggle against poverty.” His father cleared land and mended shoes to keep the family fed; there was nothing left over for a son’s education. Wilder earned his own way to Middlebury College by cutting wood, keeping a cow, and reading every book he could find — and from there, into the ministry.

In 1852 he sailed for Kolapoor (Kolhapur), India, becoming the first missionary to a city “especially holy in Brahmin eyes” that had never before tolerated one. He built its first Christian church largely with his own hands. Cholera drove him out of the field in 1857; he returned in 1861 and kept working — preaching, building, and writing prolifically for the Bombay press on missions and Indian affairs — until failing health and a wish to educate his children brought him back to the United States in 1875, and eventually to a home in Princeton, New Jersey.

“My whole soul,” he said of the mission field he had left behind, “would leap, could I go back. Could I not place twenty missionaries there at once?”

It was in Princeton, two years after leaving India, that Wilder started the Review — not to represent any one board or denomination, but, as his own obituary put it, to view missions “from a point of prospect more elevated than any denominational one.” For ten years he edited it himself. When his health finally gave out, he handed the work to Rev. A. T. Pierson and Rev. J. M. Sherwood. He died on October 10, 1887 — the same day the transfer of the Review was formally completed.

The tribute that opened the very next issue, January 1888, closed with the words that still describe what this archive holds: a record, month by month, of “the vast machinery of missions” as it actually looked to the people living it, published continuously from 1888 to 1939.

This site makes that record searchable and readable in full — scanned and hosted by cafis.org, with country and person mentions automatically detected from the original text (best-effort, not a verified index — see any issue’s own disclaimer). Every issue links back to its original scan, so nothing here need be taken on faith.