Seven young aristocrats—two of them famous athletes, and another two, military officers—forsaking the comforts of England to work with a relatively unknown missionary society in the back country of China—this was a story the press could not pass up, and these young men immediately became religious celebrities.

Known as the Cambridge Seven, they were one of the grand gestures of nineteenth-century missions. Their story, published as The Evangelization of the World, was distributed free to every YMCA and YWCA throughout the British Empire and United States.

Though their time together was brief, they helped catapult the CIM from obscurity to "almost embarrassing prominence," and inspired hundreds of recruits for the CIM and other mission societies. In 1885, when the Seven arrived in China, the CIM had 163 missionaries; they doubled by 1890 and reached 800 by 1900, one-third of the entire Protestant missionary force.

Their story—especially their brief encounter with the infamous Pastor Hsi of ...

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