ele: & ett Ey uy PWS st tt A Pe * ales at es 4 : P ve 3 ‘ ifs 2 : : * Z . ane ; ae A ‘ : s aS , S ‘tte Se Selig) tae Linsey erased oo ¢ Ate in Ootah gles hee fh, Rin Cod Cs. ‘ 5 + : E , re Sieh ee Ay its rath ages é es 3 ae + : lee Pgh yd eigt id E } ’ e n¢ tye ‘ ne Cat 4 ce, SES : f mats 5 wads my Ly Mi oe en Ay cae , gaan aoe Res x _~ 7 1 Ce . 385 Library of Che Theological Seminary PRINCETON ° NEW JERSEY Cb PRESENTED BY Delavan L, Pierson Li’ nee 3 Bs THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS ROBERT E. SPEER A, a : ae coy Me y Bee & . a . 4 # 7 I H E & VA fh} CHURCH AND MISSIONS-~ By ROBERT E. SPEER SECRETARY OF THE BOARD OF FOREIGN MISSIONS OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES NEW o YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1926, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS ats yl PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE No attempt is made in this little book to deal either comprehensively or in detail with the whole enterprise of foreign missions. The author has sought merely to treat a few of the most significant aspects of the principles and problems of this work of the Church which was primary in the first centuries and is primary to-day. CONTENTS CHAPTER I II VI THROUGH THE CENTURIES THE AIMS AND PURPOSES OF FOREIGN Muis- SIONS THe SocrtaL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS OF MopeErN MIssIons New DEMANDS ON THE FoREIGN MIssION ENTERPRISE AT THE HOME BASE New DEMANDS ON THE Musston FIELD CREATED BY NEw Wor.tp ConplirTIOoNsS THE RicuH FRUITAGE OF ForREIGN Missions PAGE Il 42 94 120 150 187 us sae FUSS MV TALS ie i | THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS GHAPTER I THROUGH THE CENTURIES How soon did the universal note come into Christian- ity? Perhaps the essential thing is that it came. Be- cause Christianity was what it was, it was inevitable that the universal note should appear. But when did it appear? Did it lie in Christianity from the begin- ning and did it appear from the outset or was it a later unfolding? On the one hand it is said, the gospel came as es- sentially Jewish. Jesus had no other idea of Himself than as the Messiah expected of the Jews. “We must not suppose,” it is said, “that Jesus was proclaiming any other than the promised Messianic Kingdom to which the Jews had so long been looking forward. . . . He inculcated the most absolute and thorough- going conformity to the law, a conformity which should far surpass that of the Pharisees. .. . That He anticipated that the law should ever be done away He showed no sign.” (McGiffert, “The Apostolic Age,” p. 19, 25 f.) He limited His own ministry and He bade His disciples to limit theirs to the “‘lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matt. xv, 24; x, 5.) He spent His whole life in His native land and had no II I2 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS knowledge of other peoples and no sense of duty toward them. He was born and died a Jew, within the con- temporary Jewish horizon, and the universal expansion of Christianity came as a later conception and develop- ment. (See Harnack, “The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries,” Vol. I, p. 40.) On the other hand, even if we eliminate the Fourth Gospel and accept the critical results as to the Synop- tics, we cannot fail to see that the Gospel held from the beginning in the thought of Jesus the principle of universality. The opening words of the Gospel of Mark set forth the conception of the Kingdom, and the Gospel forbids an exclusively nationalistic inter- pretation of the conception. It represents Jesus as the beloved Son of God, with a significance in the ideas which includes humanity. The idea of God’s father- hood and of a Kingdom not of Israel but of God, the God Who was behind all things and Who made rains to fall and the sun to shine was an idea wider than ‘any one race or nation. And the fact that Jesus “maintained a conservative attitude toward the law does not indicate that He meant to exclude Gentiles from the Kingdom of God.” “During the earlier part of His ministry,” says Dr. McGiffert, ‘““He seems to have had only His own countrymen in mind” (Matt. x, 5, Mark vii, 27), “but before His death, when He realised that His Gospel would be rejected by the na- tion at large, He distinctly contemplated the entrance of foreign peoples into the Kingdom.” (Matt. viii, 11 ff., xxi, 43.) (McGiffert, “The Apostolic Age,” p. 26 f.) Taking our Gospels as they stand we must claim for Christianity a universal principle from the begin- ning. Our Lord was the Son of Man. This was His THROUGH THE CENTURIES 13 favourite title for Himself. Connecting the parallel passages we find Him using the title thirty-nine times in the Synoptics and ten times in the Gospel of John. Whether He borrowed it from the contemporary Mes- sianic vocabulary, which is improbable, or took it from the Book of Daniel, which is possible but also im- probable, He filled it with new meaning. The title for- bade any nationalistic limitations. It carried with it implicitly the conception of the universal significance of the person and mission of Jesus. It described Him as “the indispensable centre of the Kingdom of God in humanity’ (Holzmann); as “the perfect realisation of the idea of man, with the mission of realising it in humanity” (Wittichen); “the man in whom all the history of humanity must have its end” (Hofmann) ; “the universal Messiah” (Bohme); “the representa- tive of the race in whom are united the virtual powers of the whole of humanity” (Westcott). (See von Schubert “Outlines of Church History,” p. 24 f.) The universal sweep given to Christianity in the opening chapters of Luke is warranted. (Luke 1, 79; li, 14, 30, 32; iii, 6). Our Lord came in no mould of racial exclusiveness but with a mission opened in its essential character from the beginning to all man- kind. One of His earliest sermons gave great offence because He laid emphasis on the outreaching grace of God. Elijah, He pointed out, had been sent to none of the widows of Israel in the days of famine but to a Sidonian woman, and Elisha had cleansed no lepers of Israel but only Naaman, the Syrian. “And they were all filled with wrath as they heard these things” (Luke iv, 25-29). The same spirit of nationalistic narrow- ness, from which Jesus was free, found expression in the sneer of the Jews at Jesus’ declaration, “Ye shall 14. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS seek Me and shall not find Me; and where I am, ye cannot come. The Jews therefore said among them-_ selves, Whither will this man go that we shall not find Him? Will He go unto the Dispersion among the Greeks, and teach the Greeks?’ (John vii, 34, 35). As though in contrast with this smallness of vision, John proceeds to relate the words of Jesus on the last, the great day of the Feast of Tabernacles, beginning, “Tf any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink” (John vii, 37). This contrast between the attitude of Jesus and the attitude of the Jews is sharply presented in their rela- tions to the Samaritans. The Jews had no dealings with the Samaritans (John iv, 9), and when they would be especially bitter and contemptuous in their reference to Jesus they said to Him, “Thou art a Sa- maritan and hast a devil” (John viii, 48). The later tradition declared, “It is forbidden to eat bread or to drink wine with the Samaritans.” But Jesus ignored and violated these restraints. “He went and entered into a village of the Samaritans” (Luke ix, 52). He sent His disciples into a Samaritan village to buy food and welcomed the people of the village to faith and discipleship (John iv, 39-42). And He deliberately gave to a Samaritan a place in one of His most ex- quisite parables above Levite and priest (Luke x, 33). It was significant that the first people to recognise the universal mission of Jesus were Samaritans. “We know that this is indeed the Saviour of the world,” they said (John iv, 42). Yet in some sense, this sweep of the work of Jesus had been already perceived. The song of the angels suggested it (Luke ii, 10, 14). Aged Simeon foresaw it. “Mine eyes have seen thy salvation,” he said as the child Jesus lay in his arms, THROUGH THE CENTURIES 15 “Which Thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples A light for revelation to the Gentiles” (Luke ii, 31, 32). And John the Baptist hinted at it also? “The Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world” (John i, 29). Thenceforward it was revealed with increas- ing clearness that Jesus was in the world for the world. He said, Himself, that the field was the world (Matt. xili, 38). His disciples were the light of the world (Matt. v, 14), as He had come a light into the world (John xii, 46), and was Himself the world’s light (John viii, 12). He called Himself the bread of God which had come down for the life of the world (John vi, 33, 35). Indeed, throughout, Jesus will admit no narrower field of work and salvation for Himself than the world. There are apparently contradictory statements. “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. xv, 24). “Go not into any way of the Gen- tiles and enter not into any city of the Samaritans” (Matt. x, 5). Jesus had to make a beginning. His immediate mission was to Israel. The only way in which any larger mission could be made possible was by the discharge of this mission to the Jews. A sal- vation for all was to be wrought out in time and space, and until the work was done the field was con- fined. But beyond all the immediate and preparatory work lay the universal reaches of a redemption for all mankind. Jesus was such a good Israelite in order that the mission of Israel might be fulfilled and there be henceforth neither Jew nor Greek. Accordingly the whole spirit and message of Jesus were universal. “God sent not His son into the world to condemn the world but that the world through Him might be saved” 16 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS (John iii, 16,17). He contemplated the conviction of the world (John xvi, 8; xvii, 21, 23), and the preach- ing of His gospel among all nations (Matt. xii, 14; xxvi, 13). And even before His coming He said the Father had intended the temple to be a place of prayer for all nations (Matt. xi, 17), while now all local limits were set aside and everywhere true worshippers were invited to come immediately to the Father with- out temple and without priest (John iv, 20-24). Jesus told of a good Father over all (Matt. v, 45- 48), of a light in Himself adequate for all guidance (John viii, 12), of Himself as the only way to the Father (John xiv, 6), and as the truth and the life (John xiv, 6). In view of all this the nation in which He was could be the starting point only, not the goal. His gospel was a message for all men everywhere. His last commands, accordingly, did not create the missionary obligation. They merely expressed it (Matt. xxvii, 19; Mark xvi, 15; Acts i, 8). If He had not uttered them the obligation would not have been diminished in the slightest degree. But having uttered them our duty has been made so clear that we can miss it only by missing Christ and His signifi- cance to our own hearts. At the same time the first disciples found it hard to grasp the full significance of the missionary idea and to embody it in the life and work of the Church. They had a number of pressing problems to face, the task of thinking out their situation, of recording the amazing history through which they had passed, of working out institutions, of meeting the practical is- sues of social relationships within the new Christian community and between that community and the world without, the everlasting problem of Church and State, THROUGH THE CENTURIES 17 of the national and supra-national aspects of Chris- tianity, of defining their convictions and beginning tq glimpse the immense theological and apologetic work which lay before them. At their doors, moreover, they had their first task, to witness to their faith and to win fellow disciples from sea townsmen and im- mediate neighbours. Just how and how soon the Gospel began to spread we have no record. The legends of the far reaching labours of the apostles in other lands are only legends. What we know is that there began almost at once a great, unorganised, spontaneous evangelistic movement and that very soon foreign missions were specialised as a distinct activity under bold and heroic leadership, as has been necessary in every age of the Christian Church and as is still necessary to-day. The first outward movement of Christianity resulted from the persecutions following the death of Stephen. The Gospel had indeed already been “carried at least to Damascus and there can be little doubt that the fugitive disciples found believers to welcome them in many quarters. We are not to think of them as be- coming travelling evangelists, and spending all their time in going from place to place preaching the Gospel. They had their daily bread to earn, and they doubtless settled down quietly among their own countrymen in this and that place, and lived the life of faithful, scru- pulous Jews, just as they had done in Jerusalem, and just as their neighbours were doing. But at the same time they must have retained the ideal of the Christian life which they had seen realised in Jerusalem, and the little circles in which they gathered with others of like mind, and with those whom they succeeded in winning to their faith, could not fail to take on the 18 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS character of the circle to which they had there be- longed; and thus at an early day among the Jewish population of many cities, towns and villages within and without Palestine, the same kind of Christian brotherhood was realised that had existed from the beginning in Jerusalem. The flight of the disciples therefore did not mean merely the spread of a knowl- edge of the Gospel, it meant also the formation of lit- tle companies of Christian brethren, wherever they made their homes.” (McGiffert, “The Apostolic Age,” Pp. 94). | | . All this, however, was still work within the nation. The distinctive foreign mission had to wait for Paul. There were, to be sure, antecedents of his undertak- ing. Philip went on a mission to the Samaritans which the Apostles sanctioned and followed up, and later he found and baptised the first convert from Africa. And Peter with characteristic courage ac- cepted the responsibility of baptising a gentile soldier from Italy. But it was Paul who really began the en- terprise of foreign missions in the first century as it required Carey to re-begin it in the eighteenth. And yet Paul did not begin it as a self-originated project. He was at first subordinate to an older companion. They were both called out and sent forth from a Chris- tian community. And their mission unfolded as they followed it. The beginning of missions confirms the experience of missions in all ages. Given a missionary church or body of believers, and a foreign mission is the in- evitable consequence. If the mission, or an attempt at it, is lacking, it is proof that the Spirit is lacking in the church, The money problem is not mentioned, nor is any- THROUGH THE CENTURIES Ig thing said of organisation. God and men, men and God—that is all. That is always all. Money and ma- chinery are secondary to-day as they were then. We are guilty of distortion and distrust and atheism when we put them first. But simple as was the sending out of these first missionaries, it does not follow that now the wise thing is for each local church to act in the independent fashion of the church at Antioch, and se- lect and commission and send out its own representa- tives. It would be easy to relate stories of the dismal failure and wrong of some experiments of this sort. In our sense of words, this first foreign mission was not a foreign mission at all. The missionaries went among their own people. They never went out of the bounds of their own government, and they learned no new language, tried no new climate, touched no for- eign land. It was a deputation rather than a mission. The real lesson for us is not a lesson of rigid method, but a suggestion of principle, namely, that by the meth- ods which experience has approved, each church should be in vital contact with the missionary enterprise and participating in it. The method of the sending forth of these first missionaries is not a reflection on mod- erm missionary organisations. It is significant that those societies and missions which seem to emphasise most the call of the Spirit, are the most highly organ- ised and the most authoritatively governed. This itineration was a modest venture, a preliminary trial, a test of wings. The missionaries turned first naturally to territory which Barnabas knew. He had lived in Cyprus, owned property there, and personally possessed influence that made their visit to the island a matter of no great risk. Here they went first to Jews, as had been and was still to be for some time 20 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS the almost invariable evangelistic rule. Even on this trip, however, a gleam of the wider mission came to them. The Jews came first of necessity, the mission- aries felt and said they felt, but the gospel was for Gentiles too (Acts xiii, 46, 47). And when they re- ported to the home church on their return, the domi- nant impression of the itineration evidently was that God “had opened a door of faith unto the Gentiles” (Acts xiv, 27). The mission revealed itself, and fed the spirit which had created it. The missionaries moved. It had required persecu- tion to stir up the Jerusalem believers. But now men had been raised up with the spirit of the great commis- sion in their blood. They were going men. If re- jected, they went on (Acts xiii, 50, 51). They were not afraid of persecution. They took it when it came in the line of their duty, but also they had no hesita- tion in running away from it (Acts xiv, 5). If it was necessary to be beaten, they bore it joyfully; but Paul had no principle against going down over walls to es- cape danger (Acts ix, 25), or leaving places which were too hot. Still, they came right back to these places on this trip. If they fled, it was not from fear, and if they returned, it was not from hardihood. They went in the way of duty. That was all. If mission- aries in China could do no good by staying in interior towns during the Boxer troubles, and only imperilled | the Chinese converts by remaining, it was their duty, following Paul’s example, to leave. If their remain- ing at their post and accepting death would have helped the cause, they would have done right to stay, and those who did stay, did what Paul would have done in their place. The missionaries did not move just for the sake THROUGH THE CENTURIES 21 of moving. Itineration with them was not mere travel or sight-seeing. It was hard, well-directed preaching. To do this work thoroughly they retraced their steps (Acts xiv, 21), even to Lystra and Iconium, where they had been rejected, and whence they had fled. Those missionaries in China who after the troubles returned to their stations, some of them before even the consuls were ready to encourage them, also were following Paul’s example. On this itineration the mis- sionaries did more than just “herald” the gospel. They organised the believers. No priests were set over the little companies to exercise authority by virtue of apos- tolic succession. All was life and motion and free- dom. Neither did Barnabas and Paul employ a helper and place him over the group. They hit upon a per- fectly simple, natural, self-supporting arrangement, de- signed to secure liberty, growth and the sense of re- sponsibility. Fuller developments would come later, but this was enough for the beginning. Perhaps if Paul had had no results of his work he might have employed a different method. But he had results, and this was the way he took care of them. The sole reliance of the missionaries was the Gos- pel (Acts xiv, 21). They had absolutely no ulterior inducements to offer. No social, educational or phil- anthropic advantages had been evolved which could act as attractions to draw the people toward Chris- tianity. It was not yet a proscribed religion. Its rela- tion to the government and the imperial court had not been defined. But if not under the ban, there was nothing to commend it but its spiritual efficiency and its response to the deepest needs of human hearts. Paul did some signs and wonders (Acts xiv, 3, 10; xiii, 11), but one of them made them more trouble than it 22 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS did good, and on the contrary side he assured believers that tribulation was in store for them (Acts xiv, 22). Many a modern missionary has wished that he was as free from the financial, political and social entangle- ments of Christianity in his enterprise, that he might deal with men on spiritual ground alone. The penalty of the long postponement of the evangelisation of the world is twofold—(1) the social and racial chasm be- tween “Christians” and “heathen” has become ter- rible in its width and depth and permanence, and (2) Christianity has come to terms with culture, commerce and politics, so that it is well-nigh impossible to dis- engage it and present it to Gentile and Jew as in the first generation. ; A noble picture of true missionary wisdom and con- secration is presented in the course of Barnabas. As he and Paul met their new problems and did their new work, the older man began to shift the responsibilities to the shoulders of the younger, whose capacities he had long before foreseen. He pushes him forward, does not quarrel with his growing prominence, happily slips into the second place after their visit to Antioch in Pisidia, and finds his joy in the increasing power of Paul. Here is the picture of a large-natured, fine- spirited, sagacious man, doing the greatest work of his life in developing Paul and lovingly shaping his growth. The man who could bear himself thus was a good man. He was even a great man. ‘There is room in every age for missionaries of this spirit, who see ability in others, and who lay themselves out to develop it, and who then can rejoice in it without jealousy. And this is the true principle of foreign missions. Their business is to found in each land a native church and to recognise its freedom and duty. THROUGH THE CENTURIES 23 The great problem which shook the early Church became more clearly defined on this tour. That prob- lem of the relation of the Gentile converts to the Jewish law, and in consequence, the relation of the Jewish Christians themselves to their institutions, had to be settled. These first missionaries did well to per- ceive this. There is nothing gained and much lost by slurring over in mission work the inevitable issues and collisions which must arise. These must be dealt with in the spirit of love, but also in the spirit of firmness and of a sound mind. Missions do not rest upon a maudlin erasure of all lines of distinct opinion of truth, and the purchase of good feeling by the surrender of principle to sentimental slovenliness. They involve the stern clash of truth and error. These early missionary days show how much better it is to have the issue clear and naked, and to settle it with sharp and positive finality, if it be possible. These were the beginnings, The sequels in the apostolic age were the definite settlement of the uni- versal mission of Christianity, the working out of the methods of propaganda and the principles of church organisation, the statement of the truth of the Gospel in terms of its universal significance and adaptations and the demonstration of the power of the Risen Christ as the Saviour of the world. In “The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries,’ Harnack describes what he believes to have been the nature of the missionary preaching of the early propaganda and also the power lying back of be “These four points, then—the one living God, Jesus as Saviour and Judge, the resurrection, and self-control 24 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS —combined to form the new religion. It stood out in bold relief from the old religions, and above all from the Jewish; yet, in spite of its stiff conflict with poly- theism, it lay in organic relation to the process of evolu- tion which was at work throughout all religion, upon the eastern and the central coasts of the Mediterranean. The atmosphere from which those four principles drew their vitality was the conception of recompense—i.e., the absolute supremacy of the moral element in life. No account of the principles underlying the mission- preaching of Christianity is accurate, if it does not view everything from the standpoint of this conception. ‘Grace’ did play a leading role, but grace never displaced recompense. From the very first, morality was incul- cated within the Christian churches in two ways: by the Spirit of Christ and by the conception of judgment and of recompense. Both were marked by a decided bent to the future, for the Christ of both was ‘He who was to return.’ To the mind of primitive Christianity the ‘present’ and the ‘future’ were sharply opposed to each other, and it was this opposition which furnished the principle of self-control with its most powerful motive. It became, indeed, with many people, a sort of glowing passion. The church which prayed at every service, ‘May grace come and this world pass away: maranatha,’ was the church which gave directions like those which we read in the opening parable of Hermas. ‘From the lips of all Christians this word is to be heard: The world is crucified to me, and I to the world.’ (Celsus, cited by Origen, V, lxiv). “This resolute renunciation of the world was really the first thing which made the church competent and strong to tell upon the world. Then, if ever, was the saying verified: “He who would do anything for the world must have nothing to do with it.’ Primitive Christianity has been upbraided for being too unworldly and ascetic. But revolutions are not effected with rose- water, and it was a veritable revolution to overthrow polytheism and to set up the majesty of God and good- ness in the world—for those who believed in them, as well as for those who did not. This could not have THROUGH THE CENTURIES 25 transpired in the first instance, had not men asserted the vanity of the present world, and practically severed themselves from it. The rigour of this attitude was scarcely abated by the mission-preaching; on the con- trary, it was aggravated, since instead of being isolated it was set side by side with the message of the Saviour and of salvation, of love and charity. Yet it must be added, that for all its clear-cut expression, and the strong bias it imparted to the minds of men towards the future, the idea of recompense was freed from harshness and inertia by its juxtaposition with a feeling of perfect confidence that God was present, and a con- viction of His care and of His providence. No mode of thought was more alien to early Christianity than deism. The early Christians knew the Father in heaven; they knew that God was near them, guiding them, and reigning in their life with a might of His own, This was the God they proclaimed abroad. And thus, in their preaching, the future became already present, while hard and fast recompense seemed to dis- appear entirely. For what further ‘recompense’ was needed by the people who were living in God’s presence, feeling with every faculty of the soul, aye, and with every sense, the wisdom, power and goodness of their God? Moods of assured possession and of yearning, experiences of grace and phases of ardent hope, came and went in many a man besides the apostle Paul. He yearned for the prospect of release from the body, and thus felt a touching sympathy for everything in bondage, for the whole creation in its groans. But it was no harassing or uncertain hope that engrossed all his heart and being; it was hope fixed upon a strong and secure basis, upon his filial relationship to God and his possession of God’s Spirit. “Now, for the first time, that testimony rose among men, which cannot ever be surpassed, the testimony that God is Love. The first great statement of the new religion, into which the fourth evangelist condensed its central principle, was based entirely and exclusively on love: ‘We love, because He first loved us.’ ‘God so loved the world. ‘A new commandment give I 26 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS unto you, that ye love one another.’ And the greatest, strongest, deepest thing Paul ever wrote is the hymn commencing with the words: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.’ The new language on the lips of Christians was the language of love. “But it was more than a language, it was a thing of power and action. The Christians really considered themselves brothers and sisters, and their actions cor- responded to this belief. On this point we possess two exceptionable testimonies from pagan writers. Says Lucian of the Christians: ‘Their original law-giver had taught them that they were all brethren, one of an- other. ... They become incredibly alert when any- thing of this kind occurs, that affects their common interests. On such occasions no expense is grudged.’ And Tertullian (Apolog. xxxix.) observes: ‘It is our care for the helpless, our practice of loving-kindness, that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents.’ ‘Only look,’ they say, ‘look how they love one another!’ (they themselves being given to mutual hatred). ‘Look how they are prepared to die for one another!’ Thus had this saying been really fulfilled: ‘Hereby shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.’ “The gospel thus became a social message. The preaching which laid hold of the outer man, detaching him from the world, and uniting him to his God, was also a preaching of solidarity and brotherliness. The gospel, it has been truly said, is at bottom both individ- ualistic and socialistic. Its tendency towards mutual association, so far from being an accidental phenom- enon in its history, is inherent in its character. It spiritualises the irresistible impulse which draws one man to another, and it raises the social connection of human beings from the sphere of a convention to that of a moral obligation. In this way it serves to heighten the worth of man, and essays to recast contemporary society, to transform the socialism which involves a con- flict of interests into the socialism which rests upon the THROUGH THE CENTURIES 27 consciousness of a spiritual unity and a common goal. This was ever present to the mind of the great Apostle to the Gentiles. In his little churches, where each per- son bore his neighbour’s burden, Paul’s spirit already saw the dawning of a new humanity, and in the epistle to the Ephesians he has voiced this feeling with a thrill of exultation. Far in the background of these churches, like some unsubstantial semblance, lay the division be- tween Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, great and small, rich and poor. For a new humanity had now appeared, and the apostle viewed it as Christ’s body, in which every member served the rest and each was indispensable in his own place. Looking at these churches, with all their troubles and infirmities, he an- ticipated, in his high moments of enthusiasm, what was the development of many centuries.” (op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 116 f., 183 f.). The missionary history of the Church for the first three centuries has many lessons for modern foreign missions. It made the widest use of the Old Testa- ment and later of the New as foreign missions have done. It made no compromise with polytheism or idol worship. At the same time it did not sanction abuse of the gods or unprovoked insult to idols. In the sixtieth canon of Elvira, we read: “If any one shall have broken an idol and been slain in the act, he shall not be reckoned among the martyrs, seeing that no such command is to be found in scripture, nor will any such deed be found done among the apostles.” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 369.) It did not sanction civil disobedience or disloyalty. “The very keenest criticism passed by in- dividual Christian teachers upon the nature of the Ro- man state and the imperial office never enjoined the neglect of intercession or dissuaded Christians from this duty. Numerous passages in which the emperor is mentioned immediately after God, attest the fact that 28 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS he was held by Christians to be ‘a deo secundus ante omnes et super omnes deos’ (Tertull., Apol. xxx. : ‘sec- ond only to God, before and above all the gods’). Christians, in fact, could declare that they allowed the presence of no defect, either in the theory or in the practice of their loyalty. They taught—and they made their teaching part of the world’s history—that worship paid to God was one thing, and honour paid to a ruler quite another, as also that to worship a monarch was a detestable and humiliating offence. None the less, they strictly inculcated obedience to all authority.” (ibid. Wolk Iyp..373 ft.) The situation at the end of the third century is de- scribed by Harnack in an epilogue: ‘How rich, then, how manifold, are the ramifications of the Christian religion at the very outset as it steps on to pagan soil! And every separate point appears to be the main point, every single aspect looks like the whole! It is the preaching of God the Father Almighty, of His Son the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the resurrec- tion. It is the gospel of the Saviour and of salvation. It is the gospel of love and charity. It is the religion of the Spirit and power, of moral earnestness and holi- ness. It is the religion of authority and of an unlimited faith, and again, the religion of reason and of enlight- ened understanding, besides being a religion of “‘mys- teries.’ It proclaims the origin of a new people, of a people which has existed in secret from the very be- ginning of things. It is the religion of a sacred book. It possessed, nay, it was, everything that can possibly be considered as religion. “Christianity thus showed itself to be syncretistic. But it revealed to the world a special kind of syncretism, namely, the syncretism of a universal religion. Every force, every relationship in its environment, was mas- tered by it and made to serve its own ends—a feature in which the other religions in the Roman Empire make THROUGH THE CENTURIES 29 but a poor, meagre, and a narrow show. Yet uncon- sciously it learned and borrowed from many quarters; indeed it would be impossible to imagine it existing amid all the wealth and vigour of these religions, had it not drawn pith and flavour even from them. These reli- gions fertilised the ground for it, and the new grain and seed which fell upon that soil sent down its roots and grew to be a mighty tree. Here is a religion which embraces everything, and yet it can always be expressed in perfectly simple terms: one name, the name of Jesus Christ, still sums up everything. “The syncretism of this religion is further shown by its faculty for incorporating the most diverse nation- alities—Parthians, Medes and Elamites, Greeks and Barbarians. It laughed at the barriers of nationality. While attracting to itself all popular elements, it repudiated only one, viz., that of the Jewish nationalism. But this very repudiation was a note of universalism, for, although Judaism had been divested of its national- ism and already turned into a universal religion, its universalism had remained for two centuries confined to narrow limits. And how universal did Christianity show itself, in relation to the capacities and culture of mankind! Valentinus is a contemporary of Hermas, and both are Christians; Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria are contemporaries, and both are teachers in the Church; Eusebius is a contemporary of St. An- thony, and both are in the service of the same com- munion.” (ibid., Vol. II, p. 391 f.). The whole organisation of the Christian Church during the second and third centuries was directed toward the dissemination of Christianity and the es- tablishment of the Church throughout the Empire. There were various orders of agents engaged in the great task, but “the most numerous and successful missionaries of the Christian religion were not the reg- ular teachers but Christians themselves, by dint of their loyalty and courage. How little we hear of the former 30 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS and their results! How much of the effects produced by the latter! Above all, every confessor and martyr was a missionary; he not merely confirmed the faith of those who were already won, but also enlisted new members by his testimony and his death. . . . Never- theless, it was not merely the confessors and martyrs who were missionaries. It was characteristic of this religion that every one who seriously confessed the faith proved of service to its propaganda. Christians are to ‘let their light shine, that pagans may see their good works and glorify the Father in heaven.’ If this dominated all their life, and if they lived according to the precepts of their religion, they could not be hidden at all; by their very mode of living they could not fail to preach their faith plainly and audibly. Then there was the conviction that the Day of Judgment was at hand, and that they were debtors to the heathen. Fur- thermore, so far from narrowing Christianity, the ex- » clusiveness of the gospel was a powerful aid in pro- moting its mission, owing to the sharp dilemma which it involved. “We cannot hesitate to believe that the great mis- sion of Christianity was in reality accomplished by means of informal missionaries. Justin says so quite explicitly. What won him over was the impression made by the moral life which he found among Chris- tians in general.” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 458 ff.) But towards the close of the third century the for- eign missionary undertaking underwent a deteriora- tion. “Powerful and vigorous, assured of her own dis- tinctive character, and secure from any risk of being dissolved into contemporary religions, the Church be- lieved herself able now to deal more generously and THROUGH THE CENTURIES 3 complaisantly with men, provided only that they would submit to her authority. Her missionary methods al- tered slowly but significantly in the course of the third century. Gregory Thaumaturgus, who shows himself a pupil of Origen in his religious philosophy, with its comprehensive statement of Christianity, but who, as a Hellenist, excels his master, accommodated himself as a bishop in a truly surprising way to the pagan ten- dencies of those whom he converted. We shall hear of him later on. Saints and intercessors, who were thus semi-gods, poured into the Church. Local cults and holy places were instituted. The different provinces of life were distributed afresh among guardian spirits. The old gods returned; only, their masks were new. Annual festivals were noisily celebrated. Amulets and charms, relics and bones of the saints, were all objects of desire. And the very religion which erstwhile in its strictly spiritual temper had prohibited and resisted any tendency towards materialism, now took material shape in every one of its relationships. It had killed the world and nature. But now it proceeded to revive them, not of course in their entirety, but still in cer- tain sections and details, and—what is more—in phases that were dead and repulsive. Miracles in the churches became more numerous, more external, and more coarse. Whatever incidents the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles had narrated in the course of their fables, were dragged into contemporary life and predicated of the living present. “This Church, amid whose religion Porphyry found blameworthy features in its audacious critique of the universe, its doctrine of the incarnation, and its asser- tion of the resurrection of the flesh—this Church laboured at her mission in the second half of the third century, and she won the day. But had she been sum- moned to the bar and asked what right she had to admit these novelties, she could have replied: ‘I am not to blame. I have but developed the germ which was planted in my being from the very first!’ This religion was the first to cut the ground from under the feet of all other religions, and by means of her religious phi- 32 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS losophy, as a civilising power, to displace ancient phi- losophy. But the reasons for the triumph to Chris- tianity in that age are no guarantee for the permanence of that triumph throughout the history of mankind. Such a triumph rather depends upon the simple ele- ments of the religion, on the preaching of the living God as the Father of men, and on the likeness of Jesus Christ. For that very reason it depends also on the capacity of Christianity to strip off once more any collective syncretism and unite itself to fresh co- efficients. The Reformation made a beginning in this direction.” (ibid., Vol. I, p. 395 ff.). The Reformation, however, was twelve centuries away. What became of the foreign missionary idea and enterprise in the interval? The triumph of the Church in the Roman state under Charlemagne, with all its consequences of good and evil, and the division of the Church into West and East in 867 left the old Roman world nominally Christian. But around it lay three groups of unevangelised races which constituted the foreign mission field of the Middle Ages, the Celts, the Teutons and the Slavs, and which Christianity sought to reach even before they established themselves on the ruins of the Roman Empire. On the process of this evangelisation we have but scanty information. “ “We know as little in detail,’ remarks Schlegel, ‘of the circumstances under which Christianity became so universally spread in a short space of time among all the Gothic nations, as of the establishment, step by step, of their great kingdom on the Black Sea.’ The rapid and universal diffusion, indeed, of the new faith, is a proof of that capacity for civilisation, and of the national connection of the whole race; but where shall we find the details of their conversion? We have not a record, not even a legend, of the way in which the Visigoths in France, the Ostrogoths in Pannonia, the THROUGH THE CENTURIES 33 Suevians in Spain, the Gepide, the Vandals, the fol- lowers of Odoacer, and the fiery Lombards, were con- verted to the Christian faith, We may trace this, in part, to the terrible desolation which at this period reigned everywhere, while nation warred against nation, and tribe against tribe; we may trace, still more, to the fact that every one of the tribes above mentioned was converted to the Arian form of Christianity, a sufficient reason in the eyes of Catholic historians for ignoring altogether the efforts of heretics to spread the knowl- edge of the faith. And till the close of the sixth and the opening of the seventh century, we must be content with the slenderest details, if we wish to know anything of the early diffusion of Christianity on the European continent.” (MacLear, “The Missionary History of the Middle Ages,” p. 37 f.) MacLear’s account of “The Missionary History of the Middle Ages’’ is still the best account we have of the foreign missions of the Church from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. It sets forth (1) the early efforts of the Church among the Goths in 340-508, when Ulphilas, Valentinus and Severinus were the mis- sionaries on the Danube and in Bavaria and Austria, and the conversion of the Franks under Clovis; (2) the history of the Church of Ireland and the mission of St. Patrick, 431-490; (3) the story of St. Columba and Jona and the conversion of the Picts, 380-597; (4) the mission of St. Augustine to England, 596-627; (5) the progress of missionary work in England under Paulinus, Felix, Aidan and Wilfrid, 627-689; (6) the labours of the Celtic missionaries from Ireland, Columbanus, St. Gall, Kilian and others in southern Germany, 590-630; (7) missionary efforts in Fries- land and parts adjacent, 628-719; (8) the labour of Wilfrid or Boniface in the conversion of Germany, 715-755; (9) the efforts of the disciples of Boniface, 34. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Gregory of Utrecht, Sturmi of Fulda, St. Lebuin, Liudger and Willehad, 719-789; (10) missionary ef- fort in Denmark and Sweden and the work of Anskar, the Apostle of the North, 800-1011; (11) the conver- sion of Norway, 900-1030; (12) missions among the Slavs in Bulgaria, Moravia, Bohemia and Russia, 800- 1000; (13) the conversion of Poland and Pomerania and the work of Otho, 1000-1127; (14) the conversion of Wendland, Prussia and Lithuania, 1050-1410; (15) missions to the Saracens and the Mongols, the work of Raymund Lull and the Nestorian missions, 1200- 1400; (16) the compulsory conversion of the Jews and Moors, 1440-1520. Some of the outstanding features of these medi- geval missions were: | 1. The national or political character of many con- versions, the people following their kings or chiefs, so that Boniface writes: “Without the patronage of the Frankish kings I can neither govern the people, ex- ercise discipline over the clergy and monks, nor pro- hibit heathen rites.” (ibid., p. 402.) 2. The influence of individual energy and personal character. ‘Around individuals penetrated with zeal and self-denial centres the life, nay, the very existence of the Churches of Europe. In the most troubled epochs of these troublous times, they alway appeared to do the work of their day and their generation.”. . . “Take away these men, blot out their influence, and how materially would events have varied! They had their defects, no one can deny—the defects of their day and their generation. We may question the wis- dom of many of the expedients to which they resorted; we may smile at much that savours of credulity and superstition; we may regret that at times they were THROUGH THE CENTURIES 35 induced to have recourse to ‘pious frauds’ in carrying out their work: the extreme asceticism of Columbanus, the policy of Augustine in dealing with the British bishops, the pertinacity of Wilfrid at the Council of Whitby, the devotion of every Anglo-Saxon mission- ary to the Roman see, all these, and many other points, may be regarded by us, in a very different age, as worthy of reprobation; but considering the circum- stances of the time in which they lived, it becomes us to speak kindly of men who hazarded their lives to hand down to us the blessings of civilisation.” (ibid., Pp. 403, 405 f.) 3. The influence of the monasteries and the monastic orders in establishing centres of security and civilisa- tion on the ruins which the overthrow of the Roman Empire had left. “As from the gloom of these soli- tudes, a gloom so much in harmony with the worship of Thor and Woden, the new races, wild and wasteful, without prudence or forethought or steady industry, burst forth on the towns and cities of Southern Europe, according as internal wars or factions drove them forth to seek new homes, the question was, Who would seek them out? Who would brave all dangers in preaching to them the Word of Life? Who would settle down amongst them, improve their infant agriculture, and instil the first principles of civilisation? It was a mo- mentous question, but it was answered. Armed with none of the invention of modern industry and mechan- ical art, strong only in invisible protection, the Mon- astery sent forth its sons to carry light and life into these dark forests.” (ibid., p. 409.) “The missionary monk became the coloniser. The practised eye of men like Boniface or Sturmi sought out the proper site with heroic diligence, saw that it occupied a central posi- 36 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS tion, that it possessed a fertile soil, that it was near some friendly watercourse. These points secured, the word was given; the trees were felled, the forest cleared, and the monastic buildings rose. Soon the voice of prayer was heard, and the mysterious chant and solemn litany awoke unwonted echoes in the forest glades. While some of the brethren educated the young, others copied manuscripts, or toiled over the illuminated missal, or transcribed a Gospel or an Epis- tle, others cultivated the soil, guided the plough, planted the apple-tree or the vine, arranged the bee-hives, erected the water-mill, opened the mine, and thus pre- sented to the eyes of men the kingdom of Christ, as that of One Who had redeemed the bodies no less than the souls of His creatures.” (ibid., p. 412). 4. The organisation of churches with adequate superintendence, the education of a ministry and church synods which were the only bodies able and willing to deal with the needs of society. “We find them grap- pling with similar evils of their own day; with the Teutonic and Scandinavian custom of exposing weak and deformed children; with sacrifices of men and ani- mals in honour of the gods; with similar sacrifices at funerals; with witchcraft and sorcery of all kinds; we find them inculcating a due regard for the sacredness of human life, and the necessity for punitive justice and regular forms of law, in contradistinction to the low, unworthy notions which would condone all crimes, even murder, by pecuniary fines; we find them elevat- ing the peasant class, and striving to abolish slavery.” (ibid., p. 417.) 5. The real effort, in plans at least, to give sound religious instruction. ‘The sermons of Boniface and the correspondence of Alcuin with Charlemagne in- THROUGH THE CENTURIES 37 dicate that some at least of the missionaries taught thoroughly. 6. The absence of vernacular literature and espe- cially of translations of the Bible and the Liturgy. This was especially true of the missionaries in the West. “It never seems to have struck them, as it did Ulphilas, and Cyril, and Methodius, and other mission- aries of the Eastern Church, that one of the most im- portant requisites for permanent success was the in- troduction of the Scriptures and the Liturgy, or at least portions of both, in the vernacular language of their converts.” (ibid., p. 435.) 7. The vigorous attacks of the missionaries upon heathen practices and sacred places. “Again and again we have seen them hewing down the images, profaning the temples, and protesting with vehemence against sorcery, witchcraft, and other heathen practices. The apostle of Ireland did not, as we saw, spare the great object of Celtic worship; his country- men, Columbanus and Gallus, provoked the grievous wrath of the Suevians by their hostility to Thor and Odin; Willibrord, at the peril of his life, polluted the sacred fountains of Fosites-land; Boniface risked not only personal safety but all his influence over the people of Hesse by hewing down the sacred oak of Geismar ; the address of Lebuin to the Saxon assembly did not betray one easily ‘shaken by the wind’; Bogoris flung away his idols at the first request of Methodius; Vladi- mir flogged the huge image of Peroun, and flung it into the waters of the Dnieper before the face of his people; Olaf and Thangbrand overthrew the monuments of Scandinavian idolatry with a zeal worthy of a Jehu; Bishop Otho in Pomerania insisted, in spite of imminent danger to himself, on destroying various Slavonic temples. As far as such external protests against idolatry could avail, their missionary zeal did not err on the side of laxity.” (ibid., p. 442). 38 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 8. And yet, side by side with this, there was the greatest accommodation of Christianity to heathen worship and tradition. “The boundary line between the old and the new faith was not very sharply de- fined,” and “a continual interchange long went on be- tween Christian legends and heathen myths.” g. Lastly, as MacLear concludes—‘Whenever the Church effected anything real or lasting, it was when she was content to persevere in a spirit of absolute de- pendence on Him Who has promised to be with her ‘always, even unto the end of the world’; when in the person of a Columba, a Boniface, a Sturmi, an Anskar, a Raymund Lull, she was content to go forth and sow the seed, and then leave it to do its work, remember- ing that if ‘earthly seed is long in springing up, im- perishable seed is longer still.’ Whenever she failed in her efforts, it was when she forgot in Whose strength she went forth, and for Whose glory alone she existed, when she was tempted to resort to other means and to try other expedients than those which her great Head had sanctioned, when instead of patiently leaving the good seed to grow of itself, she strove to hurry its de- velopment, and was impatient of small beginnings and weak instruments.” ( ibid., p. 450 f.) In one respect we have noted a superiority of the missions from the Eastern Church over the missions in the West. The former supplied the new Churches with a vernacular literature and translation of the Bible. The Western Church failed here and its failure lasted long after the Reformation. Pope Gregory VII in 1080 declared that “as to a vernacular edition of the scriptures, that was impossible; it was not the will of God that the Sacred Word should be everywhere dis- played unless it should be held in contempt and give THROUGH THE CENTURIES 39 rise to error.” Five centuries later, at the Council of Trent, the same position was still maintained: “If any one shall have the temerity to read or possess (the Bible) without written permission he shall not receive absolution until he has first delivered up such Bible to the ordinary.” But in other respects the Western Church surpassed the Eastern. It was equipped with energies which in the conflict with Islam the Eastern Church showed that it lacked. It had worked out issues which the Eastern Church had slurred over. It had a firmer intellectual grip. Its form of Christianity was “more manly, rigid, moral.”’ It was more missionary. (von Schubert, “Outlines of Church History,” p. 151 And yet in the time of the Reformation all foreign missionary effort had died down. Europe was nomi- nally Christian. The Moslem world had been let alone since the days of Raymund Lull. Asia was far away and Islam lay across the roads that led thither. Then came the discovery of the route around the Cape, a new door to Africa and Asia, and the unveiling of the new world. The Roman Catholic Church awoke at once to the new opportunities for foreign missions and in the sixteenth century the Jesuits, the Dominicans, the Franciscans, and others, poured out across the world with dauntless courage and tireless energy to found the Church in new lands and their enterprises are spread out to-day over the whole earth. The Protestant Churches were engrossed at first in a life and death struggle at home and it was two cen- turies or more before they really discerned the foreign missionary duty. In the interval, however, there were a number of isolated missionary undertakings—the ill- fated Huguenot settlements in Brazil in 1555 and in 40 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Florida in 1565, the royal Swedish mission of Gustava Vasa and Gustavus Adolphus in Lapland at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth cen- turies, the Dutch missions in their colonies in the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries, the early missions of John Eliot and the Mayhews to the American Indians. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel is the oldest of our English-speaking foreign mission boards, founded in 1721 for the “religious instruction of the Queen’s subjects beyond the seas; for the maintenance of clergymen in the plantations, colonies, and factories of Great Britain; and for the propagation of the Gospel in those parts.” (Bliss, “A Concise History of Mis- sions,” p. 43.) In the middle of the seventeenth century a clearer conception of the missionary duty began to break in over the hard theological controversy which had fol- lowed the Reformation. Some laymen at Lubeck de- voted themselves to the missionary ideal and in 1664 an Austrian Protestant baron, Von Welz, issued two pub- lications calling for “a special association for the ex- tension of the evangelical religion and the conversion of the heathen. He propounded three questions: (1) Is it right that we, evangelical Christians, hold the Gospel for ourselves alone, and do not seek to spread it? (2) Is it right that we, evangelical Christians, spend so much on all sorts of dress, delicacies in eating and drinking, etc., but have hitherto thought of no means for the spread of the Gospel?” (ibid., p. 43 f.) Von Welz himself went out to Dutch Guiana. The missionary spirit now laid hold of the German Pietists, and growing out of these influences the Danish Tamil Mission was founded in 1705, by Zeigenbalg and Plutschau, which passed after more than a century of THROUGH THE CENTURIES 4I work into the hands of the Leipsic Society. The Moravians followed the Pietists and in 1732 began a mission in the Danish West Indies, and the following year in Greenland. After the Pietists and the Mora- vians came the Methodists. “In 1738, John Wesley visited Herrnhut, and was very much impressed with what he saw and heard; and in the subsequent work of the two brothers and their associate, Whitfield, the result of the influence of Zinzendorf and his teacher Francke was very manifest. With them, too, the effect was seen in an increasing desire for evangelization, but for some reason the evangelization did not take as wide a scope. It was still the colonial or home idea that dominated, not the conception of a world to be con- verted. It was not until 1786, when Thomas Coke, originally sent to Nova Scotia to preach Methodism among the English settlers, was driven by a storm to the West Indies and was brought face to face with the condition of the slaves, that the heathen world began to assume its proper place in the thought even of the Wes- leyans; and it was a quarter of a century later before their first real foreign mission was commenced in Africa.” (ibid., p. 49 f.) These were the preparations. We date the real be- ginning now from William Carey who went with John Thomas to India in 1793, under the Baptist Missionary Society of which Andrew Fuller was the inspiration. Carey called the Christian Church to a recovery of the foreign missionary conception and the Church re- sponded to the call. One by one the different Protes- tanfcommunions took up the task until to-day there is not one of them that does not recognise as part of its fundamental duty its proper share in the effort to carry the Gospel to the whole world. CHAPTER II Tue AIMS AND PURPOSES OF FOREIGN MISSIONS THE aim of foreign missions, in the form in which they have been carried on since Carey’s time, may be stated in the words of the Manual of one of our largest missionary societies : “The supreme and controlling aim of foreign missions is to make the Lord Jesus Christ known to all men as their Divine Saviour and to persuade them to become His disciples; to gather these disciples into Christian churches which shall be self-propagating, self-support- ing and self-governing ; to co-operate, so long as neces- sary, with these churches in the evangelising of their countrymen, and in bringing to bear on all human life the spirit and principles of Christ.” This statement is clear and definite and comprehen- sive but it leaves many questions to be considered and answered. | What is it “to make Christ known to the world?” The Moravian missionaries interpret the duty in the most direct and immediate terms. In the “Instructions for the members of the Unitas Fratrum, who Min- ister in the Gospel among the Heathen. London, 1784,” section 20 reads: “Therefore, until the Brethren shall be able to ex- press themselves intelligently to the heathen, they must be contented with preaching by their walk and conversation only. Though the heathen may be brought to understand many things by signs—a way 42 AIMS AND PURPOSES 43 of preaching which often makes a particular impres- sion, when words cannot be understood. “But when the Brethren shall have learned the language sufficiently to be understood, their testimony is to begin with Jesus Christ, describing Him as that great Lord, Who has all power in heaven and on earth, yea, as the Almighty God, Who made all things, and man in particular. They set forth His love to man to be so inexpressibly great, that He became Himself a man for our sake, to deliver us all from evil, and to make us happy here and hereafter. They testify to them at the same time, that He, out of love to man, endured even the most cruel death, and shed His blood, that we might obtain eternal life. They extol Him as the most kind, most benign and gracious Saviour, Whose heart’s delight is to do good unto men. Them- selves they represent as messengers sent by Him, to invite them, the heathen, to the enjoyment of all His blessings; and their labour aims only at gaining the hearts of the heathen for our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus they continue unweariedly preaching Christ and His sacrifice for us, until His gospel shall kindle a fire in their hearts, and bring them to faith in Jesus.” The following sections set forth that after the mis- sionaries have won the heathen for Christ then they are to tell them that our Lord Jesus Christ has a Father and are to explain God the Father to them, and that “when the word of Jesus Christ and His heavenly Father shall have taken hold of the hearts of the heathen,” then the Holy Spirit shall be explained to them. On the other hand the late Dr. Nevius, one of the ablest and wisest missionaries in China, maintained that the proper approach to the Chinese, at least, was to begin with God. He was opposed to the circulation of a Gospel like Mark, without any note or comment, be- cause he believed that its abrupt introduction, “The be- 44 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS ginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God,” » at once created prejudice and misunderstanding which was unnecessary. Instead of making Christ known to the Chinese, this method, he held, obscured Him and obstructed the entrance of the Gospel. His method was to begin with God the Creator and Father, and to unfold His revelation in nature and in Christ. But whatever the method of approach or the form of statement, all Christian missions have been created by the sense of desire and duty to make the Gospel known to the world, and in one way or another have actually served the primary end of evangelisation. As Paul said of activities, of some of which he approved and of some of which he disapproved, ‘‘What then? Notwithstanding, every way Christ is preached and I therein do rejoice, yea and will rejoice.”” No imagina- tion can conceive the extent, diversity and persistence of this preaching of Christ and His Gospel in the for- eign mission enterprise. Ordained missionaries and native preachers have preached in chapel and house, in temple and shrine, by the wayside and in the city and village street. Men and women without ecclesiastical ordination, by the ten thousand, have told what they know of the Gospel in hospital and school and shop and house and wherever they had an opportunity to speak to other men and women. No doubt much of this preaching has been crude. The Taiping Rebellion shows how much earnest and sincere misrepresentation of the Gospel there has been. Nevertheless truth has gone abroad and great masses of men have heard of Christ and of these many have accepted the new hopes which the Gospel seemed to bring. In this work of direct evangelisation there are all the problems of the preaching of the Gospel which the AIMS AND PURPOSES 45 Church has met throughout the centuries, complicated by new problems of language, antagonistic religions, and political organisations and issues. Some of these we shall consider in later chapters. Two of the more simple questions may be stated here. Can the Gospel be preached on the foreign field in the same evangelistic form to which we have been accustomed in the West? Is it wise to preach the Gospel indiscriminately to all classes and groups or is it better to select a superior class or group and let the Gospel work out from it? With regard to the first of these questions, it may be replied that the work of evangelisation need not be and never has been bound up to particular forms, either in medizeval or in modern missions, and that even in the Western Churches the modes of evangelisation of one day have differed from those of another. It need not concern us at all if our methods are inapplicable in Asia and Africa or if new methods never dreamed of by us emerge there. Nonetheless it is interesting to ob- serve that general evangelistic movements such as we have known in the West have been found natural and effective in Asia and that it is probable that we shall see them there in the future on a vastly greater scale. We may take one field for illustration. There has always been a steady emphasis upon evangelistic duty in the Churches in Japan and from time to time there have been notable special evangelistic efforts. Effective use has been made of the opportunities offered by exposi- tions. The Taikyo Dendo was a fruitful evangelistic campaign marking the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury, and fifteen years later the Churches throughout the country engaged generally in carrying forward a three years’ united campaign. The staff of workers was not large enough to make a simultaneous campaign 46 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS possible and meetings, accordingly, were conducted in different sections of the country on a general consecu- tive plan. There was no difficulty in securing audiences of attentive and responsive people representing any level of society which was sought after. I attended a number of the meetings held in connection with this campaign in churches, tents and public halls. Almost invariably the meetings were crowded, the attention rapt, the people willing to sit and listen for hours, the newspaper reports full and sympathetic, and when ex- pressions were called for the response would be sur- prising. Great numbers expressed a purpose to follow Christ and much larger numbers a willingness to study the Gospel. There seemed to be no limitations upon this work except those which sprang from the few- ness of the qualified workers or from the inactivity or lukewarmness of those Christians who are not awake to their duty and the exceptional opportunities of the present time. It was interesting to note the opinions of the Japanese leaders with regard to it. They all spoke of the great gain which has come from co-operation of the different denominations. Mr. Imai, one of the effective preachers in the campaign, formerly a Bud- dhist priest, contrasted the unity of the Christians with “the chasms between the sects of Buddhism and of Shinto, neither of which could possibly carry on such a campaign.” ‘Men of the most different views,” said Mr. Uemura, “have been delighted to find that there was such joy in getting together.” “If ever in Japan a union Church should develop,” said Mr. Miyagawa, “historians will trace it to a natural, unpremeditated outgrowth of this campaign.”” Many Churches gained in membership and the Church of Christ in Japan rejoiced in the largest number of baptisms that it had AIMS AND PURPOSES > 47 ever had, equalling ten per cent. of the total member- ship of the Church. The Japanese leaders, however, spoke earnestly of three great needs which the work of the campaign clearly revealed. (1) The first was the need of a more distinct utterance of the definite evan- gelical note. It is significant to have this emphasised, especially by Mr. Miyagawa, whose little book, “Christ and His Mission,’ dealing with the problem of the person of Christ, has called forth some criticism. Speaking with regard to the message of the campaign, Mr. Miyagawa publicly declared that, “There must be a far more vigorous, incisive presentation of the mean- ing of the cross and salvation in Christ.’’ To this end also it was felt that there was urgent need of the raising up of men with the gift of direct evangelistic persua- sion. (2) A second need was the lack of intensive personal work. Of this Mr. Uemura significantly said, “The big demonstrations and mass meetings have by no means been wasted. They are especially appro- priate during the first year but now we must bear down upon personal evangelism and the thorough nurture of seekers. In this we must seek the aid of the mis- sionaries more than in the past. Doubtless it is the fault of us Japanese leaders that the missionaries have not been sufficiently prominent as speakers and workers. I earnestly hope that missionaries will not only be given an opportunity but will press forward without being asked.” ‘“‘The campaign,” said Bishop Hiraiwa of the Methodist Church, “has shown that our pastors have to be trained totrain. They do not yet know how to nurse into healthy life and to guide on to maturity the inquirers who come to them. As a result in the majority of local churches not more than one-tenth of the persons whose signed cards were handed to the 48 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS pastors have come into church membership.” With this same thought in mind Mr. Uemura urged, “that first and last, what is needed is a larger number of strong men, especially in the ministry. Even in the cities the churches are often poorly manned and it is still worse in the country. We need to raise the standard of ministerial candidates and get more men in our seminaries with the physique and force and ability of the picked men in the government colleges. Theo- logical school students should be more carefully selected and not over urged to enter. They should be put through a physical examination and not spoiled by scholarship aid. Let us pray for men, for the harvest is waiting.” (3) This need of prayer was emphasised by the Japanese leaders as the third great need. ‘There is one deep conviction which the last few months have brought,” said Mr. Miyagawa, “Man’s wisdom cannot open hearts nor save souls. Only as we bow before the heavenly Father and pray for spiritual power to con- vince the audience and comfort the inquirers can hearts be won to Christ. Whatever results have been achieved have come from prevailing prayer.” Two aspects of the campaign were emphasised by the missionaries in addition to these points of which the Japanese leaders speak. One of these was the activity of the laymen. As Dr. Fulton says, “The lay element in the Church has brought to the front both men and women. The call upon them as speakers has given them a new sense of responsibility, and the healthful criticism which has been received in some cases for failing to utter a clear and positive gospel will not be lost upon them.” In the second place the cam- paign helped to reveal the growing realisation of the country that the old religious forces are inadequate to AIMS AND PURPOSES | 49 meet the needs of the nation or of human life. Ata banquet of prominent men entertained at the Imperial hotel in Tokyo by the evangelistic committee, Count Okuma, whose kinship with Christian ideals was per- haps overestimated, in reviewing the half century of modern Christian work in Japan; “not only acknowl- edged the large contribution made to the betterment of society but frankly stated his own convictions that no practical solution of many pressing problems was in sight apart from Christianity.”” In his comments on the campaign the Rev. Harper H. Coates of Tokyo stated, ‘““The monotheistic trend hitherto kept in the background of Japanese thought is gradually finding expression among thinkers of light and leading and cannot fail in time to land men in the Christian Church.” Even Abbot Kosui, the recent head of the Hongwanji sect of Buddhism, said in a statement widely quoted among the people, “Buddhism in Japan as well as in India and China is doomed to ultimate destruction, for it is out of touch with life.” The second typical evangelistic question which we have suggested is illustrated in the low caste movement in India. Much of the early missionary work in India was directed to high caste people. The educational work then and since has been maintained as an agency of access and influence among the upper castes. During the past thirty years, however, the missions discovered a great door of opportunity among the lower or more accurately, the outcaste people, approximately 50,- 000,000, who have in the past been outside the pale of Indian social life. They were an untouchable, un- privileged mass of humanity dropped through the bot- tom of human life. Christian missions went to them. They heard in Christianity a new message of hope, and 50 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS as a result tens of thousands of these ignorant but still aspiring people have been baptised into the Christian Church. The movement has its grave problems and some of these are stated in the “Memorandum” of the Christo Samaj, issued in 1920, and representing the views of some of the ablest of the Indian Christian leaders in South India: “We find serious drawbacks and mistakes in con- nection with the way in which whole villages and families have been and are being brought into the Christian Church. We raise no serious objection on the score that these mass movements are from the lower classes ; for the Gospel should indeed be preached to the poor. But we perceive questionable motives mixed up in the mass movement phenomena, which have led to serious complications in the Christian organism. It is to the social and material aspirations of the lower classes that the method has largely appealed and the spiritual motive is not given the emphasis and pre- eminence that it always should claim. It is openly avowed that persons without a real perception of Chris- tianity are admitted into the Christian fold in anticipa- tion of the spiritual benefits that might result to their children or succeeding generations. While we seriously question even such a result, we submit emphatically this is a fatal error in the building up of the Church, which was intended to be an assembly of those who have deliberately given themselves to the lordship of Christ. Also it does little justice to the inherent religious capacity of the lower classes attested by their past history, and does permanent harm to Indian Christianity by establishing a low standard of spirituality in the Indian Church. This low standard of spiritual life is one of the chief stumbling blocks to the true expansion of Christianity in the land; for converts of a higher order who have accepted Christianity through higher motives could hardly find their spiritual home in the Christian community as it is at present composed, with AIMS AND PURPOSES 51 the result that they either succumb to the prevailing standard of the community or go out of the Christian community or remain as unbaptized Christians outside. Mass movements have also reproduced the caste divisions inside the Christian Church and have, we are afraid, forever committed Christianity to development on caste lines. They have given the lie to the hopes held out by Christian missionaries in the past of Chris- tianity proving the most effective force in the formation of an Indian nation. We are therefore even forced to disown the Christian community as not being a creation of the spirit of Christ, and would differentiate between this community and the true Christian Church, which should consist of true followers of Christ. Such methods of enlarging the Christian Church have been followed in the West, and such nominal Christianity does exist in the West. But that is no sufficient reason for perpetuating them here, where the Christian Church is yet in its initial stages with its task of evangelisation still largely before it. This drawback comes to the forefront especially at the present juncture in India, where the struggle between Christianity and Hinduism clearly lies in the spiritual realm. That the large acces- sion to the Christian Churches from these classes is a drag on the wheels of progress becomes apparent. Whenever any desirable reform is proposed, the mis- sions that are responsible for these movements at once point out that it is only a small section that would countenance the change, and that the less developed Christians are averse to it. Thus, by continual ex- pansion of the Churches by the inflow of mere numbers, their period of tutelage and subordination can be indefinitely postponed, and it is even contended that these lower classes cannot be entrusted to their more educated brethren, and that the missionary alone can hold the scales even between the two parties.” Some of the discussions of this question which one hears in India lead him to ask whether if those speak- ing had had matters in their own hands there ever 52 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS would have been any mass movement at all, or whether if they could have their way now the movement would be allowed any further development. But the teaching of our Lord and the history of the Christian Church in the New Testament, in the centuries of the expansion of the Church, in the Reformation, in the best activities of the Roman Catholic Church; the institution of the human family with the principles and processes of its unequalled power; the laws of life and progress in institutions and in society are all against too tight and hampering an attitude with regard to the providence of God in the founding of His Church. One can sym- pathise deeply with the individualistic and selective view expressed in the quotation from the Memorandum of the Christo Samaj, and yet one cannot but believe that in the long run we shall see that this mass movement with all its problems and difficulties was and is of God’s will. Only we should seek to make fewer mistakes than we have made and should certainly look with restive- ness and discontent upon our present failure to make all that should be made out of this opportunity. There are those who believe that only Indian Christians of the higher castes could use this opportunity to the full. It would be a tragic thing if leaders of the Indian Church from the better castes were led to terminate or to op- pose a movement which they might not only save from mistake and loss, but by which it might be the will of God through them to save India. Apart from these questions and many more which are involved in the distinctive evangelistic aims of missions, there is the problem of relating evangelisation to the other elements in the statement of the broad pur- pose of missions which was quoted at the beginning of this chapter. This statement binds together in one, AIMS AND PURPOSES 53 two aims which are sometimes separated, and which are well stated in a very suggestive little book entitled, “Mission Problems in Japan.” “TI. The end of mission work in any country should be to raise up a native Church, with an efficient organ- isation, a sound theology, and a- consecrated and able ministry. When this is accomplished the work of the missionary is done. The unevangelised portion of the nation, however great, may and should be left to the care of the native Church. The Churches in America might still need to assist the native organisations with funds; but as soon as an efficient native Church is established, as defined above, the work of the missionary body is over, and they should therefore be withdrawn. “II. The aim of the foreign missionaries to any country should be to evangelise that country, i.e., to cause, if not all, then at any rate the larger part of its inhabitants to know the truth. The establishment and organisation of a native Church is a means, and the most important one, to that end, but it is not in itself an end. As the missionaries have a work to perform be- fore the organisation of the native Church, so they have a work after it has attained such a degree of efficiency that it no longer needs their superintendence. Their work is then to press on the evangelisation of the mass of the people, a work that is never finished so long as a large part of the people are lying in heathen darkness.” These two aims are not separate and antagonistic. They belong together. To evangelise it is not enough that missionaries should preach the Gospel. As Professor William Adams Brown said, in a report on “Modern Missions in the Far East’: “We must raise up a native ministry, create a Chris- tian literature in the vernacular ; plant institutions which shall have for each of the countries in which they are established the same power of self-propagation which is characteristic of the churches of the homeland. 54. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS “This is a work which cannot be done by foreigners. © They may lay the foundation, but the building itself must be the work of native Christians interpreting Christianity to their fellow-countrymen in terms of their own speech and habits of thought. It is one of the most encouraging features of the present situation that this is so generally recognised by missionaries, and that the progress of the mission cause is being more and more judged by this standard. “What then does it mean to create a native Church? Clearly not simply to gather congregations of native Christians and to raise up a native ministry to preach to them. It means to bring into existence in each country of the world a Christian community with an independent self-consciousness, self-supporting, self- governing and self-propagating.”’ When we conceive this Christian community in terms of a Church, as missions have always done and must inevitably do, a host of new questions emerges. What is the Christian Church? What are its essential marks? What are its real functions? And consideration of these questions will bring out, of course, the differences of view, some of them superficial and some of them very deep, which prevail with regard to the true defini- tion of the Church. The leaders of the Churches on the mission fields will have to face these differences and sooner or later answer these questions as best they can for themselves. They may decide to carry on the traditions which they have received or to pursue some new composite or original road. We can only pray that they may be led aright. The aim of foreign missions clearly is to plant Christianity indigenously in the life of each nation, to domesticate it there and let it grow up and out in the forms of life appropriate to it in the new environment to which it has been naturalised, to which, indeed, it has AIMS AND PURPOSES) 55 not needed to be naturalised so far as it has been presented in its true character as the universal life and faith of man. So far as we succeed in carrying out this aim, we build up in each nation, or we are witnesses to a building up by God of Churches rooted in the life of each separate nation, each one made up of its nation’s people, subject to its distinctive character and partici- pating in its national mission and destiny. Our very fundamental ideal in foreign missions involves the creation of the national problem, the problem of the relation of national Churches, or of Churches which are to become national. The ideal of the Roman Church is to subject all Churches everywhere to the Roman tradition, the Roman theory, and the Roman government. This is not our ideal. Our ideal is to establish in each land a. native Church that shall be of the soil, rooted in the tradition and life of the people, fitted to its customs and institutions, sharing its character and participating in its mission, yes, defining and inspiring that mission as it can do only when it is a truly national Church subject to no alien bondage. In such a Church, Christianity will, of course, surrender nothing that is essential and universal. She enters into no compromise. She simply domesticates herself in a new home which she has been long in finding, and from the new roots which she sinks into humanity expands that interpreta- tion of the life of God in man and nourishes that hope of man’s future in God, which can only be perfected as all the people bring their glory and honour into the final temple of humanity. Just as Boards and Missions exist for the sake of the individual missionary, so his end is found in estab- lishing and assisting a living native Church. I use the 56 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS word “native” without hesitation. It is a current fashion in missionary literature to eschew it on the ground that it is a reproachful term. What makes it reproachful? Not its history. It is a good and honest word, one of the best and honestest words in the English language. If it has been tainted by any condi- tions existing in the mission work, the right course is to change the conditions and not to allow a noble word to be degraded. So long as the conditions exist they will taint any other word that may be substituted for it. They will taint “indigenous” faster than they tainted “native.” They will taint “Church” as they are al- ready beginning to do. They will even taint the word “Christian.” What needs to be changed is not the good word “native” but the facts of dependence and subservience in the native Church. It is desirable that there should be clear thinking and straight speaking in this matter, because there is danger that in some coun- tries the mission enterprise will be led into a morass in which both Missions and Churches will be bogged to their detriment and confusion. The supreme and determining aim of missions in any country, India for example, is to get Jesus Christ made known and accepted in India. Elemental to this aim is the establishment of a Christian Church in India, but the establishment of the Church in any land is not a matter of terminology. It is a matter of fact. And a Church that is a Church in fact and not merely in term will be self-dependent, self-governed, and most of all a force of living and spontaneous propaganda. I do not say that it must be. I simply say that it will be. To give up the idea of financial self-dependence is to accept the fact of dependence, and that fact, no mat- ter how it may be obscured by mergers or by agree- AIMS AND PURPOSES | 57 ments, will keep the Church, so long as it remains a fact, from fulfilling its functions or wielding its power. The spirit of race superiority on the part of missions in whatever way it displays itself, in temper or in policy, as to money, relationships, or anything else, is a bane- ful thing, a barrier to be overcome in the effort to plant and develop an efficient and sovereign native Church. But the fact of financial dependence is a barrier also, and the Indian Church ought resolutely to set itself to overcome that barrier. Until it does do so, no sub- ordination of missionaries to it nor any merging of missions with it will make it independent or set it in its rightful place of national religious leadership. What then are the elements which must enter into the ideal of the indigenous Church? 1. That it should be the Church of Christ, that He should be its Head, in the fulness of the fact and con- ception of Him and His Headship set forth in the New Testament. It will be exclusive in the sense that He is the only Saviour and Lord. It will be inclusive in the sense that He is all in all, and Head of all both present and past, and that by Him all things consist. All the wealth and truth of the inheritance and experi- ence of the nation is His. 2. That it should be a living, propagating power, so possessing Christ and possessed by Him that its spon- taneous and irresistible instinct shall be to make Christ known to all men and to make Christ Lord of all things. (See Frederic Myers, “Catholic Thoughts on the Church of Christ and the Church of England.’’) 3. That it should be self-governing and self-support- ing. This does not mean that it may not accept counsel and help. It does mean that it does not rely upon them and that it can do without them. 58 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS 4. That it should be national and free. This means that it should be independent of foreign control and authority, though it may have what relations of inter- national fellowship it thinks wise. It means that it will have the colour and flavour of the national char- acter and will be fitted to the genius of the race. It means that so far as any external authority is con- cerned the Church will have absolute freedom of thought and life. 5. That it should be a part of that Church which lives from age to age and which is above all nations and races, and that it should be consciously and vitally and truly in line with the full Christian heritage. This means that it must know the Church of history as well as the Christ of history. 6. That it should know what the Church of the past has been through in the matter of faith and order, but be free on the basis of the New Testament and the history of the Church and its own living experience to work out its own credal statements and ecclesiastical organisation. 7. That it should be a living organism built of those living cells which are essential to all organic life. This means that it should function in and through efficient congregational units. An argument can be made for a new form of Christianity which would dispense with local church organisations, with the sacraments and the discipline and education and fellowship of local churches. But it is a purely theoretical and fallacious argument. “If men are to make a thing living,” says Mr. Chesterton, “they must make it local.” “For a long time past,” wrote Hort, “I have been coming in various ways to feel that perhaps our most urgent need in the English Church is the creation of a true con- AIMS AND PURPOSES 59 gregational life. . . . A new congregational life would give back to Christianity itself a power of which people little dream.” 8. That it should fearlessly grapple in the spirit of Christ with all the problems of life and society, or, to put it in more Christian terms, that it should seek to serve both individual persons and society as a whole in all the ways in which men of righteousness and truth and courage can serve in Christ’s name their fellow men and their age. g. That it should teach and live the Gospel and that it should conceive and represent Christianity not as a Western system to be modified but as the ideal truth of God revealed in Christ after which all national Churches are striving. The essential thing about these new Churches is that they should be real. Life and witness will be the first evidence of this reality, but also if these Churches are real they will be independent. No one will make them independent. No one can. They will simply be so. And we gain nothing by slurring the importance of this. One of the essentials of a real Church is financial self- dependence. There has been and is real danger in India, that this element in the ideal and character of a Church may be slurred over. “I am sick,” writes one Indian Christian, ‘of hearing self-support, self-support on all sides. Self-respect, self-government, self-propa- gation always precede self-support. Self-support should never be the initial step. It is a blessing that comes of itself without the present straining of nerves and pound- ing the pulpits with self-support sermons.” (The National Missionary Intelligencer, August, 1921; p. 84.) “With regard to money contributed by Churches in the West for the evangelisation of India,” says an appeal 60 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS signed by South Indian missionaries and Indian Chris- tians, “the chief question is not by whom the money is administered, but whether it is spent in the most fruitful way for the extension of Christ’s kingdom. The principle that a body because it contributes money must have a voice in the spending of it, should not operate in the Church of Christ.” (Christian Patriot, June 8, 1918.) “Let the doctrine of he who pays the piper has the right to call for the tune be decently buried.” (‘““Memorandum” of the Christo Samaj, p. 20.) Asa reaction against wrong views on the other side and the use of missionary money as a basis for missionary influence and authority, there is much that is wholesome in this emphasis, but, while the native Church may properly resent the idea that foreign funds entitle foreign Missions to control the Church, it must not shut its eyes to the hard fact which does not grow out of missionary obstinacy and domination, but rests on true psychology, true economy and true history, that the Church must be financially self-dependent. That does not mean that it may not receive financial help from without. The American Church is intellectually independent and spiritually independent, but it is draw- ing all the time upon the churches of Great-Britain for intellectual and spiritual help, and it is even more in- debted for spiritual help to its foreign missions and their work in foreign lands. But the principle to which I am referring does require relentlessly, and the native Church will never be able to escape from it, that that Church should set for itself the goal of complete self- support and should go a great deal further at once towards the achievement of that goal than it has gone. There are those in the missions and the native Churches who see this clearly. ‘Mr. ——,” writes the AIMS AND PURPOSES 61 Rey. Bernard Lucas, in an article entitled “The Indian Church and Indian Leadership,” “would relegate to a quite subordinate position the financial aspect of the question, and, ignoring the source from which the funds are obtained, would use the funds of the Home Church for the support of Indian missionaries, who as regards status and salary would be very much superior to their ministerial brethren. I would put the financial aspect of the question in the forefront, and make the Indian Church funds the controlling factor in the matter of salary, and the Indian Church organ- isation the supreme sphere in the matter of position and influence. The goal which must, in my judgment, regulate the whole missionary policy is the substitution, not of Indian for European missionaries, but of the Indian Church with its own ministerial and mission service, for the Home Church with its foreign mis- sionaries and its foreign-supported workers.” (“The Harvest Field,’ November, 1917, p. 423.) And the Rev. Andrew Thakur Das, in a paper on the “New Day in the Indian Church,” writes: “While it is be- coming clear that Christianity is to be naturalised in India, it is not easy to depict and define its future forms and features. We have not, as a community, fully set ourselves to this task. It is easy, however, to see the steep path which will lead us to the goal. An indigenous Church has to be an independent and self-sustained Church. Undoubtedly one of the keys of this situation is an Indian ministry. As long as the Indian agents are dependent on foreign funds and sub- ject to foreign control, so long it will be impossible for the Indian Church to take a vigorous step forward towards this ideal. Foreign support and control are apt to act as narcotics, and check the spontaneous 62 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS development of Indian Christianity. A mission-paid ministry tends to create a barrier between the minister and his people, by bringing him more into touch with the foreigner than with those whom he serves, and makes him responsible not to the Church, but to the Foreign Mission which supplies the money. The situation becomes very serious when we consider that, while on the one hand foreign pay-mastership is dead- ening, on the other hand Indian congregations are not rich enough to support suitable ministers. It may be possible for Missionary Societies to continue payment without exercising control, but it will damp Indian self- respect and advance.” ‘What we have to do,” Mr. Thakur Das says, “is to keep steadily before our eyes the necessary goal of replacing foreign money, foreign men, and foreign administration by Indian money, Indian men, and Indian administration.” Nothing has more notably characterised the Church in Japan than its sturdy financial independence, and nothing helped more to accomplish the results which the Churches in Japan have achieved than the example of men like Paul Sawayama, who not in a spirit of bitterness or separatism, or resentment against the foreign missions, but in the spirit of love and co-opera- tion and for the sake of the life of the Japanese Church and for the sake of the evangelisation of Japan undertook, at great self-sacrifice and perhaps at the cost of his life, the responsibility of leadership in estab- lishing both evangelistic and educational work in Japan on a purely Japanese and absolutely self-supporting basis. It would undoubtedly be a great help in India if men would come forward, with the courage described in the Memorandum of the Christo Samaj and with AIMS AND PURPOSES 63 Sawayama’s spirit, to found and carry forward purely indigenous and self-supporting activities. All who long for this will pray that such undertakings as that of the hospital and brotherhood at Tirupatter may meet with great success and be the forerunners of many such agencies in India. (“National Missionary Intelli- gencer,” April, 1921.) It should be said again that this insistence upon the self-dependence of the Church is not an obstinate prejudice of the missions nor the attempt to use the money help of the Western Churches as a condition of authority. The Boards and missions are eager to have the native churches take up and exercise all the power that they can. It is in their own best interest that one desires to see the Churches filled with a keen con- sciousness as to the inevitable connection between self- respect, self-administration and self-dependence. It is surprising and yet natural that the Churches which have been established on the mission field have had so little trouble in the matter of their credal state- ments. It is surprising when we think of the diffi- culties experienced in the West, and when we remember the composite elements which have entered into these new Churches. On the other hand all were busy with the direct work of extending the boundaries of the Church. There was present the saving power of a great and loyal evangelistic momentum. The issue was the fundamental one between Christ and paganism. Also it must be added, these creeds are as yet not original contributions out of new experience of the Gospel but amplifications and adaptations of Western formularies. It may be of interest to cite two of these. This is the creed of the Church of Christ in Japan: 62 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS development of Indian Christianity. A mission-paid ministry tends to create a barrier between the minister and his people, by bringing him more into touch with the foreigner than with those whom he serves, and makes him responsible not to the Church, but to the Foreign Mission which supplies the money. The situation becomes very serious when we consider that, while on the one hand foreign pay-mastership is dead- ening, on the other hand Indian congregations are not rich enough to support suitable ministers. It may be possible for Missionary Societies to continue payment without exercising control, but it will damp Indian self- respect and advance.”’ ‘What we have to do,” Mr. Thakur Das says, “is to keep steadily before our eyes the necessary goal of replacing foreign money, foreign men, and foreign administration by Indian money, Indian men, and Indian administration.” Nothing has more notably characterised the Church in Japan than its sturdy financial independence, and nothing helped more to accomplish the results which the Churches in Japan have achieved than the example of men like Paul Sawayama, who not in a spirit of bitterness or separatism, or resentment against the foreign missions, but in the spirit of love and co-opera- tion and for the sake of the life of the Japanese Church and for the sake of the evangelisation of Japan undertook, at great self-sacrifice and perhaps at the cost of his life, the responsibility of leadership in estab- lishing both evangelistic and educational work in Japan on a purely Japanese and absolutely self-supporting basis. It would undoubtedly be a great help in India if men would come forward, with the courage described in the Memorandum of the Christo Samaj and with AIMS AND PURPOSES 63 Sawayama’s spirit, to found and carry forward purely indigenous and self-supporting activities. All who long for this will pray that such undertakings as that of the hospital and brotherhood at Tirupatter may meet with great success and be the forerunners of many such agencies in India. (“National Missionary Intelli- gencer,” April, 1921.) It should be said again that this insistence upon the self-dependence of the Church is not an obstinate prejudice of the missions nor the attempt to use the money help of the Western Churches as a condition of authority. The Boards and missions are eager to have the native churches take up and exercise all the power that they can. It is in their own best interest that one desires to see the Churches filled with a keen con- sciousness as to the inevitable connection between self- respect, self-administration and self-dependence. | It is surprising and yet natural that the Churches which have been established on the mission field have had so little trouble in the matter of their credal state- ments. It is surprising when we think of the diffi- culties experienced in the West, and when we remember the composite elements which have entered into these new Churches. On the other hand all were busy with the direct work of extending the boundaries of the Church. There was present the saving power of a great and loyal evangelistic momentum. ‘The issue was the fundamental one between Christ and paganism. Also it must be added, these creeds are as yet not original contributions out of new experience of the Gospel but amplifications and adaptations of Western formularies. It may be of interest to cite two of these. This is the creed of the Church of Christ in Japan: 66 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS against God’s good and holy law, and that out of this condition no man is able to deliver himself. (6) OF THE GRACE OF GoD: We believe that God out of His great love for the world, has given His only begotten Son to be the Saviour of sinners, and in the Gospel freely offers His all-sufficient salvation to all men. (7) OF THE Lorp Jesus CuRIsT: We believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God: Who for us men and for our salvation was conceived of the Holy Spirit, became man, yet without sin, the only true Incarnation of God; He through His word and through His perfect obedience did reveal the Father ; and by His life, death and resur- rection did establish the way by which men may obtain forgiveness of sin and the gift of eternal life; He ascended into heaven where He ever liveth to make in- tercession for us. (8) Or THE Hoty Spirit: We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, Who moves upon the hearts of men to restrain them from evil and to turn them unto good, to convict the world of sin, to enlighten men’s minds in the knowledge of Christ, and to persuade and enable them to obey the call of the Gospel; He abides with the Church, dwelling in every believer as the spirit of truth, of holiness, of comfort and of love. (9) OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE: We believe that, being born again by the spirit of God, we become new creatures in Christ Jesus, trusting in Him alone for our salvation, confessing and for- saking our sins, with a sincere purpose to do the will of God; we believe that God pardons our sins on the ground of perfect obedience and sacrifice of Christ and that we are adopted as sons of God and grow into the likeness of Christ through fellowship with Him and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. (10) Or THE CHURCH: We acknowledge one holy catholic Church, the in- numerable company of saints of every age and nation, who being united by the Holy Spirit to Christ their - AIMS AND PURPOSES 67 Head, are one body in Him, and have communion with their Lord and with one another. Further we receive it as the Will of Christ that His Church on earth should exist as a visible and sacred brotherhood, consisting of those who profess faith in Jesus. Christ and obedience unto Him, and organised for the confession of His name, for the public worship of God, for the admin- istration of the sacraments, for the upbuilding of be- lievers, for the universal propagation of the Gospel and for the service of man, and we acknowledge as a part of this universal brotherhood every church throughout the world which professes this faith in Jesus Christ and obedience to Him as Divine Lord and Saviour. (11) OF THE SACRAMENTS: We believe that our Lord instituted the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Baptism is a sign and seal of our union with Christ and our renewal by the Holy Spirit. The Lord’s Supper is a memorial of Christ’s death and is a means of grace to those who partake in faith, and is to be observed by His people till He comes. (12) Or THE RESURRECTION AND JUDGMENT: We believe in the resurrection of the dead, both of the just and the unjust, and that Christ shall judge the living and the dead; who shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of judgment.” On the basis of such simple doctrinal standards as these all the Presbyterian and Reformed Churches at work in Japan have united in co-operation with the Church of Christ, and in India not only the Presby- terian and Reformed Missions with one exception, but the Congregational Missions as well have united in combining their fruitage in the United Church of India. Indeed, throughout the mission field the spirit of co- operation and comity has in general governed the re- lations of all the evangelical Churches. 68 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS A great deal is made, nevertheless, by critics of foreign missions of the folly and wickedness of the Western Churches in extending their denomina- tionalism to the foreign fields. In a measure the critics are right. Our denominations grew up from historic antecedents which are intelligible to us, and those who adhere to each denomination are able to justify it in their own view. There are many of us who have no such ingenuity, and who see no reason for the mainte- nance of so many denominations, and little for the maintenance of the half-dozen bodies into which it may be hoped that the present multitude of denominations will soon coalesce, except the reason that may be found in temperamental differences and in the administrative effectiveness due to having a few separate divisions of what is yet one army. But there is no reason for ex- porting to Asia our Occidental lines of cleavage. There surely Christianity should be introduced in such simple and essential forms as to make one common Church possible, undivided by our western sectarianism. And the critics are not only right in this principle, that we ought not to inflict our denominationalism on the mission field, but they have a little justification of their charge that this has sometimes been done. There have been instances where two Churches have occupied a field which should have been left to one, where new native Churches have been seriously disturbed in their development by imitation of western models, and where one body or another of western missionaries has re- fused to participate in union movements which would have tended to obscure or to eliminate the lines of western denominationalism. But the critics make far too much of what few facts of this sort there are. As a matter of fact, there is such AIMS AND PURPOSES 69 inconsiderable rivalry on the mission field that it can be almost ignored. Instead of conflict and competition, there is real, even if not perfect, harmony and the closest co-operation. And the union movements are not only among cognate bodies. In Shantung Province in China, the English Baptists and American Presbyterians have joined in one university, including a theological school where the preachers for the two missions are trained together, and the English and American Congrega- tionalists and the American Methodists and Presby- terians have united in a similar theological institution in Peking. In other fields there are boards of reference, permanent committees on co-operation, or other pro- visions for unity of effort; and pages could be filled with the resolutions and agreements of missionary con- ferences in many fields regarding missionary comity and co-operation. The critics have little idea how large is the measure of unity already attained abroad, and how relatively small is the friction and overlapping. The critics are far surpassed in their zeal for unity and goodwill by the Christian missionaries who are doing the work of establishing the Church in Asia and the rest of the non-Christian world. But the critics say: “In spite of all this, it is true that the various Churches are projecting themselves over the world, and the poor heathen are hopelessly confused by the diverse and perplexing forms in which Christianity presents itself to them. They are used to simplicity and unity, and they are asked to accept a new religion which presents itself in twenty different forms.” Lord Curzon said all this in the trite and stale way common to all superficial examiners of mis- sions in Asia. Speaking of Japan especially, he said: 70 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS “When Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Evan- gelicals, Lutherans, Church of England, Methodists, Reformed, Russian Orthodox, Quakers, Unitarians, and Universalists appear simultaneously upon the scene, each claiming to hold the keys of heaven in their hand, it cannot be thought surprising if the Japanese, who have hardly made up their minds that they want a heaven at all, are somewhat bewildered by the multi- plicity of volunteer doorkeepers.” In reply to this it should be said, first of all, that it is for the most part sheer nonsense. In most mission fields there are no denominations at all. Each separate church has its own district. The countries are so large, and the population so immense, that each mission works for different sections of people, and it goes to these people, not as a mission of a particular denomination, but as an expression of the great Church of Christ, and of what is common to all branches of it. The Presby- terian converts in Persia do not know that they are Presbyterians. The Baptist converts in India only know that they are Christians. In most cases no denominational titles have been translated or invented. And if Lord Curzon had examined the native Christians as to what denominations had baptised and enrolled them, he would have discovered that most of them did not know. They only know that they are Christians. Get all the native Christians of Shanghai together, and you will find that the denominational distinctions are completely lost sight of. I attended a Christian En- deavour convention there once, and the missionary critic would have found it difficult to unearth the divisional walls which give him so much distress. And the idea that the poor heathen are nonplussed at the thought of religious denominationalism is fool- AIMS AND PURPOSES rig ish. All the great non-Christian religions are full of what we call denominations. Mohammedanism is usually singled out as a rebuke to Christianity in this regard. But Mohammedans would not be grateful for this conspicuousness. They say, “The Magians are divided into seventy sects, the Jews into seventy-one, the Christians into seventy-two, and the Moslems into seventy-three, as Mohammed has foretold.” Even in schism, Islam claims precedence. Moreover, its devotees have passed beyond Christendom in this, that only one sect is entitled to salvation in their view, each sect holding the others damnable. Historically, almost innumerable sects have been developed, of which the Sunnees and Shiahs, with their subdivisions, and the Matazalites, the Safatians, and Kharejites, are only the principal ones. The same thing is true of Bud- dhism. In Japan, where Christian denominationalism so troubled Lord Curzon, there are nine principal Buddhist sects, and forty-two sub-sects, with differences of opinion and characteristics more grave and serious than those which separate the Protestant denomina- tions. The reproach of denominationalism is a familiar taunt of the Hindu visitors to England and America. But nothing in Christendom compares with the intoler- able caste divisions of Hinduism, and even inside of the Brahmin caste there are diverse schools and rival temples. The Hindu reformers have made a great deal of the divisions of Christendom, and have preached a great catholic religious unity. “Spare me and my countrymen the infliction of antiquated and lifeless dogmas,” said Keshub Chunder Sen. “I cannot but feel perplexed, and even amused, amidst countless and quarrelling sects.” How familiar these words sound! 72 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS They have become part of the stock-in-trade of Oriental visitors, with which they tickle the ears of that large class of critics of missions at home who could not define a dogma if they tried, and who do not venture into _ sufficiently close contact with sects to be hurt by them, founded split asunder in the most bitter controversy, or helped. The sect which Keshub Chunder Sen during his life. JI do not think this amused him. After his death, the branch of the Brahma Samaj which followed him fell into what its leading member, Mr. Mozoomdar, called a “condition of anarchy.” Hindu reform has outclassed the most centrifugal Christian denominationalism. The same history has been re- peated in Babism. Professing to be a religious unity, shaming Christendom, it broke up into foolish personal factions. Nothing could be much further from the truth than the assertion that the non-Christian world is confused and mystified by the denominationalism of Christianity because it has always known unity in its religions. It has not, and its own freedom and varia- tion of view and diverse theological schools have en- abled it to understand very well the principle of re- ligious unity in variety. To the critics accordingly we reply, “Be careful; your words sound plausible, but they do not accord with the facts. The difficulty in the way of the acceptance of Christianity by men abroad, or by men at home, is not denominationalism. ‘That is a pretext, and it is a poor and unworthy one.” To ourselves we may well say, however, “Why are we not one? Do we need so many divisions? Can we not draw closer together? Can we not remove what real grounds do exist for criticism? Why can we AIMS AND PURPOSES 73 not realise now that unity of all believers for which our Lord prayed?” The ideal of an independent native Church as a formative element in missionary policy involves the question of the relation of foreign missions and foreign missionaries to this new Church. The question is an inevitable one whatever may be the practice of any particular denomination. Some denominations, as we shall see, work on the principle of a world-wide exten- sion of that denomination with many national branches. Others follow the principle of establishing totally in- dependent national Churches. In either case the same problem arises. The problem is inherent in the foreign mission enterprise and for that matter in the home missionary enterprise, wherever an organised Church seeks to establish another organised Church, or even where, inside any one Church, an organisation of that Church, such as a missionary board, carries on work within the field of another organisation of that Church. Christianity was meant to spread unceasingly, spon- taneously, and vitally. The attempt to atone for the failure to evangelise the world through such organic evangelisation by the establishment of missionary societies and missionary boards, necessary as this at- tempt is, brings with it the problem of how to relate such agencies, and the Church acting through them, to other forms of the Church’s action and organisation. There are those who believe that this problem as a problem of constitutional statement or form of govern- ment is insoluble. It seems probable that the relation of home boards to home mission conferences, Presby- teries or parishes, and of foreign missions to native Churches, of missionary societies to bishops, of the 74 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS whole temporary device of missionary agencies to the permanent institutions of the Church, can never be covered and settled by formulas or resolutions, but must remain as a discipline for the spirit of Christian men and an opportunity for the exercise of their qualities of good sense and patience and love. And the problem is not only inevitable, but is also desirable. If the energies of life should die down and the Western Churches discontinue their missionary work on one hand, or the native Churches should accept the doom of a perpetual dependence and subservience on the other hand, the problem would no doubt be escaped, but at the price of the failure both of foreign missions and of the native Church. Who would welcome such a deliverance? Foreign missions were established for the very purpose of creating a Church which would raise such questions as are now raised. If the dis- cussion brings with it painful experiences and foolish words on one side or the other or on both sides, these spring not from the necessities of the problem but from our own human infirmities of mind and spirit, and are a challenge to us to prove that the Gospel which we preach as sufficient for all needs of the world is suf- ficient for our own needs as Christian men engaged in the business of building up the Christian Church. In all the fields where the work is in an advanced stage and in some where it is not, one of the most urgent of all mission questions is this question of right relations between the native Churches and the missions which have come from the Western Churches. So grave is the situation in some lands, due to the develop- ment of the nationalistic spirit and the sense of duty on the part of the Church, and yet the preponderant re- sources and power of the foreign missions, that there AIMS AND PURPOSES 75 are some earnest souls who wonder whether heroic, even violent measures may not be necessary. In India, for example, in sympathy with the extreme nationalistic spirit, shall the Indian Church break completely free from all foreign relationships, relate itself to Indian tradition and temper rather than to the stream of historic Christianity, and thus settle the question in the radical way that an occasional missionary has sug- gested? “The Memorandum on the Further Develop- ment and Expansion of Christianity in India,” issued by the Christo Samaj, sets forth this possibility : “The new nationalism has not left untouched Christian life and thought. It has affected the com- munity both from the inside and outside. Within the community it has made us realise, as never before, that Christianity has a part to play in national life, and that there is a spiritual heritage of the past to which we have been denied access. It has been slowly dawning on us that it is only to the extent to which Christian life reacts to the Indian past and present that Chris- tianity can become a living factor. But the unprepared- ness of Indian Christians for fulfilling their destiny is now becoming more apparent with the recognition that we have been hitherto in a world apart from India, created for us by the genius of foreign missions. As to the external influence of Christianity in politics, though there have been conspicuous cases of Indian Christians in public life, the community as a whole has not responded, rightly or wrongly, in any effective man- ner to political movements. This is now gradually passing away, and Indian Christians are showing greater interest in all that concerns the political future of Indias to" | “The ideal line of action that suggests itself to us is complete independence and even exclusiveness, and to work out the salvation of Indian Christianity without any reference to foreign missions. This is necessary to recover our normal character as Indian Christians, 76 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS and will have to be jealously adhered to, until there comes into being an Indian Christianity with a distinc- tive character of its own. It was stated by an Indian belonging to our school of thought that we do not want any more foreign missionaries, and that the better type of missionary is even a worse enemy of Indian Chris- tianity than the ordinary run of missionaries. While it may be suicidal for Indians to dissociate themselves from and completely disown Western Christianity, we perceive that our training under the present system has so greatly westernised our ideas and outlook that we cannot recover or discover the Indian standpoint with- out a negative policy of dissociation from the West as well as a positive policy of devotion to the East. In so far as the Indian is imbued with the Western mentality, he is himself an enemy to Indian Christianity. While therefore the Indian has to fight against his own West- ern mentality in his attempt to recover his Indian out- look, he would immensely complicate the situation by association with Western Christians, who could hardly be expected to fulfil the requirements that even most Indian Christians lack. And the more avowedly sympathetic to the Indian standpoint the Westerner is, the more subtle and insidious will be the way in which he will consciously or unconsciously transmit his West- ern mentality and retard the progress of the Indian in the path that he alone can discover. We therefore look for real salvation from only such adventurous spirits as would turn a deaf ear for the present to the temptations of association with foreigners and dependence on foreign help. They will pre-eminently be the heralds of the new era and the creators of the new Christian edifice, wherein the religious aspirants of India will find their natural abode. For the sake of Indian Chris- tianity some Indian Christians will have to take this self-denying ordinance and will have to be severely left alone to accomplish the task to which they have been called. It will be the great privilege of sympathetic Indians to stand by these pioneers and prophets and directly help them. It will be the duty of all interested in the progress of Christ’s Kingdom in India to pray AIMS AND PURPOSES 77 for the advent of such men and hold them up before God when they arise.” One cannot but have a great deal of sympathy with this view. He almost wishes that some such leaders would arise, and yet on sober second thought he real- ises, as the writers of this Memorandum have done, that probably the problems are to be worked out not by revolt and alienation but by co-operation and unity. And in China where the problem of right relations between the nation and Western nations has been during the past year more acute than in any other country, the leaders both of the Church and of the Missions are earnestly seeking to show that in the Christian Church East and West can work together and can solve all questions under a principle of co- operation and unity. The aim of Foreign Missions to make Christ known and to found His Church makes legitimate and neces- sary all activities which prove to be essential to realising this aim. No form of work, next to the direct oral explanation of the Gospel, seems to us to be more im- portant or influential than education. Carey began instinctively with schools and Duff soon made out of educational missions a distinct and powerful missionary method. Since then, however, there have been decades of debate over the subject of missionary education, with opinions ranging all the way from those who advocate education even without religious instruction or direct evangelistic aim, to those who deny the legiti- macy of any form of educational effort at all and hold that missionary work should be restricted absolutely to the simple oral preaching of the Gospel. After having been quiescent for some years this discussion has now 78 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS become very much alive once more. All believe in the use of education as a missionary agency, but some are satisfied with its general influence as a source of light and a school of character, as an instrument for the diffusion of truth of all kinds and not distinctly as an agency for teaching Christianity while others believe that its use is subject to very clear and definite aims. We believe that foremost among these is the aim to win students to the acceptance and confession of Christ as their Lord and Saviour and to the dedication of their lives to the work of bringing in His Kingdom. It does not trouble those who hold this view to have this aim denounced as proselytism. If by proselytising is meant the effort to persuade Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists and Confucianists and all men to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour and openly to confess and follow and serve Him, then the work of proselytising is exactly the work in which missions are engaged, and to forward that work is the main reason for our establishing and maintaining Christian schools of whatsoever grade. This purpose and character of missionary education are Clearly set forth in a deliverance of the Educational Board of the Bombay Representative Council of Mis- sions in 1921, signed by the Chairman of the Board, the Bishop of Bombay, and by its Secretary, the Rev. John McLean: “Missionaries believe that, though the branches of study commonly called secular are necessary to the emancipation of the people and to the amelioration of their lot, yet education is incomplete which is not addressed to the whole man, and must fail of its pur- pose unless it touches the heart and purifies the con- science. Missionaries are thus firm believers in AIMS AND PURPOSES 79 religious education; that is to say, education conducted by religious persons for the purpose of implanting re- ligious principles in the souls of the pupils, as the one ruling principle of all life and of all knowledge. This being the general ideal, neither our own convictions, nor our estimate of the significance of Christianity for the world, permits us to give any religious education but one founded on the Christian religion. “Thus, if missionaries engage in education at all, it is to offer to all who will receive it full Christian religious education. For such education.there has been, and, we believe, will continue to be, a demand in this country. On the one hand, it is essential to the growing com- munity of Indian Christians that they should have such an education available for their children. On the other hand, many non-Christians have in the past been, and many in the present are, desirous that their children also should receive such an education.” And this is a typical letter from a Mohammedan father in India written to Principal Janvier of the Ewing Christian College in Allahabad: “My son has this year passed his examination from the Jumna Mission High School, and I want to give him a college education. I prefer Ewing College to other colleges because you people impart spiritual education as well as worldly education. Both teachings should go side by side, and I am very glad that my son will be taught Bible also in reading in your college.” There are many who would wish to conceive of missionary education in somewhat different terms from those which I have used. There need be no contro- versy over such matters. Truth is truth. And all truth is God’s truth. All forces which propagate truth are welcomed in the enterprise of making Christ known and of founding His Church. Modern missions and especially foreign missions to- So THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS day have a unique agency ready to their hand in the press, with an ever-growing body of readers. Missions were the first to introduce modern printing in many mission fields and the first to establish schools for the people. Now they have their reward in an unstinted opportunity for evangelism and education through the printed page. What has taken place in Japan is coming in lesser and modified measure in other lands. The processes of national education to which Japan whole- heartedly committed herself a generation and more ago have wrought upon the nation with penetrating and far-extended influence. They have made a nation of readers. At the ricksha stands the coolies read to- gether while they wait. Messenger boys have their books in their pockets to read as they push their carts along the roads. It is claimed that more books are published and sold in Japan now each year than in Germany. For half-a-mile in one street in Tokyo, bookstalls, with new and second-hand books, line the street on either side. The press, exceeding in irre- sponsibility, in lack of historical perspective, in sobriety, in any consciousness of the perils of its power even our yellow press at home, if that be possible, finds in all this mass of common men who are now able to read, a field where fire can run as over a prairie. In the schools all classes meet together, and in the de- mocracy of their fellowship, and of the truth which they are taught, forces are at work which must slowly develop a new Japan and which will need the wisest guidance, if wise guides can be found to succeed the few survivors of the old men who have led Japan so successfully along her amazing way. For these great forces Christian guides must be supplied. Wherever Christians go or wherever they may be, AIMS AND PURPOSES SI there they must bear themselves as Christians, showing in all things the mind and spirit of Christ. All the works of love and mercy which it is Christian to do they will do, and in doing them they will be making Christ known. Loving words and loving deeds must ever go together in proclaiming Christ; but if they are to be divided, a loving, wordless deed will go further to speak of Christ than a loveless or even a loving deedless word. Ex-president Eliot of Harvard) described after his visit to China in 1912 the wealth, of this accessory service of missionaries, resulting from the simple fact of their Christian life and example. “In Tientsin I saw more of the work of the Protestant missions in China than in any other city. No fair-minded observer can look at their work as now conducted without feeling the highest respect for the men and women who do it on the spot, and for the Christian goodwill in the Occident which supports it. The Protestant missions keep before the Chinese people good examples of the Christian family life; they show to all the Chinese people who come within their in- fluence, young and old, rich and poor, fine types of Christian manhood and womanhood; and they per- fectly illustrate in practical ways the Christian doctrine of. universal brotherhood, of a love which transcends the family and embraces humanity. As a rule, the missionaries, both men and women, learn to speak some Chinese dialect, and become intimately acquainted with Chinese manners and customs, and with the workings of the Chinese mind. Other foreigners resident in China are often profoundly ignorant of everything Chinese. The missionaries are generally well informed. They teach Chinese children good Occidental literature, both religious and secular. They teach exact weighing and measuring, and accuracy in the use of numbers, subjects in which the Chinese are curiously deficient. They teach the inductive method through some ele- 82 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS mentary science, and the household arts; and they teach out-of-door sports and the elements of personal hygiene. Since the European and American mission boards have provided some of their: missions with medical mis- sionaries, the missions thus strengthened have been enabled to answer in the most effective way the ques- tion of a certain lawyer to Jesus, ‘Who is my neigh- bour?? They have not passed by on the other side, like the priest and the Levite, but have showed mercy to the injured and the diseased. They have done exactly what Jesus told the lawyer to do—‘Go and do thou likewise’; and this doing has accomplished quite as much for the propagation of Christianity as the preach- ing and the teaching by missionaries. It is apparently impossible to make Orientals take an interest in the dogmas which have had such great importance in the history of Christianity in Europe; but they are quite capable of inferring the value of Christianity from the practical beneficence of Christians in the family and in society. It is the missionaries who have kept before the Chinese the good works of Christianity. Without them, the Chinese would have been left to infer the moral value of Christianity from the outrageous con- duct of the Christian governments toward China during the past hundred and fifty years, from the brutalities of Christian soldiers and sailors in time of war, from the alcoholism of the white races as it is seen in Chinese ports, and from the commercialised vices which the white races practice in China. Against all these in- fluences adverse to Christianity on the Chinese mind the missionaries have had to contend; and it is a miracle that they have won so large a measure of success.” (Eliot, “Some Roads to Peace,” p. 30 f.) The Hon. Henry Morgenthau, who was American Ambassador in Constantinople during the World War, has borne similar testimony: “A residence of over two years in Turkey has given me the best possible opportunity to see the work of the AIMS AND PURPOSES 83 American missionaries and to know the workers in- timately. “Without hesitation I declare my high opinion of their keen insight into the real needs of the people of Turkey. The missionaries have the right idea. They go straight to the foundations and provide those in- tellectual, physical, moral and religious benefits upon which alone any true civilisation can be built. ‘The missionaries are the devoted friends of the people of Turkey and they are my friends. They are brave, intelligent and unselfish men and women. I have come to respect all and love many of them. “As an American citizen I have been proud of them. As an American Ambassador to Turkey I have been delighted to help them.” This witness to the meaning of the Gospel and of life and this application of the law of Christ to human relationships is, as we have seen, a legitimate part of the aim of missions. It is more than legitimate. It is indispensable. Foreign missions, indeed, are not charged with the task of Christianising the world. But they are responsible for seeking to show in themselves and in their relationships and in their influence what Christian life for individuals and in human relation- ships is meant to be. The necessity of this aspect of the missionary task was impressively stated by the late Lord Bryce when he was the Ambassador of Great Britain to the United States in an address to the National Laymen’s Mis- sionary Convention in Washington, in November, 1909, which should be preserved: “What I want to put to vou,” he said, “is the special urgency at this moment of your endeavouring to fulfil your responsibility to the heathen world. I see at the head of the programme of the Washington Convention that your watchword is THE EVANGELISATION OF THE 84. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS WorRLD IN THIS GENERATION. Now, why in this generation? J want to give you a reason for the great urgency of the question. “The moment which we are now living is a critical moment, or perhaps, the most critical moment there has ever been in the history of the non-Christian races— most significant and weighty upon their fate and their future. In this time of ours the European races have obtained the control of nearly the whole world, and influence over those parts of the world in which they do not exercise political control. “Our material civilisation is permeating every part of the world, and telling as it never told before upon every one of the non-Christian races. It is trans- forming the conditions of life. They in their countries are being exploited as never before. Means of trans- portation are being introduced as they never were be- fore, which enable foreigners to pass freely among them, and which are completely breaking up and de- stroying the old organisation and civilisation, such as it was, that existed among them. “Under this shock not only the material conditions of their life, but also their traditions and beliefs, their old customs, and everything that was associated with them, and depended upon their beliefs and their customs is rapidly crumbling away and disappearing. Their morality, such as it was, was associated with their beliefs and traditions. This we are destroying. This must perish under the shock and impact of the stronger civilisation, which we have brought with us. “This is the time for us to give them the one supreme gift which the world has ever received, and in which we believe the safety and future hope of the world lie, a knowledge of the life and the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is what we are called upon to give them. We are called upon now to seize this critical moment, which is also a favourable moment, to provide them with the means and basis and the foundation of life instead of that which has crumbled from beneath them. “What I want to put to you is the supreme im- AIMS AND PURPOSES 85 portance at this moment of our doing what we can to fill that void which we have made, to give them some- thing to live by instead of that by which they have lived heretofore. Now, when the old things are passing away from them, is the time for us to give them something new and something better by which they may live, through which they may come again into a truer prog- ress than they ever could do in their ancient ways. “Let Christianity go to them not as a destroying force, not as being the mere profession of those who are grasping their land and trying to turn to account their labour; let it go as a beneficent power, which is to fill their souls with new thoughts and new hopes, which is to be a link between all the races of mankind of whatever blood and whatever speech and whatever colour, and which is to teach them that they are all the children of one Father in heaven.” By none of its various methods of action has the foreign mission enterprise reached more directly the hearts of those for whom it has worked or more clearly represented Christ than by its hospitals and medical work. A hundred mission hospitals and missionary doctors might be called in illustration. Two will suffice. One is the great medical work which Dr. Dugald Christie built up at Mukden, and young Arthur Jackson of the staff who gave his life in the effort to stay the pneumonic plague in I9I1, and at whose funeral the Chinese viceroy made this remarkable address: “We have shown ourselves unworthy of the great trust laid upon us by our Emperor: we have allowed a dire pestilence to overrun the sacred capital. His Majesty the King of Great Britain shows sympathy with every country when calamity overtakes it; his subject, Dr. Jackson, moved by his Sovereign’s spirit, and with the heart of the Saviour, who gave His life to 86 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS deliver the world, responded nobly when we asked him to help our country in its need. He went forth to help us in our fight daily, where the pest lay thickest ; amidst the groans of the dying he struggled to cure the stricken, to find medicine to stay the evil. Worn by his efforts, the pestilence seized upon him, and took him from us long ere his time. Our sorrow is beyond all measure; . our grief too deep for words. “Dr. Jackson was a young man of high education and great natural ability. He came to Manchuria with the intention of spreading medical knowledge, and thus conferring untold blessings on the Eastern people. In pursuit of his ideal he was cut down. The Presby- terian Mission has lost a recruit of great promise, the Chinese Government a man who gave his life in his desire to help them. “O Spirit of Dr. Jackson, we pray you intercede for the twenty million people of Manchuria, and ask the Lord of Heaven to take away this pestilence, so that we may once more lay our heads in peace upon our pillows. “In life you were brave, now you are an exalted Spirit. Noble Spirit, who sacrificed your life for us, help us still, and look down in kindness upon us all.” The other illustration is the work of Dr. Wanless of Miraj, India. Beginning nearly thirty years ago with one gift of ten thousand dollars, Dr. Wanless, with Dr. Vail’s unequalled help in recent years, has built up a great plant which could not be reproduced now for seven hundred thousand rupees, with a score of buildings, with three or four fully equipped operat- ing-rooms, between one and two hundred beds crowded almost the year round, with thousands of out-patients. Indian hotels and lodging houses to care for the people who come from all over India have grown up about the hospital on property whose value the hospital has multiplied ten or twenty fold. It seems likely that the AIMS AND PURPOSES 87 chief fame of the state will lie in this noble work which the spirit of Christ has built up. “Sir,” said a Brah- man in a railway carriage to Bombay, speaking to a friend of ours who was a stranger to him, “TI have just come from Miraj. That is a wonderful place. I have watched those doctors. It is beyond understanding that such men who might amass wealth anywhere do that work for nothing but love and their own bare support.” Fifty men are studying medicine in a medi- cal school connected with the hospital, all but four of them Christians. On the last evening of my visit to Miraj, they invited us to meet them in their dormitory quadrangle. The full moon came up over us as we sat together in the court in the quadrangle and listened to their address. ‘‘Here,” said their spokesman, “you can see India in miniature. We come from all parts of the land. We speak nine languages. We belong to different races. If you ask what brings us all here, I will tell you. First it was Christ. Second, it was the fame of Dr. Wanless.” What a fountain of power such a place is! Thousands of people have gone out from it to all parts of India grateful for physical heal- ing. Hundreds of young men have been sent through- out the country as Christian doctors. In more than one village we met them, standing out as the foremost men of the community. In two places we found them filling the positions of chief municipal honour and responsibility, presiding over high caste men though they themselves had come from the lowest of the out- caste people. It is both the high and the low that this medical work is touching. Out of gratitude and ap- preciation the Maharajah of Kolhapur has applied and keeps in order the fine car which Dr. Vail uses in his work, and Dr. Wanless has two decorations from the 88 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Government of India. These are but little things, however, in comparison with the looks of gratitude and almost worship which one sees following the doctor as he goes with them through their great clinic of love. Modern foreign missions have thus far had two great characteristics which in the judgment of some make the further continuance of the enterprise im- possible. In the first place they have represented a simple and in the main harmonious theological view, especially of the Person of Christ. But there are those who con- ceive that the modern missionary need not be concerned to present the old view of Christ. ‘Our missionary bids his hearers formulate their thoughts of Christ in their own way, provided they retain the authority of his leadership. “Does He save you from your sin? Call Him Saviour! “Does He free you from the slavery of your pas- sions? Call Him Redeemer! “Does He teach you as no one else has taught you? Call Him Teacher! “Does He mould and master your life? Call Him Master! “Does He shine upon the pathway that is dark to you? Call Him Guide! “Does He reveal God to you? Call Him the Son of God! “Does He reveal man? Call Him the Son of Man! “Or in following Him, are your lips silent in your incapacity to define Him and His influence upon you? Call Him by no name, but follow Him!’ (Bliss, “The Modern Missionary,” p. 22.) On the other hand there are those of us who do not AIMS AND PURPOSES 89 see how Christ can be made known or His Church founded or men taught to preach the Gospel without a clear and definite conviction about Him and without the maintenance of the historic faith of the Church with regard to Him. Only time can reveal the issue. Meanwhile the missionary enterprise is still going on and the great body of evangelical men and women who are its supporters and its representatives have been able to work together in the spirit of such a deliverance as that of the International Missionary Council at its meeting in Oxford in 1923: “The International Missionary Council has given attention to the anxiety which is felt in many quarters about the possibility of missionary co-operation in face of doctrinal differences, and thinks it opportune to review the co-operation which has actually been under- taken under its auspices or those of the national and other councils which it correlates and other similar co- operative action, and to set out afresh the principles which have emerged from these experiences. “The International Council has never sought nor is it its function to work out a body of doctrinal opinions of its own. The only doctrinal opinions in the Council are those which the various members bring with them into it from the Churches and Missionary Boards to which they belong. It is no part of the duty of the Council to discuss the merits of those opinions, still less to determine doctrinal questions. “But it has never been found in practice that in consequence of this the Council is left with nothing but an uncertain mass of conflicting opinions. The Council is conscious of a great measure of agreement which centres in a common obligation and a common loyalty. We are conscious of a common obligation to proclaim the Gospel of Christ in all the world, and this sense of obligation is made rich and deep because of our knowledge of the havoc wrought by sin and of the go THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS efficacy of the salvation offered by Christ. We are bound together further by a common loyalty to Jesus Himself, and this loyalty is deep and fruitful because we rejoice to share the confessions of St. Peter, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God,’ and of St. Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’ The secret of our co-operation is the presence with us of Jesus Christ, Human Friend and Divine Helper. From this com- mon obligation and this common loyalty flow many other points of agreement, and our differences in doc- trine, great though in some instances they are, have not hindered us from profitable co-operation in counsel. When we have gathered together, we have experienced a growing unity among ourselves, in which we recog- nise the influence of the Holy Spirit. At these meet- ings we have come to a common mind on many mat- ters and been able to frame recommendations and state- ments. These have never had the character of com- mand or direction, and it has always rested with the Churches or Missions to give them, if they would, authority by adopting them or carrying them into action. “Co-operation in work is more likely to be embar- rassed by doctrinal differences than co-operation in counsel. Yet there is a wide range of matters such as negotiations with governments, the securing of re- ligious liberty, the combating of the evils arising from the sale of narcotic drugs, collection and survey of facts, investigation by educational method, etc., which are not affected by doctrinal differences. A still more imposing list might be drawn up of types of work in which impediments from doctrinal differences might have been anticipated, but experience in many lands has shown that most valuable co-operation is possible between many Churches and Missions. Such are the translation of the Holy Scriptures, the production and dissemination of Christian Literature, the conduct of schools and colleges and medical institutions, and pro- visions for the training of missionaries. Every piece of co-operation in work which this Council or, as we be- AIMS AND PURPOSES QI lieve, any council connected with it encourages or guides is confined to those Churches or Missions which freely and willingly take part in it. It would be en- tirely out of harmony with the spirit of this movement to press for such co-operation in work as would be felt to compromise doctrinal principles or to strain consciences.” In the second place missions have of necessity been the offer to the people of the non-Christian nations of a religion from without. It is argued by some that the new nationalistic spirit will not welcome these extra- national influences, and that especially countries like China which have been under the limitations involved in treaties which abridged tariff autonomy and gave foreigners rights of extra-territoriality, will be preju- diced against missionaries coming from the nations which are unwilling to modify these treaties. Many difficult problems are indeed involved in this situation, some of which we shall need to consider. The question of how far missions can or cannot dissociate them- selves from the political and economic activities of the nation from which the missionaries come is a very complicated question. Some might think that the proper and easy solution would be to regard foreign missions as a supra-national movement altogether, with no political affiliations whatsoever. There is truth in this view of missions, but it is not a working possibility. Passports, mandates, treaty provisions, naturalisation and property laws all require a citizenship status of all missionaries. And for good or ill missions must ac- cept the conditions which exist. Sometimes these appear to be good. In 1917 the Urumia Mission Station in Persia, through one of its members, the Rev. 92 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Hugo A. Muller, presented to the American Presby- terian Board of Foreign Missions a faded and torn American flag, with the following letter: “Gentlemen : American missionaries in the foreign field love the American flag; no less has the American flag cause for gratitude to American missionaries in distant fields. The American flag is honoured in the Orient—an honour due in no small degree to the missionary’s in- fluence; and, on the other hand, many American mis- sionaries owe to the American flag their lives and the lives of many natives who have clung to them in times of trouble. I have the honour, on behalf of the members of Urumia Station, to present to you a well-worn flag which was graciously used of God in defending the rights of the weak and defenceless in Urumia, Persia, during a time of great turmoil. This flag was hoisted over the gateway leading to the main compound of your Mission Station in the city of Urumia (West Persia Mission) soon after the evacua- tion of the city by the Russian army on January 2, 1915, and before the entrance into the city of the Kurdish vanguards of the Turkish army on January 4, 1915. It thereafter flew uninterruptedly until after the Russian army had re-entered the city, May 24, 1915, and again taken up the reins of government—a period of about five months. During those months it was an instrument under God’s grace in saving the lives of 15,000 defenceless Christians who had taken refuge under its shadow, and indirectly it was a strong influence for quiet and order in a much wider circle. Could this flag speak, it would tell you heart-rending tales of sorrow and suffering, of injustice and extor- tion, of cruelty and death; it would preach powerful sermons on faith, love, sympathy; it would make you feel the gratitude which it read in the 15,000 pairs of eyes that were daily upturned during these sad months AIMS AND PURPOSES 93 —a gratitude which is alive to-day, toward God and toward Christian America, and which will live on through generations. Fraternally yours in the great Cause, Huco A. Mutter.” But oftentimes the political affiliations of missions work out harmful effects, as we shall see. Foreign missions can only do their utmost to make the truth clear, to assert the sympathy of the Christian Church with what is right and just, and its disapproval of what is unjust and wrong. In any case the business of foreign missions is to found the Church of the nation. The task of estab- lishing the law of Christ in the nation is the task of the Church of that nation and not of foreign missions to that nation. The fundamental task of foreign mis- sions is accurately stated in the words which were quoted at the beginning of this chapter and which may be quoted now again at its end: “The supreme and controlling aim of foreign missions is to make the Lord Jesus Christ known to all men as their Divine Saviour and to persuade them to become His disciples; to gather these disciples: into Christian Churches which shall be self-propagating, self-support- ing and self-governing ; to co-operate, so long as neces- sary, with these Churches in the evangelising of their countrymen, and in bringing to bear on all human life the spirit and principles of Christ.” CHAPTER SIL Tue SocrtaAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS OF MODERN MIssIONSs Ir has come to be accepted as assured fact that the founders of the modern foreign missionary enterprise were destitute of the social ideal. Their motives and aims, it is supposed, were purely individualistic and other worldly. They were seeking to save souls one by one from a future doom and had no conception of the mission of Christianity: to bind men together in a purified human society. Therefore their one method was to present the Gospel orally, to the neglect of those forms of social service and those conceptions of human unity which to our modern view are an essential part of the Gospel and an indispensable agency of its propaga- tion, because without them words alone can neither express nor convey it. Almost all of our recent mis- sionary literature accepts without question this view of the motive and method of the early missionaries. In affirming the presence in the early missionaries of an intensely rigorous and solemn spirit, modern missionary writers are wholly right. These mission- aries did believe that eternal issues hang upon the rela- tion of mento Christ. They accepted without wavering the New Testament view of the significance for the world to come of human faith and character in this world. They believed that all men needed to be saved, and that there was none other Name given under heaven among men by which they might be saved except the name of Christ. They did seek to reach men 04 THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 95 one by one and to secure the conversion of individuals. They did believe that the things which are seen are temporal and that the things which are unseen are eternal, and they did conceive separately of Chris- tianity and of the physical and social fruitage which it might bear. The earnestness of their convictions in these respects cannot be overstated. Without it they would never have faced the inertia and resistance of the Church and of society and succeeded in launching their undertaking. It would be easy to put together a mass of testimony illustrative of the strength of their grasp of the individualistic elements in Christianity and of their sense of its eternal significance. And much could be produced that would seem extreme or even grotesque to our contemporary mind whose grasp on these realities is not so firm, or whose conception of their relation to other elements in Christianity and of the scope of the Kingdom of God is more complete and just. What will be pointed out in this chapter is that while the positive conception of the ideal of the missionary founders which has just been referred to is quite true, the view that they were devoid of the social concep- tion of missions and negligent of the social expression of Christianity in service for the community and of the ideal of human progress is a great mistake. The fact is that both unconsciously, because the social prin- ciple is implicit in the true missionary spirit, and con- sciously, because the missionaries were Christian men and were interested in all that affected humanity, the founders of modern missions conceived their work not only in terms of individual conversion but also in terms of human service and brotherhood. Indeed one wonders whether there were not some of them who 96 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS over socialised the missionary ideal and thought too much in terms of civilisation and general benevolence, and inadequately of the regeneration of personal char- acter and of the establishment of the Christian Church as a definite institution. The evidence in support of these statements is too abundant to be condensed into the space of a chapter, but it will suffice to cite (1) the men who led the long list of missionaries who have gone out from England and Scotland, Carey and Duff, and the man who con- tributed more than any other individual at home to settle and define the aims and methods of foreign mis- sions, Henry Venn, (2) the men who filled correspond- ing places in American foreign missions, Brainerd, Mills, Judson, Evarts and Lowrie, (3) the policies of the Moravians and of the founders of the Continental missions, like Hebich. Carey is acknowledged as the founder of our modern missionary day, although he had forerunners from Germany, like Zeigenbalg and Schwartz and Kier- nander. He held firmly, beyond a doubt, the funda- mental ideas of a sharply individual Christian experi- ence and of the need of the individual salvation from sin here and from eternal death of the people to whom he went. He wrote to his son William, in 1807, when William had gone as a missionary to Binapoor, “Should you after many years’ labour be instrumental in the conversion of only one soul, it would be worth the work of a whole life.” On his own tombstone he prescribed that only his name and the date of birth and death should be inscribed, and the lines: “A wretched, poor and helpless worm, On thy kind arms I fall.” THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS Q7 Whatever is said of the rigorist and personal charac- ter of the religious experience and theological view of the early missionaries is true of Carey. And at the same time it is true that in social and community service, in consciously influencing the economic and intellectual life of the nation to which he had gone, and in purposely affecting the forces of progress and civilisation, Carey was one of the most powerful per- sonalities of whom history has any record. He began life as a shoemaker and a school teacher with a deep concern over human wretchedness and the slave trade. His “Enquiry into the Obligation of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathen,” which was the germinal treatise for foreign missions, is full of what we call to-day the Social Conscience. The ignorance and cruelty of men and the barbarity and uncivilisation of the world were alleged by others as reasons for not undertaking Christian Missions. Carey reversed the thought: “After all, the uncivilised state of the heathen, in- stead of affording an objection against preaching the Gospel to them, ought to furnish an argument for it. Can we as men, or as Christians, hear unmoved that a great part of our fellow-creatures, whose souls are as immortal as ours, and who are as capable as ourselves of adorning the Gospel and contributing by their preachings, writings or practices to the glory of our Redeemer’s name and the good of His Church, are enveloped in ignorance and barbarism? Can we hear that they are without the Gospel, without government, without laws, and without arts and sciences, and not exert ourselves to introduce among them the senti- ments of men and of Christians? Would not the spread of the Gospel be the most effectual means of their civilisation? Would not that make them useful members of society?” 98 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS The missionary methods which he advocates include agriculture, the introduction of good cattle, and pro- motion of the conscious interests of the people. The project which he set about accomplishing at once upon his arrival in India was a mission which would main- tain itself upon and for the industrial life of the com- munity. He engaged in the manufacture of indigo. He made the best type and the best paper in India. He devised new methods of paper-manufacture. He in- troduced the first steam engine erected in India. He began the first Indian newspaper. He studied the natural history of the country and began great collec- tions and laid out experimental gardens. “Spare no pains to get me seeds and roots,” he wrote to William, and names animal specimens he desires. His letters are full of these matters. On August 5, 1794, he wrote to the Society at home, “I wish you also to send me a few instruments of husbandry, viz., scythes, sickles, plough- wheels, and such things; and a yearly assortment of all garden and flowering seeds, and seeds of fruit trees, that you can possibly procure; and let them be packed in papers, or bottles well stopped, which is the best method. All these things, at whatever price you can procure them, and the seeds of all sorts of field and forest trees, etc., I will regularly remit you the money for every year; and I hope that I may depend upon the exertions of my numerous friends to procure them. Apply to London seedsmen and others, as it will be a lasting advantage to this country; and I shall have it in my power to do this for what I now call my own country. Only take care that they are new and dry.”” He founded in 1820 “The Agricultural and Horticultural Society in India” and prepared its in- quiries which, as Dr. George Smith said, “show a grasp THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 99 of principles, a mastery of detail, and a kindliness of spirit which reveal the practical farmer, the accom- plished observer, and the thoughtful philanthropist all in one. One only we may quote: ‘19. In what manner do you think the comforts of the peasantry around you could be increased, their health better secured, and their general happiness promoted?” This Society became a great influence for good in India, and later grew into three and formed the model for the Royal Agricultural Society of England, founded in 1838. He justified his action in these matters, “by quoting his hero, Brainerd, who was constrained to assist his Indian converts with his counsels in sowing their maize and arranging their secular concerns. ‘Few,’ he adds with the true breadth of genius which converted the Baptist shoemaker into the Christian statesman and scholar, ‘who are exten- sively acquainted with human life, will esteem these cares either unworthy of religion or incongruous with its highest enjoyments.’”’ He protested against the narrowness of supporters of the work in America who had given money for theological teaching which was not to be used for teaching science. “I never heard anything more illiberal. Pray, can youth be trained up for the Christian ministry without science? Do you in America train up youths for it without any knowledge of science?” He began the great movements for the care of the leper, for the abolition of widow burning and infanticide, and for the abatement of other moral evils which “he opposed all his life with a practical reasonableness till he saw the public opinion he had done so much to create triumph. He knew the people of India, their religious, social, and economic condition, . as no Englishman before him had done. He stood I0O THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS between them and their foreign Government at the beginning of our intimate contact with all classes as detailed administrators and rulers.” Carey’s biog- raphy is one long record of ceaseless fidelity to his central, individual, spiritual aim at the same time that he served society with more power and vigour, pouring out of this one man, than can be found in some whole present day governments. “An ambassador for Christ above all things like Paul,” says Dr. Smith, Carey’s biographer, “but, also like him, becoming all things to all men that he might win some to the higher life, Carey was successively, and often at the same time a captain of labour, a school- master, a printer, the developer of the vernacular speech, the expounder of the classical language, the translator of both into English and of the English Bible into both, the founder of a pure literature, the purifier of society, the watchful philanthropist, the saviour of the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing and the would-be-suicide, of the down-trodden and oppressed. We have now to see him on the scientific or the physical and economic side, while he still jealously keeps his strength for the one motive power of all, the spiritual, and with almost equal care avoids the political or ad- ministrative as his Master did. But even then it was his aim to proclaim the divine principles which would use science and politics alike to bring nations to the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the application of these principles to the course of God’s providence and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for literature and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in the practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an example to all of every race who have followed him in the past century.” The first, and in some regards the greatest missionary of the Scotch Churches was Alexander Duff. He too was a man of the deepest and most living personal THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS IOL Christian experience, and a believer in and preacher of the Gospel of personal salvation from sin and death and hell. But is there a modern missionary or any leader of any Church or in any land who is Duff’s superior in his discernment of the relation of religion to the whole of human life, or in the mastery of his influence over the tides of any nation’s intellectual and political life? “It was the special glory of Alexander Duff,” said Bishop Cotton, when the great missionary was leaving India for the last time, “that arriving here in the midst of a great intellectual movement of a completely atheistical character, he at once resolved to make that character Christian. When the new generation of Bengalees and too many, alas, of their European friends and teachers were talking of Christianity as an obsolete superstition, soon to be burned up in the pyre on which the creeds of the Brahman, the Buddhist and the Mohammedan were already perishing, Alexander Duff suddenly burst upon the scene with his unhesitating faith, his indomitable energy, his varied erudition, and his never-failing stream of fervid eloquence, to teach them that the Gospel was not dead or sleeping, not the ally of ignorance and error, not ashamed or unable to vindicate its claims to universal reverence; but that then, as always, the Gospel of Christ was marching for- ward in the van of civilisation, and that the Church of Christ was still ‘the light of the world.’ The effect of his fearless stand against the arrogance of infidelity has lasted to this day; and whether the number he baptised is small or great (some there are among them whom we will know and honour) it is quite certain that the work which he did in India can never be undone, unless we, whom he leaves behind, are faithless to his example.” Duff founded a new type of education in India. He developed the grant-in-aid scheme in the educational system. His influence determined the educational I02 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS policy of the Government from his time down to this present day. He accomplished, according to Sir Charles Trevelyan, the reform of writing the Indian language in Roman letters. He furnished an unflinch- ing moral conscience in Calcutta which did not hesitate for a moment to call even governors-general to ac- count. When it was proposed to keep him at home in Scotland a storm of protest arose in India. “His name,” said one appeal from eleven learned Brahmans, in Sanskrit, “is in the mouth of every Hindu because of his transcendent eloquence, learning and philan- thropy.” He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta. , “To his gigantic mind,” says Dr. Banerjea, “the successive vice-chancellors paid due deference, and he was the virtual governor of the university. ... Dr. Duff was the first person who insisted on education in the physical sciences, and strongly urged the estab- lishment of a professorship of physical science for the university.” He was a Christian missionary, but he was also a bigger man than the men about him. He was the means of introducing real medical education, when the Government was afraid to touch it for caste prejudice. He secured for the physical sciences their right place. He was never afraid of truth. Truth would never hurt truth, he held, and he was sure that-the truth about God would never suffer from truth about His world. Sir Henry Maine, who succeeded him as vice-chan- cellor, referred to this quality in a convocation as he left India: “I am not aware that he ever desired the university to refuse instruction in any subject of knowledge be- THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 103 cause he considered it dangerous. Where men of feebler minds or weaker faith would have shrunk from encouraging the study of this or that classical language, because it enshrined the archives of some antique superstition, or would have refused to stimulate pro- ficiency in this or that walk of physical science, be- cause its conclusions were supposed to lean to irreligious consequences, Dr. Duff, believing his own creed to be true, believed also that it had the great characteristic of truth—that characteristic which nothing else except truth possesses—that it can be reconciled with every- thing else which is also true. Gentlemen, if you only realise how rare this combination of qualities is—how seldom the energy which springs from religious con- viction is found united with perfect fearlessness in encouraging the spread of knowledge, you will under- stand what we have lost through Dr. Duff’s departure, and why I place it among the foremost events in the university year.” If any one wishes to read noble and glowing orations rich with the broadest conception of the relation of Christian missions to the progress of true civilisation, let him turn to Duff’s addresses. There as in Duff’s own life and work he will find conclusive evidence that our social interpretations of to-day are no new dis- covery but were obvious to our fathers and before them to their fathers. And this same combination of the intensest evan- gelical individualism with the fullest social ideal which characterised these first two great British missionaries is found also in the man who at home more than any other single man shaped missionary sentiment and policy, Henry Venn, for thirty years Secretary of the Church Missionary Society. He belonged to the old evangelical school. He held the very ideas which to- day are set off against the social view and the interpre- 104. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS tation of Christianity in terms of political and economic service. But his life was full of just such service, and no one has ever seen and stated more clearly the inevitable relations of missions and national life. Witness his private journal, January 30, i850: “Flastened to Sir E. Buxton’s, to a meeting of Aboli- tionists; present, Lord Monteagle, Gurney, Gurney Hoare, Captain Denman, Captain Trotter, Captain Bee- croft. Two hours’ discussion upon Parliamentary tactics for the Session. Agreed that the squadron must be maintained; and that, if possible, the present protecting duty upon free sugar should be retained for a few years longer.” November 28th, 1851. “Mr. Fenn called, and dis- cussed for some time Ceylon affairs; also Messrs. Hinderer, Allen, and Hensman, to whom I expounded the principles upon which they were to encourage native industry and lawful commerce, without involving the Mission in the charge of trading.” He seeks to promote the growth of cotton in Sierra Leone and sends out cotton presses and machinery. November 11th, 1856. “A deputation from the Chamber of Commerce in Manchester to London, in order to prepare a reply to a communication from Lord Clarendon upon African trade... . The Chamber of Commerce had referred to our documents, and thought them most valuable. . . . I have already agreed to go to Manchester on Friday. Mr. Moseley proposed that I should state my views to the leading members of the Chamber of Commerce on Saturday morning... .” Venn’s biography sums up his work for Africa: “His missionary principles (the conversion of in- dividual souls to Christ the only solid foundation of a mission, that a preached Gospel is the power of God, THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 105 that all other arrangements must give way to a preached Gospel, etc., etc.) were fixed and unalterable; but at the same time, he never forgot to enlist in the good cause all such collateral aids as were not inconsistent with these principles, or obstructive of them... . “Tt was this feeling that led him to throw himself ardently into the development of native industry in West Africa. Every native merchant who visited him —and there were few who did not—was urged to collect and transmit to him specimens of the products of his country. He did not rest until he had proved by care- ful analysis the superiority of Sierra Leone arrowroot, and had seen it take its independent place in the home market. He produced well-chosen samples of the wild cotton of the Gold Coast, and had them tested at Man- chester. He visited that great city and most of the large towns of Lancashire; and his accurate calcula- tions, business-like expositions, and, later on, his in- vestigation and audit of accounts, were the marvel of those most active merchants. He arranged for the careful training of two or three negroes in Kew Gardens, and thereby interested the Director, the late sir W. Hooker, so that he was ready to recommend the establishment of a botanic garden at Lagos. He also provided for the medical education in England of three negroes, who have since done well in the employment of the Government on the West Coast. He found means of reaching the late Prince Consort, who had before honoured Dr. Krapp with a personal interview, when he first brought to England the tidings of those wondrous discoveries in East and Central Africa, of which that missionary with his colleague, Rebmann, was the pioneer, and the Prince had then entrusted him with a present of an Arabic Bible and a clock, to be given to the Imam of Muscat, the Suzerain of the Sultan of Zanzibar, with a representation of the folly and miseries of the East African Slave Trade. His royal Highness now welcomed the efforts for the civilisation of Western Africa, admitted the Rev. S. Crowther, now the Negro Bishop of the Niger, to an audience at which her Majesty was also present, and took his share in the 106 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS philanthropic movement by the presentation of simple mills and machines for the use of the native chiefs. All this time Mr. Venn was most unremitting in his efforts to maintain the African Squadron. Memorials, memo-_ randa, deputations to the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, the Admiralty never failed to be presented at the right time. “Correspondence that of itself would form a volume attests the thoroughness with which he entered into the scheme of the navigation of the Niger—that scheme which is already bearing such wonderful fruit in the Niger Mission, though as yet but in its germ. The welfare of Africa, his childhood’s love, often brought him into contact with Lord Palmerston, himself equally in earnest as to the suppression of the slave-trader, who always evinced for him the greatest respect and regard.” And the best statements we have of the relations of missions to politics are from Henry Venn’s hand. What has been found true of Carey, Duff, and Venn, is true of our American missionary founders also. David Brainerd was one of the most intensely sub- jective Christians of whom we know. His journals are mystical and personal to the last degree. No one more perfectly represents than he the supposed “old motive’ of missions and the old message and method. Yet it was to his example that Carey appealed to justi- fication of his own social service. When his Indians were in danger of losing their hunting-lands through debts due to drink he persuaded some friends, as his journal states, “to expend the money which they had been and still were collecting for the religious interests of the Indian, at least a part of it, for discharging their debts and securing these lands, that there might be no entanglement lying upon them to hinder the settlement and hopeful enlargement of a Christian congregation THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 107 of Indians in these parts.” He notes with joy the moral and social effects of the Gospel, the reformation of external manners and the renovation of life. He aided the Indians in their search for better farming lands. “The design,” he writes, “of their settling thus in a body, and cultivating their lands, of which they have done very little in their pagan state, being of such necessity and importance to their religious interest, as well as worldly comfort, I thought it proper to call them together, and show them the duty of labouring with faithfulness and industry, and that they must not now ‘be slothful in business,’ as they had ever been in their pagan state. I endeavoured to press the impor- tance of their being laborious, diligent, and vigorous in the prosecution of their business; especially at the present juncture, the season of planting being now near, in order to their being in a capacity of living to- gether, and enjoying the means of grace and instruc- tion. Having given them directions for their work, which they very much wanted, as well as for their be- haviour in divers respects, | explained, sang, and en- deavoured to inculcate upon them the cxxviith Psalm, common metre, Dr. Watts’ version.” On July 21, 1746, he writes in his journal, “Took care of my people’s secular business and was not a little exercised with it. Had some degree of composure and comfort in secret retirement.” All his longing was for heaven and meanwhile “to do something for pro- moting the interest of religion, and the souls of par- ticular persons.”’ To save souls was his one consuming thought. Yet he taught his Indians how to clear their lands and raise their crops and he bore their economic burdens, and sought to teach them the principle of unity in a Christian society. 108 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS After Brainerd, Samuel J. Mills was the great crea- tive force in foreign missions in America. It was his tireless and irrepressible spirit which founded the Hay- stack band at Williams College and the society of new missionaries at Andover. As Dr. Griffin, afterwards President of Williams College, said: “T have been in situations to know that from the counsels formed in that sacred conclave (referring to Mills and his associates at Williams), or from the mind of Mills himself, arose the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the American Bible Society, the United Foreign Missionary Society, the African school, under the care of the Synod of New York and New Jersey, besides all the impetus given to Domestic Missions, to the Colonisation Society, and to the general cause of benevolence in both hemi- spheres.” He then adds, “If I had any instrumentality in originating any of these measures, I here publicly declare that in every instance I received the first im- pulse from Samuel John Mills.” In Mills all the fires of the early missionary motives and purposes glowed and flamed. Were our “modern conceptions” hid from him? On the contrary he too had the idea so common in our early missionary litera- ture that missionaries were even now accomplishing the rich prophecies of the Old Testament, that the world was swinging into its divinely appointed orbit and that men’s eyes were soon to look out upon a re- deemed society on the earth. He imagined the streams of Christian charity flowing into our cities and the West. No one studied more carefully than he or more zealously set forth the social conditions which needed to be dealt with in the city slums and on the frontier. “Tf an evil exists in a community,” he declared, “a remedy must be sought, especially if it be an evil gen- THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS I0Q erally and necessarily increasing in its unhappy effects. As long as no exertions are made to redress the griev- ance, the case must become every day more helpless.” He lived for India and Hawaii and America and died for Africa. He left home in October, 1816, as he said, “with mind ready to embrace any benevolent object which should be present and which should demand my attention.” Africa was the benevolent object which laid hold on him. “My brother,” wrote he to Burgess, professor in the University of Vermont, “‘can we en- gage in a nobler effort? We go to make freemen of slaves. We go to lay the foundations of a free and independent empire on the coast of poor, degraded Africa. It is confidently believed by many of our best and wisest men, that, if it succeeds, it will ultimately be the means of exterminating slavery in our country. Tt will eventually redeem and emancipate a million and a half of wretched men. It will transfer to Africa the blessing of religion and civilisation, and Ethiopia will stretch out her hands unto God.” So to Africa he went, but returned not. The winner of individual souls from death and hell had given himself to found a people. There is hardly a great missionary name among the American founders which cannot be called up to sup- port the view which is presented here. Two more must suffice. Of all the missionaries mentioned in this chapter, Judson is the one who most fully justifies the current view of the character and ideas of the early mission- aries. His son said of him, “As a missionary he was unwilling to disperse his mental forces over the wide surface of literary and philosophical pursuit, but in- sisted on moving along the narrow and divinely-ap- IIo THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS pointed groove of unfolding the word of God and met- ing it out to suit the wants of perishing man.” He took up no such activities as Carey and Duff or even Brainerd. He declared that the conversion of one im- mortal soul in Burmah awakened in him more emotion than all the beauty of America. In his first tract for the Burmans he wrote that his one motive was this, that ‘Being a disciple of Christ, and therefore seeking the good of others as his own, he has come, and is labouring that the Burmans may be saved from the dreadful punishment of hell, and enjoy the happiness of heaven.”” And yet he accepted what he conceived to be his duty as interpreter and adviser to the British envoy in the negotiation of a commercial treaty; he produced the Burmese-English dictionary which he de- scribed as “‘a causeway, designed to facilitate the trans- mission of all knowledge, religious and scientific, from one people to the other”; he interposed by law to de- liver a slave child from oppression; he deliberately con- served the simple social life of the Karens instead of artificially westernising it; he relieved the prisoners whose lot he shared; and he lived by the supreme social law of good deeds. Among his pietistic rules adopted on May 14, 1820, he resolved to “embrace every oppor- tunity of exercising kind feelings and doing good to others.” He readopted this resolution on seven occa- sions. And in his tract “The Threefold Cord” he wrote, “Do good—all the good in thy power—of every sort—and to every person. Regard every human being as thine own brother; look with eyes of love on every one thou meetest, and hope that he will be thy loving and beloved companion in the bright world above. Re- joice in every opportunity of doing him any good, either of a temporal or spiritual kind.” We have different THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS III names for these things now, but do our new names cover any more reality? The only other American missionary who can be mentioned is John Livingstone Nevius. Dr. Nevius was known all over the missionary world as the ad- vocate of direct evangelistic work for individuals, and his name became attached to a method of work which reduced missions to the simplest New Testament form. Did this exclude the ideal of general service to the en- tire community or the conception of society as a body to be ministered to? Ask the Chinese or any of the foreign merchants in North China who enjoy to-day some of the best fruit in the world as the result of Dr. Nevius’ work. “The improvement of the temporal as well as of the spiritual condition of the Chinese was a never-failing aim with Dr. Nevius. Many were the seeds, grains, trees, and vines he imported and strove to introduce; a foreign grain-cradle, and a carriage too. Many were failures, but that affected neither his spirits nor his efforts.” This was the testimony of his closest associate. He had grown up on a farm in Seneca County, New York, and had an inherited taste for horticulture. He estab- lished a model garden, sent to the United States and Europe for seeds and plants, developed the trees and fruits which would flourish in Shantung, gave grafts and scions and seeds to any natives who would ask for them, and left behind him when he died many strong churches and innumerable orchards and vineyards, all alike firmly rooted in the native soil. Huis books show what he foresaw to be the course of Christianity in affecting the life and institutions of China. The men in America who corresponded to Venn were I1I2 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Evarts, Lowrie and Anderson. Evarts was a lawyer and editor who became the first Treasurer and second Secretary of the American Board. ‘Missions to the heathen,” he wrote to the Rev. Cephas Washburn, “are established with a view to the salvation of perishing souls. The object is altogether religious, and should be held continually in view.’’ And yet note his conception of what this religious object includes. Appealing for recruits he writes: “Where is the man emulous of a distinction which God will approve, and panting after a renown which shall never mock the possessor? ... Is he called to the high office of a Christian missionary? ... He may lay the foundations for Christian institutions that shall shed around them a healing power, and remain an expression of the divine beneficence to the end of time.” In an “‘Address to the Christian Public’ issued in 1812 he declares: “Tt is now generally seen and felt, by those who have any claim to be considered as proper judges, that Chris- tianity is the only remedy for the disorders and miseries of this world, as well as the only foundation of hope for the world to come. No other agent will ever con- trol the violent passions of men, and without the true religion all attempts to meliorate the condition of man- kind will prove as illusory as a feverish dream. The genuine patriot, therefore, and the genuine philanthro- pist must labour, so far as they value the prosperity of their country and the happiness of the human race, to diffuse the knowledge and the influence of Chris- tianity at home and abroad. Thus will they labour most effectually to put a final period to oppression and slavery, to perfidy and war, and to all the train of evils which falsehood, ambition and cruelty have so profusely scattered through the world.” THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS 113 In the conclusion of his annual survey of the work in the annual report of the Board for 1830, he wrote: “Christians have for twenty or thirty years past distinctly avowed the determination to labour for the conversion of the world. They have professed a full belief that the time is rapidly approaching when all men will be brought under the influence of the Gospel; when nominally Christian nations will be so reformed and purified that vice and infidelity, and superstition and crime, and a merely secular profession of religion will have disappeared and been ultimately banished by the power of divine truth operating kindly but irresistibly through the medium of correct public opinion, per- vading a truly virtuous and pious community. In ac- cordance with this belief the friends of Christ have put into operation certain principles and causes which are evidently adapted to change the condition of mankind; and the effects of these causes are already becoming manifest to the ee $4 Walter Lown ha been a teacher and surveyor be- fore he entered politics and was sent first to the Penn- sylvania legislature, then to the House of Representa- tives in Washington, and then to the U. S. Senate. Upon the completion of his term as Senator, so greatly had he commended himself to the Senate that he was elected secretary of the Senate and held that office from 1825 to 1836, when he resigned it to become secretary ” of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. As , Secretary of the Board he gave three sons to the mis- sion work and studied Chinese so as to aid in introduc- ing printing from movable type into Chinese which he accomplished in conjunction with the British Museum and the King of France. “The first instruction to be given to all missionaries,” he wrote, “is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.” I II4 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS have no doubt that he believed in hell but I do not find the word in his biography or his papers and addresses. He describes Africa and China in his appeals. It is the moral and social needs which he depicts. In China he... points out that “the rights of the people, and truth and ti righteousness are unknown.” “Tit Africa he speaks of ‘ ‘the blasting influence of the slave trade, breaking up every bond of society, arraying the different communities against each other,” the des- potism and aggression of the rulers, the degradation of “half the community, the mothers of the rising gen- eration.”’ Assuredly he set forth the spiritual need, but that did not make him incapable of seeing and setting forth also the ideals which erroneously seem to us new. He anticipated the redemption of human society. As Dr. Paxton said in his funeral sermon, “He believed that the enthroned Mediator governs the world in the interest of the Church, and that therefore the King- doms of this world shall become the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ.” The missionaries of the Continent have ever shown in their work the combination of the spiritual and the practical, the individual and the group conceptions. The Moravians have always been instructed to begin their work with the direct oral preaching of Christ, but ‘they have always incarnated that preaching in life and deed. The shop and trade and farm have been among their accepted modes of missionary service, and they have sought to remould bits of society as the nuclei of healthy social growth. The Basle mission is a notable illustration of the development of community service side by side with individualistic evangelism three gen- erations ago. Samuel Hebich was a fervent evangelist THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS II5 of the most simple and primitive type. He laid the foundations of the great work of the Basle mission in India. How did he lay it? By direct oral preaching, indeed. But also by inaugurating the greatest indus- trial mission undertakings in the world. He and his associates tried raising silk worms, making silk, pre- paring arrowroot flour, pressing coconut oil, lacemak- ing, carpentering, clock-making, etc., and failed, but succeeded with presses, bookbinding, cloth-weaving, metal working, tile-making, etc. They developed banks, agriculture, building loan associations, insurance. They were the inventors of khaki cloth. The evidence which has been presented here might be multiplied indefinitely. I have confined it to the field of the beginning of modern Protestant missions. If one were to go back to medizval missions or to the later missions of the Jesuits he would make the case more ample, but not more clear and strong. The simple fact is that the alternative presented in much of our criticism of the missionary motive and ideal is an un- real alternative. If we could have asked those early missionaries whether their motive was to save the peo- ple to whom they went from future death or for a pres- ent life, and whether their ideal was to reach a few individuals or to set free redemptive forces in human society which would help to bring in the Kingdom of God, they would have answered, “You talk in terms of ‘either—or,’ with us it is ‘both—and.’ Why do you see as mutually exclusive that which with us is com- bined in one?” Perhaps they would not have answered thus, for the forms of our thought would have been unfamiliar to them, and they did what they did without self-con- 116 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS scious analysis of their motives or their aims. They did it spontaneously and inevitably for three reasons which can be made clear. 1. Whatever their motive may have been as regards the “lost world,” and they believed that in this matter they were dealing not less with present moral and social facts than with eschatology, their motive as regards Christ was unmistakable. They knew Him and it was the constraint of the love of Christ, their love of Him and their sense of His love for them, which led them out as missionaries. And that love is an energy. There is more power of living human service in it than in all other social ideas whatsover. Bishop Thoburn of India set this forth in an address many years ago: “Tt is just as natural for one who has the love of Christ in his heart,” said he, “if he sees a man hungry, to feed him, or to watch with the sick, or to devote himself in any way to relieving distress, as it was for Christ when He was on earth. And if any one of you can fail to relieve suffering when it is within your power to do it, let me tell you that you have yet to prove that you have the same kind of love in your hearts that Christ had. “I could give you many illustrations on this point, but I will confine myself to just one: You take a young man out of this meeting and say to him: ‘You are going abroad as a missionary. Don’t be drawn aside into other enterprises. Keep to the one thing, the preaching of Christ.’ ‘I shall try to do so,’ he says. He lands on an Eastern shore and starts up into the interior of the country, and at the first river that he has to cross, as he goes down to the ferry boat, he finds a row of lepers lining the path, and it comes into his heart at once that those people should have something done for them. He has a new love in his heart as he crosses that river, and some day it will take form. He crosses the river and goes along the highway, and THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS Ly. finds a starving child; the little one says, ‘My parents have deserted me and I am dying of hunger.’ He can- not pass that child, and yet if he takes the child he becomes responsible for its keeping, and he has started the nucleus of an orphanage. H2 goes on and perhaps finds the parents dying by the roadside. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I must take care of these people.’ And he founds analmshouse. He goes on upon his journey and he finds the lame, and the sick, and the halt, and the blind, and he says, ‘I must relieve these suffering people.’ Then he has a medical dispensary and a hospital. They are all there before he reaches his station. His friend comes out to visit him and finds him thus surrounded, and he says: ‘I thought you were going to do but one work. I thought you were going to preach Christ.’ He answers, “That was my intention, but I couldn’t help it.” No. If he had the love of Christ in him he couldn’t help it.” This is no fanciful view. It is the fact. The mission- ary spirit cannot help itself. From the beginning, whatever its modes of theological statement or its social theory, it has been an irrepressible service of human need, in individuals and in communities and in nations. 2. The social ideal is implicit in the missionary pur- pose. The man who sets out to save another man is acting socially. His theory may be called individual- istic but his act is social. The relationship which he takes up is cellular to the Kingdom of God. And also the Kingdom can come only as its subjects become loyal. And a true mass loyalty is possible only when built out of loyal persons. Furthermore, the aim of missions to found churches and to relate converts to one another in a new unity, was an inherently social aim. And beyond this, also, the power of Christianity as redemptive of all that it touches is so self-evidencing that no thoughtful missionary could escape from dis- 118 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS cerning that that which results from the Gospel must have been of God’s purpose in the Gospel. 3. The first approach of Christian missions to the non-Christian peoples revealed the fact that there was no oral medium of communicating the Gospel. Words did not exist for many fundamental Christian ideas. Words that did exist had an inadequate or misleading content. They could not communicate the new truth. Words never can communicate new truth. They carry the significance not of the speaker but of the hearer. It was not as a human teacher, but as the divine in- carnation that our Lord brought into the world a new conception of God. No teaching could have communi- cated that conception. It had to be shown, and Christ showed it. “He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” Only by life, to-day, can Christ be preached. No words alone can speak Him to men as words can speak Him when pictured also in deeds. Many of the non-Christian peoples are kindergarten peoples and need to be taught by object lessons. Acts must put content into words for them. The love of Christ must be interpreted to them by the vision of a man in whom Christ is loving them. Therefore Adoniram Judson, devoted to one thing only, the preaching of Christ, went about doing good, and Brainerd showed his Indians how to handle their crops, and Carey founded agri- cultural societies, and hospitals and homes grew up wherever the missionary settled down. It is clear that saving men and serving men are and have always been inseparable. The contrast between them is manufactured. It is uncongenial to Chris- tianity. But did these early missionaries have any idea of the Kingdom, of the Gospel as regenerative of hu- man society? Perhaps they did not often use the term THE SOCIAL IDEALS OF THE FOUNDERS II9Q “Kingdom.” Neither did St. Paul. It does not occur once in some of his epistles, and, in others, as in the single instance in the Epistle to the Romans, it is not used in our modern social sense. And neither he nor our Lord ever said “social” or “society” or “commun- ity,’ nor any of many other words characteristic of our contemporary forms of speech as we strive to cor- rect and fulfil our own partial thinking about Chris- tianity. But the great Christians who founded modern missions, whatever may be alleged against their suc- cessors, knew the moral and spiritual content of these terms and sought in love of God and love of man to save men, to serve their generation and to make Christ Lord of all. If they did not conceive of the world as a Kingdom they did, with St. Paul, think of it or at least act toward it as the family of God. CHAPTER IV New DEMANDS ON THE FOREIGN MISSION ENTERPRISE AT THE HOME BASE Let us turn to some of the new aspects of the foreign mission enterprise at the home base. Outstanding among these is the question of the duty of the Church to demand of the governments in all Christian lands true Christian behaviour in all international relations. Any other behaviour on the part of Christian govern- ments, or governments that ought to be Christian, hin- ders and in some measure nullifies the message of the missionary. He is met with the rejoinder, “Physician, heal thyself.” The missionary may answer that there is no connection whatever between Christianity and the governments of Christian lands, but that is a distinction hard to make real and convincing to the people. They may justly ask to be delivered from the confusion which ensues when some representatives of Western nations teach one message and live one life and others repudiate that message if not by verbal rejection, at least by un- Christian behaviour. And they may properly ask why, if Christianity is to be accepted by them and Christ is to be put in control of their life as individuals and as a nation, the missionaries cannot show such a result in the lands from which they come. If after many cen- turies these lands reject Christianity, or behave in un- Christian ways, how can the people of non-Christian countries be sure that they are not doing better in re- maining non-Christian? The trouble with the contact 120 NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE I2I of Christians with non-Christian people is that the mis- sionary propaganda is offset and contradicted by our non-missionary propaganda both by precept and ex- ample. The Christian Church has a right to object to this, not primarily because it hinders missionary progress but because it is wrong. ‘There are very real distinc- tions between the functions of Church and State even though there is a medial territory where the lines are not very definite or clear. But the distinction that the Church is Christian and that the State is not, is not a valid distinction. In Great Britain and the United States the State is Christian in theory and principle. At one period of American history the State denied this. In the treaty with Tripoli in 1796, it was de- clared: “The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquillity of Mussulmans. . . « No protest arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.” But that view was later officially repudiated. The judgment of the United States Supreme Court in the Alien Contract Labour Law Case, rendered on February 29, 1892, declared through Justice Brewer, that the law in question could not be operative in the case under consideration—that of a minister brought over from Europe to New York —on the broad ground that “no purpose of action against religion can be imputed to any legislation, state or national, because this is a religious people.” What religion was meant the Court declared with equal plain- ness. It quoted decisions to the effect that Christianity is and always had been a part of the common law of I22 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS States like Pennsylvania, that the Government is not neutral as towards all religions, because we are a Chris- tian people, and the morality of the country is deeply engrafted upon Christianity, and not upon the doctrines or worship of impostors like Mohammed and the Grand Lama. Passing to the view of American life as ex- pressed in the laws, its business, its customs and its society, the decision finds “everywhere a clear recogni- tion of the same truth.” “Among other matters,” it says, “note the following: The form of oath universally prevailing concluding with an appeal to the Almighty; the custom of opening sessions of all deliberative bodies and most conventions with prayer; the prefatory words of all wills, ‘In the Name of God, Amen’; the laws respecting the observance of the Sabbath, with the gen- eral cessation of all secular business and the closing of courts, legislatures and other similar assemblies on that day; the churches and church organisations which abound in every city, town and hamlet; the multitude of charitable organisations everywhere under Christian auspices ; the gigantic missionary associations with gen- eral support and aiming to establish Christian missions in every quarter of the globe. These and many other matters which might be noticed add a volume of unoffi- cial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation.” The Christian duty of the State does not rest, how- ever, upon court decisions or legislative enactments. Nor can these dissolve the obligation. The duty of the State to be and to act as Christian is fundamental and inescapable. Christ is and has a right to be acknowl- edged as the head of the State, and all the acts of the State ought to be in conformity with the law of Chris- tianity. We may be far away from this to-day. We NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 123 are far away from it. That is precisely the point I am making. The State ought to cease to act in a non- Christian way, and the Christian Church in the nations which have regarded themselves as Christian ought to seek to secure the Christian character and Christian ac- tions of the State. There may be difference of opinion as to some of the ways in which the Christian Church is urged to seek these ends. But there are some ways about which there is no disagreement. One is the production by the Church of individuals who will behave as Christians wherever they are and whatever they may do. As mer- chants or consuls abroad, as legislators or statesmen at home, such men will bear witness to their faith and will embody their principles in deeds. Here is room for a great body of men who will not be missionaries in any professional sense, but who will nevertheless be doing the most effective and fruitful missionary service. It is agreed also that it is the clear business of the Church to proclaim the true principles of human life and rela- tionships. And it ought to be clear that this proclama- tion must be real, not merely vague and indefinite. It is not the mission of the Church to formulate legisla- tion embodying the means by which Christian ends are to be secured, but it is its mission to describe those ends, to show men that they can be attained, and to constrain men not to rest until they have been won. From time to time also non-Christian things will appear which ought certainly to be unmistakably and explicitly de- nounced by the Church. Both our Lord and John the Baptist had some plain and definite things to say about the unrighteousness of the government and the gov- ernor under whom they lived, and their Church to-day is bound to resist unrighteousness and to exact justice. / I24 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS The Churches at home owe a great debt to the missions abroad in this regard. Christian missionaries in Japan will have a far easier time commending Christianity to the Japanese if the countries from which they come will behave in a Christian way toward Japan. But let us return to the thought that the Christian duty of the State is inherent and indisputable. There is not one law or one Lord for persons and another law and another Lord for societies. There is the one law of Christ which is valid for the whole of human life and Jesus Christ is the Lord of nations as well as of men. This view was clearly and strongly stated at the Missionary Convention in Washington in 1925, by the Hon. Newton W. Rowell of Canada: “A leading statesman of our own day in Europe has openly and publicly proclaimed his adherence to the Machiavellian ideals of statesmanship; and he is en- deavouring to put them into actual practice, both in do- mestic and in international affairs. Those who share his views would say that he, too, is but recognising the hard facts of this present time, and that, however far statesmen of other countries may have departed in the domestic government of their own states from Machia- vellian ideas, they still practise those ideals in interna- tional relations, and there may be some justification for that view. Machiavelli, while he believed that some form of religion was a good thing for the masses of the people because it made them more obedient to gov- ernments, openly proclaimed himself a pagan; and un- doubtedly he drew inspiration for his conceptions of the state, its place and its functions, from the pagan ideals of ancient Rome. Machiavelli’s conception as applied to international relations is essentially pagan in its spirit and outlook, and yet, that essentially pagan conception NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 125 dominated the spirit of international relations for be- tween three and four hundred years. “Has the Christian Church any theory of interna- tional relations? Is there any Christian conception and ideal of international relations to set over against the Machiavellian and pagan conception? If it has not, if it has no substitute to provide, then let it confess its im- potence in the face of some of the gravest problems of our time. But, if the Christian Church has some theory of international relations, which it can set opposite the Machiavellian theory, then is it not incumbent upon all Christian people to seek to put that Christian concep- tion into actual practice? I believe there is a Christian theory of international relations. May I venture to suggest to you that the thinking of our people will de- termine their attitude on these great questions, so that it is of fundamental importance that we should have a clear conception of what such a Christian theory in- volves, and solid ground upon which to stand in con- sidering these problems? What lies at the very basis of a Christian conception of international relations? The President of this Republic, speaking at the Com- mercial Club of Chicago on December 4th, 1924, is re- ported to have said: “T am profoundly impressed with the fact that the structure of modern society is essentially a unity, destined to stand or fall as such. At the last, those of us who are partners in the supreme service of building up and bettering our civilisation must go up or down, must succeed or fail, together in our one common enterprise.” “That is a statesman’s form of stating the essential unity of our common humanity. The Bishop of St. Al- 126 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS bans this morning gave us the Christian leader’s form of statement of that same great truth, that ‘God hath made of one blood all nations.’ We start at the very basis of any Christian conception of international rela- tions with this fundamental proposition, the essential unity of our common humanity, under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. “And then, what is the next essential element? It grows out of the first, a logical development from it. It is not the Machiavellian theory that morals have no relation to the state of international affairs, but the Christian theory that we must recognise the supremacy of public right and of moral law in international affairs just as truly as in domestic affairs. We can make no real progress in dealing with the problems of our time unless nations recognise the vital place of the spiritual and moral considerations and of moral forces in the relation of nation to nation.” Such national fidelity as this to elemental Christian principles will be an im- mense reinforcement to the effort to carry the Gospel to the world. Just as there are sure limits to the proper field of action of the Church in relation to politics, so there are equally sure limits to the proper field of action of the State in relation to religion. It is not its business, nor the business of its representatives to carry on religious propaganda. But likewise it is its business not to hin- der such propaganda when it is not subversive of order or morals. Whether any particular propaganda is sub- versive of morals becomes less and less a question of difficulty as the moral conceptions of Christianity come to be generally accepted throughout the world. In former days a religion forbidding polygamy might have been held to be subversive of morals in a polygamous NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 127 land. And many ideas of one religion have seemed im- moral to another. But these difficulties, for the present at least, are not serious. As to the question of public order, however, the issue is a living one and the world will have to face the problem of universal religious lib- erty. This principle has been recognised by the League of Nations and embodied in the mandates under which the colonial administrations affected by the World War are now conducted. And the only sure and just way to deal with the matter and to secure order and tran- quillity is to establish universally the principle of reli- gious toleration and freedom. The people of India are coming to realise this and to underbuild the civil recognition of the principle in India with a genuine popular acceptance of it. The Religious Unity Con- ference in Delhi in 1924, composed of leading represen- tatives of all the religions in India, gave notable ex- pression to this view in its resolutions: “a. That every individual or group shall have full liberty to hold and give expression to his or their beliefs and follow any religious practice with due regard to the feelings of others and without interfering with their rights. In no case may such individual or group revile the founders, holy persons or tenets of any other faith; “b, That all places of worship of whatever faith or religion, shall be considered sacred and inviolable and shall on no account be attacked or desecrated whether as a result of provocation or by way of retaliation for sacrilege of the same nature, It shall be the duty of every citizen, of whatever faith or religion, to prevent such attack or desecration as far as possible, and where such attack or desecration has taken place it shall al- ways be promptly condemned. “h. That every individual is at liberty to follow any faith and to change it whenever he so wills and shall 128 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS not by reason of such change of faith render himself liable to any punishment or persecution at the hands of the followers of the faith renounced by him: cee 1. That every individual or group is at liberty to convert or reconvert another by argument or persuasion but must not attempt to do so or prevent its being done by force, fraud or other unfair means such as the offering of material inducement. Persons under sixteen years of age should not be converted unless it be along with their parents or guardians. If any person under sixteen years of age is found stranded without his parents or guardians by a person of another faith he should be promptly handed over to persons of his own faith. There must be no secrecy about any conversion or reconversion.”’ To get this view embodied in actual human practice will be a long task, but its adoption even in theory has been an amazing achievement. Where people come thus to a spontaneous acknowl- edgment of the right of religious liberty there is no need of State action except to bring law into accord with sentiment, if indeed law has not preceded. But is it not the duty of the world to see that law does precede and create sentiment in this matter wherever the prin- ciple is denied? Is this not a clear missionary duty of the Christian nations, namely, to use their influence to the utmost to secure the recognition of religious free- dom everywhere? ‘There have been times when some _ governments acted under such a sense of duty. Great Britain and France and the United States did so in 1858 in their treaties with China. In these treaties they sought to secure religious freedom in China for their own nationals but they went beyond this and stipulated also for religious freedom for Chinese subjects. And the treaty of 1903 between the United States and China is even more specific and full. Article 14 of this treaty NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 129 reads: “The principles of the Christian religion as pro- fessed by the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches are recognised as teaching men to do good and to do to others as they would have others do to them. Those who quietly profess and teach these doctrines shall not be harassed or persecuted on account of their faith. Any person, whether citizen of United States or Chi- nese convert, who, according to these tenets, peaceably teaches and practises the principles of Christianity, shall in no case be interfered with or molested therefore. No restrictions shall be placed upon Chinese joining Christian Churches. Converts and non-converts, being Chinese subjects, shall alike conform to the laws of China, and shall pay due respect to those in authority, living together in peace and amity; and the fact of being converts shall not protect them from the conse- quences of any offence they may have committed before or may commit after their admission into the Church, or exempt them from paying legal taxes levied on Chi- nese subjects generally, except taxes levied, and con- tributions for the support of religious customs and practices contrary to their faith. Missionaries shall not interfere with the exercise by the native authorities of their jurisdiction over Chinese subjects; nor shall the native authorities make any distinction between con- verts and non-converts, but shall administer the laws without partiality, so that both classes can live together in peace.” The United States acted again under the sense of duty in behalf of religious tolerance when during Presi- dent Grant’s administration the Japanese Government revived the old proclamation in prohibition of Chris- tianity. Mr. Seward was then Secretary of State, and he wrote that the President “regards the proclamation I30 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS as not merely ill-judged but as injurious and offensive to the United States and to all other Christian states, and as directly conflicting with the Eighth Article of the Treaty of 1858, and no less in conflict with the tol- erating principles and spirit which prevail throughout the world. You are advised, therefore, that the United States cannot acquiesce in or submit to the Mikado’s proclamation.” The American Government acted in the matter yet again in the revision of its treaty with Siam in 1920. Under this new treaty Americans sur- rendered their extra-territorial rights in Siam. The treaty provided for the toleration of religion in the case of Americans in Siam, and it made use of the follow- ing ingenious language: “The citizens and subjects of both the High Contracting Parties shall enjoy in the territories and possessions of the High Contracting Parties entire liberty of conscience, and, subject to the laws, ordinances and regulations, shall enjoy the right of private or public exercise of their worship.” The Siamese Government unhesitatingly accepted this form of statement so that this treaty is a recognition of the right of religious freedom of Americans in Siam and of Siamese in the United States; but it is more than that. Itis a reciprocal declaration of the religious free- dom of Americans in America and of Siamese in Siam. What objection could there be to such reciprocal treaties with China in place of the treaties of earlier years? From the beginning, Great Britain has pursued the policy, with some few limitations, of religious freedom in all its own territories, and long ago went beyond this to maintain the rights of subjects of other States to religious freedom in their own States. NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 131 “Tn 1853, when the British and French fleets were in the Turkish waters for the protection of Turkey, a young man was judicially condemned to death and publicly executed in Adrianople, by the Ottoman authorities, for the crime of having apostatised from Islam to Christianity. He had openly declared that Christ was the true Prophet, and that, having Him, he had no need of Mohammed, who therefore was a false Prophet. He was cast into prison and cruelly tortured to induce him to recant, but in vain. On being be- headed, he exclaimed with his last breath, ‘I profess Jesus Christ, and for Him I die.’ On September 17, 1855, the Earl of Clarendon, Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, the British Ambassador at Constantinople: ‘The Christian Powers, who are making gigantic efforts and submitting to enormous sacrifices, to save the Turkish Empire from ruin and destruction, cannot permit the continu- ance of a law in Turkey, which is not only a standing insult to them, but a source of cruel persecution to their co-religionists, which they never can consent to per- petuate by the successes of their fleets and armies. They are entitled to demand, and Her Majesty’s Gov- ernment do distinctly demand, that no punishment whatever shall attach to the Mahometan who becomes a Christian. The same noble language of Christian patriotism had also been held earlier by the Earl of Aberdeen, who wrote to Sir Stratford Canning on January 16, 1844: ‘The Christian Powers will not en- dure that the Porte should insult and trample on their faith, by treating as a criminal any person who em- braces it.’ The intention was to induce the Porte to renounce and abrogate the law in question. But the spirited correspondence with the Turkish Government, even under those exceptionally favourable circum- stances, led to no greater result than that, early in the year 1856, a Memorandum was agreed upon containing these words: ‘As all forms of religion are and shall be freely professed in the Ottoman dominions, no subject of His Majesty the Sultan shall be hindered in the exercise of the religion that he professes, nor shall be 132 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS in any way annoyed on this account. None shall be compelled to change their religion.” The discovery had been made that the objectionable law, being regarded as invested with a divine character, could not be an- nulled or abrogated by any human authority whatso- ever. Therefore, the British Ambassador considered it best to advise his Government to be content with the aforementioned clause, saying in his despatch to the Earl of Clarendon, dated February 12, 1856: ‘The law of the Koran is not abolished, it is true, respecting renegades, and the Sultan’s ministers affirm that such a stretch of authority would exceed even His Majesty’s legal powers. But, however that may be, the practical application of it is renounced by means of a public document, and Her Majesty’s Government would at any time be justified in complaining of a breach of en- gagement if the Porte were to authorise or to permit any exception to its own official declaration.’ (Koelle, “Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” page 474.) In the Treaty of Berlin, into which England, Austria, Russia, France, Italy and Turkey entered in 1878, it is declared in Article 2 that complete religious liberty is to exist in the various territories mentioned in the pre- ceding article, “including the whole Turkish Empire.” The 62nd article begins: “The Sublime Porte, having expressed its willingness to maintain the principle of religious liberty and to give it the widest sphere, the contracting parties take cognisance of this spontaneous declaration.” The work of the West in this matter is not ended, however. “In spite of the reiterated declara- tions,’ says Dr. Barton, “it is evident that the Turkish Government does not and never did intend to acknowl- edge the right of a Moslem to become a Christian. A high official once told the writer that Turkey gives to all her subjects the widest religious liberty. He said: ‘There is the fullest liberty for the Armenian to become NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE D353 a Catholic, for the Greek to become an Armenian, for the Catholics and Armenians to become Greeks, for any one of them to become Protestant, or for all to become Mohammedans. There is the fullest and completest religious liberty for all the subjects of this empire.’ In response to the question, ‘How about liberty for the Mohammedan to become a Christian ?’ he replied : ‘That is an impossibility in the nature of the case. When one has once accepted Islam and become a follower of the Prophet he cannot change. There is no power on earth that can change him. Whatever he may say or claim cannot alter the fact that he is a Moslem still, and must always be such. It is, therefore, an absurdity to say that a Moslem has the privilege of changing his religion, for to do so is beyond his power.’ For the last forty years the actions of the official and influential Turks have borne out this theory of religious liberty in the Ottoman Empire. Every Moslem showing in- terest in Christian things takes his life in his hands. No protection can be afforded him against the false charges that begin at once to multiply. His only safety lies in flight.” (Barton, “Daybreak in Turkey,” p. BRO MTS Ye ei But all religions should be free to appeal to men, provided they do not assail the moral axioms of life, as no religion can which will command the assent of men in a free society. And only those institutions ought to be free to endure which can command the loy- alty of free men. It is not the duty of the Western nations to annihilate one another’s nationality or the nationality of the non-Christian nations, but it is their duty to demand that the human spirit in all lands shall be free to think its own thoughts and pursue its own worship of God. 134 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Let us turn from the consideration of this duty of the home Churches in their relation to the character and functions of their governments in their relation to for- eign missions and examine the question whether the present situation in foreign missions calls for any mod- ification of our conception of the enterprise or of the | motives relied upon to sustain it, or of the methods to be used in its prosecution. It may be well to summarise some of the views now put forward. Some hold that the old idea of missions as the offer of something which we have to people who do not have it is essentially un- sound; that the true way to conceive missions is in terms of quest. We go out to join with the earnest spirits of other religions in a common search for some- thing which as yet neither we nor they have found. Some raise the question in a somewhat different form and ask whether we really have a religion worth carry- ing to other nations or with sufficient motive power in it to bear it over the seas and make it effective in other lands. Some maintain that the old individualistic con- ception of seeking to convert individuals is an anachro- nism and that we should seek now rather to Christianise the world order and national institutions and social and economic relations. And some add that this work is so far from being done in the West that until it is done here we cannot hope to do it elsewhere and that it is hypocritical to undertake it. Some put the matter otherwise. The work to be done, they say, is a uni- versal work. It differs not at all in India from the United States. The concept of “foreign missions” is unreal. The old world with which Carey dealt is not our modern world. There is nothing foreign any more. As a weekly religious paper puts it: “The distinction between home and foreign Christian effort is a false dis- NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 135 tinction. There is no such thing as foreign missions. ... Lhe attempt to separate Kingdom work into geographical divisions will break down through its own artificiality.” Some declare that the indigenous Churches which have been established are the agencies which should now be conceived as responsible for the work of evangelisation, and that foreign missions should be auxiliary to them and subject to their deter- mination and control, and that the Western Churches should look to these new Churches for counsel and authority. Some argue that missionaries of the old type are no longer needed, that the motives which pro- duced them have lost their vitality, and that the modern world calls rather for missionaries in the steel trade, in engineering, in diplomacy, in commerce, in social reform. The list of questionings and restatements might be indefinitely prolonged. With regard to the fundamental questions raised, back of all transitory forms of expression, three things may be said: First, it is interesting to note that almost every aspect of these statements can be duplicated from the discus- sions of a century ago. There is hardly an objection made to the foreign mission enterprise in its present development that could not have been made and that was not made long ago. If these objections had been consulted by the founders of modern missions the enter- prise would never have been begun. If it were not in existence to-day it would not be started by those who think of foreign missions as a search for truth, or who wonder whether the Christian Churches of the West have anything to give the rest of the world. There were doubters a century ago who saw no reason for specialising foreign missionary effort but who argued 136 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS for a general Christian conception of the Church’s task. There would have been no foreign missions if men like Carey had not begun them as a distinct and geographi- cally foreign undertaking. Those Churches are doing most of the work to-day who conceive it still clearly and - veraciously as a task that is special and distinct. To blur this over has as yet one sure result. The work is not done. Whether there are still vital missionary motives in such Christianity as we have is not a matter of specula- tion. It is open to the test of fact. There are more missionaries than there ever were and more money is given to missions than has ever been given. It is easy to ascertain who are going and what their convictions are and who are not going and what their convictions are. And it is easy to discover also where most of the support comes from. It is from men and women who believe that Jesus Christ is the only hope of the world. Where that conviction remains, the springs of foreign missions remain open and rich. In the second place, we need to remind ourselves of the actual facts of our real world. The world is a good deal bigger thing than the knowledge and outlook of any single individual are competent to take in. And while in one sense it is a steadily shrinking and dimin- ishing world, in another sense, equally true, it is a con- stantly enlarging world, growing in population and complexity. Those students and writers of the mission- ary enterprise who speak as though they saw the whole of it and could crowd it all into one formula, whether old or new, are self-forgetful. Neither Peking, nor Shanghai, nor Calcutta, nor New York, nor London, nor Berlin, nor Rio, nor Buenos Aires, nor Cairo, nor Cape Town is the whole world, nor are the back cran- NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 137 nies of Persia or Afghanistan or Mongolia, or of Cameroun, or Nigeria, or of central South America. Neither is the whole of the problem of any one part of the world to be stated in terms of one social class or of one set of relationships, economic or political. There are all stages of human life to be found in our wide and various world and the foreign missionary en- terprise may be ending at one place when it is only be- ginning at another. There are fields where it has fin- ished its work and withdrawn as in Hawaii, in many parts of North America and in centres in other lands. But there are other areas where its work has only begun or has not yet been begun at all. These statements are true whether we conceive fields in a geographical sense or in terms of forces, human groups, or ranges of thought and ideal. A. few illustrative cases of unoccupied and of un- reached peoples must suffice. Several winters ago I crossed Persia twice. One journey was directly west from Meshed on the border of Afghanistan to Tabriz on the border of Turkey and Russia. Between Meshed and Teheran we travelled for more than six hundred miles through deserts but also through pleasant valleys, villages, and cities and there was not one Christian mis- sionary or preacher, foreign or native, in the whole re- gion. From Teheran again we travelled three hundred miles west to Tabriz without finding a missionary or evangelist or teacher of any kind. There are 60,000 uncared-for lepers in South America. Some of our Presbyterian mission stations in Shantung, China, have each a population to evangelise equal to the population of California, Indiana or Michigan. Would these states be deemed adequately occupied by Christian forces on this basis? In India there are single mis- 138 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS sionaries who have districts of three quarters of a million people and five hundred villages. To talk of the evangelisation of these regions as the business of “the native Church demanding its recognition and rights” is the language of sheer uninformed formularists. There is no native Church in these Persian towns and cities outside of the half dozen mission stations. Some day, please God, there will be such a Church. But if a mis- sion field where there is neither missionary nor native Church is not an unoccupied field, what is an unoccu- pied field? If such a field is, there are a thousand such waiting. I am writing this chapter on a steamship bound for the South American Christian Congress at Montevideo and have just this moment been reading the Report of the Commission on the Indians. “It is estimated,” says this report, “that about 55 per cent. of the population of Peru is Indian, i.e., about 2,500,000; that in Bolivia about 50 per cent. of the population is Indian, and 27 per cent. a mixed race with Indian blood and character predominating, amounting in all to about 1,500,000; that in Ecuador the Indians number about 75 per cent. or 1,200,00.” And this Report proceeds to summarise the evidence from South American sources regarding the conditions of these Indians. Their “chief vices are alcohol and coca, both of which produce terrible havoc. ... Lhe great majority of the Chuncho savages are stn worshippers. It would be vain to deny that the Quechua Indian is an idolater at heart. . . . In the celebration of religious observances the Indian finds his deepest degradation.” The Report indicates what is being done by the State, by the Roman Catholic Church and by the Protestant forces but it is an account of “the petty done, the undone vast.” NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 139 One could go on indefinitely describing concrete situa- tions which call as definitely for the extension of for- eign missions to-day as the world of Carey’s time called for their establishment. To one who knows these sit- uations from having seen them the view of some Chris- tian people that there is no longer any need for foreign missions, that the rising native Churches are ready now to take over the work, that the differentiation of mis- sions as foreign is no longer valid—is a simply incredi- ble view. The strongest and oldest of the indigenous Churches bear the strongest testimony to the apparent inevitable- ness of the present missionary methods and to the need of the maintenance and great enlargement of the for- eign missionary force. Some years ago Indian Chris- tians organised the National Missionary Society of In- dia to be supported and staffed wholly by Indians and to be conducted on Indian methods. All friends of the Indian Church watched the development eagerly. The Society has done useful work but its methods have been an exact duplication of the methods of the Missions and its reports recognise the immense areas of unmet need. In Japan the strongest appeal for missionary re- inforcements has not come from the Missions but from Japanese leaders. “If we understood rightly the real need,” writes Dr. Ebina, “we would not hesitate to ad- vocate a fourfold increase of missionary forces—forces sufficient to make short work of the evangelisation of Japan. Then Japan as a converted nation would her- self become the vanguard of the missionary forces on the Asiatic Continent.” These unoccupied areas are only part of the task. They are far greater than the adequately occupied areas, but there are two other and perhaps even more 140 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS significant summoning fields. In the first place there are the ideas, forces, relationships, classes for which the missionary work remains to be done and on some of which the missionary obligation remains to be laid. It is not easy in connection with these to determine how much of the task belongs to the native Church and how much to the Western Church and how much to the State and how much to society. And even when it is clear that some piece of work is legitimately the work of the Western Church as such and not the work of Christians functioning as citizens in the discharge of civic duties, there is the still further question as to whether the work to be done by the Church belongs to it as a whole or to its foreign missionary agencies. There are some who argue that all the work of the Church must be one and that the differentiation of foreign missions is improper. ‘This is not, however, a new position. It was the position of many of the early opponents of foreign missions. Those who maintain it to-day do so in the avowed support of foreign mis- sions, but they do not realise that whatever need existed for foreign missions as foreign a hundred years ago exists to-day, plus much more need. The truth which underlies their view is that for the sake of foreign mis- sions as well as for the sake of the work of the Church at home there is a deeper and more urgent need than ever for the full discharge of all Christian duty in Church and State, in the individual and in society, at home and abroad. In our national bearing and spirit toward other peo- ples, in the character of our commercial and industrial relationships, in the care of unfortunate classes like the diseased, the leper and the blind and the outcasts, in education and public health and child welfare, in NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE I4!I inspiring sacrifice and effort and loyalty and hope Christianity has vast opportunities as yet unrealised in which the general missionary spirit finds a new call and which in large part, though only in part, fall to the specific enterprise of foreign missions. The other and greatest of all the unoccupied areas is in human life and personality itself. After all, the greatest need is qualitative not quantitative. It is not for more men and women so much as for more man and woman, or, to put it better, for more surrender of life to the use of God and more appropriation of the unlimited power that there is in God for the use of man. St. Paul meant more to the permanence and per- petuation and power of Christianity than a hundred or a hundred thousand common men. Both in the mis- sions and in the native Churches the supreme need and call are for men like him, Perhaps we deem this im- possible, but we have always to reckon with that search- ing and summoning word of Christ, “He that believeth on Me the works that I do shall he do also and greater works than these shall he do.” This promise opens up the greatest unoccupied field in the world. The occupation of this field will have revolutionary effects. It will upheave our missionary methods and our criticisms of them. It will send out pioneers into waste places. It will break up complacency and tradi- tion. It will show that impossibilities are easy. It will end small prejudices and the sense of race domina- tion and of race subjugation, and of the use of race as a cover either for assertion or for delinquency. It will enable men to see the greatest need and to give them- selves to it. It will convince them of the conscience and the cross of Christ. In the third place it is to be observed that the foreign 142 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS mission enterprise itself supplies the valid elements in the considerations which are now under discussion. It has been insisting from the outset that the peoples who have acquired any privileges or power should recognise the truth of human unity and the duty of human service and bring all humanity into the common experience of its common wealth. It is demanding to-day that Chris- tianity should be given control of the whole impact of nation on nation and race on race the world around. It argues for the world-wide extension of the Gospel because only so can any of the peoples of the world know its fulness. The complete glory of the Lordship of Christ can be realised only in a world where every people and every tribe actually crown Him Lord of all. It has striven generation after generation to build up the national Churches to which it can pass over the bur- den which it has borne and which will take up the burdens which do not belong to and can never be suc- cessfully assumed by foreign missionaries. Now that these Churches are, all too slowly, coming into being, so far from being reluctant to recognise them or to be- come subordinate to them, the joy of foreign missions is fulfilled. The friend of the bridegroom rejoices to hear the bridegroom’s voice. It cannot be heard too soon, in its acceptance and recognition of the worthi- ness and attraction and sufficiency of the Church in each land made ready for Him. No agency will be more ready and eager to welcome its euthanasia than foreign missions, when their work is done and they can give way to national Churches co-operating with the Churches of the West in the universal and continuing work of the Kingdom of Christ in the world. If to any extent the Christian conceptions with which we have worked in the missionary enterprise in the past NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 143 have been inadequate, then as they expand under the larger experience of the Church and the teaching of the Spirit of Christ and approximate more closely to the full truth, to that extent they ought to result, and if the process is a true one will result, not in any impoverish- ment of the missionary motive but in its enrichment, not in the contraction of the enterprise but in its great and adequate expansion. Only those can fail to wel- come such a development who, consciously or uncon- sciously, are in reality out of sympathy with the effort of the Church to seek literally to fulfil the essential genius of Christianity and its final summary expression in the last commission of our Lord. In the following chapter we shall note the relation- ship of the foreign missionary enterprise abroad.to the race problem, There are foreign missionary aspects of that problem which fall also to the Churches at home. Mr. Rowell referred to them in the same address which we have already quoted: “We acknowledge allegiance to our city, and our duty and responsibility as citizens. We acknowledge allegiance to our state or province, and our duty and responsibility as citizens in the state. We acknowledge our allegiance to our national government, and our duty and responsibility as citizens to that government. We do not find that the one allegiance conflicts with the other. The man who is the best citizen in the com- munity, in the city, is the best citizen of the state and in the nation. We are not required to do away with these allegiances, but, recognising their full force and power, we need to add to them one other, our allegiance to the cause of humanity under the leadership of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. “And that carries with it obligations just as binding, 144. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS just as inescapable for every honest Christian man and. woman as the obligation to the city or the state or the national government. We think of our city as a unity, we think of our state as a unity, we think of our nation as a unity. We must broaden our horizon and take in the sweep of all the nations; we must think of our hu- manity as one great unity, the children of a common Father, bound together by the ties of human brother- hood. This was that great conception which St. Augustine set forth in “The City of God,’ that great conception of the world-wide unity which dominated the thought of Europe for one thousand years. In modern times the spirit of nationalism has led us away from that great Christian ideal. The problem we face to-day is how to reconcile and harmonise the two—the idea of nationalism with that of world-wide unity—to recognise the facts and forces of to-day, and yet inspire all men with the Christian spirit and the recognition of the unity of our race. How then are the relations of the members of the family of nations to be governed? I have already pointed out that there must be the rec- ognition of public right, the moral factor in the relation of nation to nation. There must be an earnest and honest effort to understand and appreciate the point of view of other races and other peoples. We cannot un- derstand each other and work together as different races and different nations, unless we honestly seek to under- stand and appreciate the point of view of other peoples.” Do the new conditions of the missionary work in foreign lands call upon the Churches at home to pro- vide a different type of missionary, or missionaries with different kinds of preparation and qualifications from those required in the past? To be specific, is it the fact that the work calls now not for the old general train- NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE I45 ing and for missionaries to settle down for permanent evangelistic work or to devote themselves for life to whatever forms of service press themselves upon them, but rather for men and women of specialised training for specialised forms and for definite positions and per- haps not for permanent service at all but to accomplish a temporary task and then return home? Yes and no. There is a limited call for service from young men and women who may not be able to give more than a few years or who are uncertain as to where their duty may lie, but who wish to see and judge for themselves as to the claims of the foreign field. In places where ex- perience and knowledge of the language are not essen- tial but where work can be done in English under the supervision of experienced workers, a few of these short term workers may render useful service. Beyond this there is and will be increasing opportunity for serv- ice from the ablest men and women of each national Church, West or East, in visiting for longer or shorter periods the churches and institutions of the other. The best leaders of the Churches on the mission field may bring help and support to us. And scholars, lecturers, teachers, doctors and many other competent men and women from the West should go out to the Mission fields, some for brief visits, others for longer periods. The world is growing ever more compact and easy of access, bound together in common thoughts and ac- quaintance, and the barrier of language becomes less and less. The best Christian scholarship and apologetic of the West should be carried to other countries not in books only but personally by our ablest teachers and preachers. There ought to be also a great supple- mentary lay mission. No one could estimate the value to Christian missions to Asia and other lands of our 146 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS best Christian laymen who would go out to testify clearly and boldly to their Christian faith. It is to be hoped that the day will soon come when such forms of service as these and others like them and such general financial help as our Western Churches may give in the way of brotherly aid to be administered, if it is needed at all, wholly by the new Churches, may take the place of the foreign mission enterprise in its present form. But we have not reached that day. And there is as great need now as ever of the enterprise in the form and with the forces which we know to-day. Indeed, Dr. Ebina has said that these forces should be multiplied fourfold in the case of Japan, if we are to achieve the desired goal when the native Christians can take over the task with only supplementary aid, if aid at all, from without. The real work must still and for some time be borne by the men and women who go out to learn the language and to become a permanent part of the life of the people. That does not mean that more and more the places of leadership, college presidencies and pro- fessorships, evangelistic superintendence, executive ad- ministration, shall not be in native hands as in the case of all congregational pastorates. But for a long time yet medical leadership and organisation, many educa- tional positions and the responsibility for unceasing pioneer expansion and for the relentless prosecution of the supreme ideal of the evangelisation of all lives and of all life, will call for the maintenance of foreign mis- sions and for a continuous supply of the same kind of men and women who have gone in the past. There can be and there ought to be now in the enlarged and com- plexly developed work, abroad as at home, the greatest amount of competent and specialised equipment. A way must be found, however, abroad as at home, for NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 147 holding all such specialised service as true as the old general type of service to the great central missionary aims, and it could be wished that specialised skill might be obtainable without too great cost in general sym- pathies and adaptation and efficiency. It is clear that we have lost as well as gained much in our present educational ideals and processes. The net result has surely been gain. The older missionaries themselves are eager to bear their testimony to the energy, flexi- bility and effectiveness as well as the devotion of the new generation which has grown up. Whether we shall hold these gains and augment them will depend upon the life of the Christian Churches at home. The missionaries who go out cannot be better than the best of the home Church. Will that best be good enough? The contention that the missionary and educational task of the Church is indivisible and undifferentiated, that the terms “foreign” and “home” should be elim- inated, and that the whole work of the Church at home and abroad should be conceived as one, is in one view a thoroughly sound contention. It should be ceaselessly urged against the disposition to slight any section of the great mission of the Church in the world. But it is not a practicable principle on which to organise ad- ministration or to conduct actual achievement. If there is not specialisation of effort and responsibility, it is inevitable that the work will not be done. The Churches have acted with wisdom, accordingly, in es- tablishing boards and agencies to care for the different aspects of their work which call for separate adminis- tration. Where the Churches have failed to provide in this way for any real task which was suffering over- sight and neglect, agencies have inevitably been devel- oped, independent or semi-independent of the Churches, 148 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS to meet the necessity. At the present time in many of the Churches we are witnessing a curious anomaly. These Churches are offering themselves as adequate agencies of religious activity able and ready to provide for all the work which it is the duty of the Church to do, and yet at the same time they are proposing plans of consolidated benevolence which are intended to pool the gifts and work of the Church and to equalise its activity on some basis of mathematical proportions. Under these plans the individual donor will cease to designate the use or object of his gift and will leave it to some central agency of the Church to apportion. Something is to be said for this plan and something against it. Probably the right answer to it is that each Church may well lay upon each of its members the duty of some proportionate contribution to all its work. This should be the minimum gift of each man propor- tioned in his own conscience to his ability. But beyond this minimum and standard offering every individual Christian ought to be free, and as a responsible trustee ought to be encouraged to use his power, not as pre- scribed by some one else, but as led by his own con- science and intelligence and personal interest. Nothing could be more suicidal than the course which some are advocating, in America at least, of a common benevo- lence pool which would discourage the individual from the careful personal administration of his gifts and which would hinder any agency of the Church, whether its work is at home or abroad, from presenting its case with maximum power. A problem like this and many other problems, both administrative and doctrinal, may become simply signs of waning momentum, or a case of energy diverted from the objective task and absorbed in the mechanism. NEW DEMANDS AT THE HOME BASE 149 Our supreme need is for a Church which has not begun to speculate and argue over things that should be taken for granted, which is so bent on accomplishing certain great ends which are agreed upon that it cannot stop to dispute and differ over subordinate issues, however important, upon which there may be disagreement. It is a curious thing that the less important the end or issue the wider is the basis of agreement required by men ; while the vaster the stake the less exacting the de- mands. In the face of a pestilence a whole community will act as a unit which will divide hopelessly into fac- tions over the location of a monument or the cutting down of a tree or the music in a church. The Church needs the sense of a vast enterprise, simple, urgent, de- manding all that war demands and demanding far more, because it asks of love what war draws from hate and fear. If the Church is to be saved it will be by the spirit of such a great unselfish world service, not by introspection, or a return upon history or the effort to purge herself by inward debate and recrimination. Let the Church rise and move and we shall know what ele- ments in her are true and what are false by the place they will press to fill in her advancing assault upon all evil, in her self-forgetful realisation of the unity of love, in her exaltation of Christ, His Cross and His Throne. CHAPTER V NEw DEMANDS ON THE MIssSION FIELD CREATED BY New Wor.tp ConpDITIONS Tue line of distinction between this and the preceding chapter is not as clear as the titles of the two chapters might suggest. It is not easy to separate the home problems from the foreign problems or to distinguish the influences which condition each set of problems, but there is perhaps enough difference to justify separation of the two chapters. First there are the new educational problems. When missionary education began in many fields there was no other education offered. There may have been old style schools like those of the Confucian system which have now almost completely disappeared but which for centuries covered the whole of China, reaching to every country village; or like the Madresseh, the ecclesiastical or semi-ecclesiastical schools in Turkey, or like the temple schools in India. But there were no modern educational institutions. And the state system of edu- cation had not yet begun. In China Dr. Mateer’s school at Tungchow, in Shantung, and Dr. Sheffield’s at Tengchow, in Chihli, in North China, and the schools of the London Missionary Society in Hong Kong, were the first institutions to provide modern education. In India, Carey at Serampore and Duff in Calcutta, were in the field long before government. In many cases the missionary schools prepared the way, worked out the 150 NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD I5I principles and provided the first models. Now and then missionaries believed that they saw a greater op- portunity for dispelling error and diffusing light by withdrawing temporarily or even permanently from direct missionary service in order to aid the govern- ment to begin their systems of education. Carey did this while still remaining a missionary of the Seram- pore brotherhood, but Verbeck and McCartee went over for a time wholly to the service of Japan to begin the work which later developed into the Imperial Univer- sity in Tokyo. Verbeck’s work is well-known, but Mc- Cartee’s was useful also. “His good work for the edu- cation of Japan in the first stages of its development,” said Viscount Tanaka, then Vice-minister of Educa- tion, “‘can never be forgotten.’ Martin went to the as- sistance of China to found its institution in Peking known as the Tungwen College, designed “to train young men for the public service, especially as agents of international intercourse,” and never conceived that he had abandoned his character as a missionary. In his old age and retirement he returned to honorary membership in his own mission in Peking. Not only did missionary education fill this honour- able place in the origin of modern education in many lands but in some of them it has retained the leadership. In South Africa the Scotch Missions at Lovedale and Livingstonia provide the best education available for African young men and women, and Mr. Charles T. Loram, Inspector of Schools, Natal, says quite plainly: “The history of Native education in South Africa is the history of South African missions, for it is due entirely to the efforts of the missionaries that the Na- tives of South Africa have received any education at all, and to this day all but three of the several thousand I52 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Native schools are conducted by missionary agencies.” (‘Education in South Africa,” p. 46.) In the Near East the best educational institutions have been and are the Christian schools, the American Universities at Beirut and Cairo, Robert College and the American College for Women in Constantinople, the American Mission schools in Teheran and Tabriz. In the Philippines the missionary institution at Duma- guete is recognised to be the best in the archipelago outside of Manila. In some of these cases the mission institutions have been left with the whole field their own. Elsewhere this has not been the case. Schools under government or other auspices have grown up to share the work, but the missionary schools have still held their ground. They have done so in India. The Madras Christian College and the Forman Christian College and others like them are not sur- passed, and sometimes are not equalled, by any of the other colleges embraced with them in the provincial universities. In China the missionary universities were far in the lead and in some provinces still hold their own, as in Shantung, Fukien, Canton, Szchuen and Hunan. At Peking and Nanking the government uni- versities, not without foreign assistance in various forms, and with official support and government re- sources, are already beginning to overtop the two mis- sionary universities. Is this not the inevitable and the desirable develop- ment everywhere? Is it not the proper and necessary function of the state to provide for the education of the children? This has been the German and the Amer- ican view and increasingly also the British view. In any case the Protestant foreign missionary enterprise has never conceived it to be its duty to claim the pre- NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 153 rogative of controlling the education of a nation. It has no permanent responsibilities. Its work, however long continued, must in the end be a temporary work. Its business is to found the Christian Church, to give all the help it can to the Church, to individual men and to society and its institutions and relationships, and to conclude its distinctive work as soon as it can, leav- ing behind it the agencies and forces and ideals essential to Christian life in individuals and society. The prob- lems involved inthe international and inter-racial rela- tionships ensuing may be spoken of as foreign mission- ary but they will represent an entirely different phase and will not require the present forms of organisation or policies of procedure. The fact that such a different situation is ahead of us and is to be longed and wrought for must not hide the fact that it will not come unless a great many things are done first which some good people are not only overleaping but even depreciating as though they were already done or were dispensable. They are neither. But we shall return to this elsewhere. It is enough to point out here that the educational work of Missions does not involve any jealousy of government education or any effort to obstruct it. On the contrary, mission- aries have always done their utmost to encourage and aid the government. Their conviction is that the more freely truth can be diffused the better. All that they dread is error or half truth or the suppression of truth. The Christian Church is the mother of education and nowhere more clearly than in the foreign mission field. And foreign missions rejoice to see adequate educa- tional systems projected and developed in the fields where they are at work. All that they desire in the midst of this development 154 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS is first the opportunity to be of real service to the coun- try to which they have come with no other desire than the desire of true helpfulness, and second the freedom, which we believe is a just freedom, to teach the Chris- tian religion to those who may be willing to receive such teaching and especially to begin to train for largest usefulness the children of the Christian Church. The danger which confronts the foreign mission enter- prise to-day is that in one or both of these respects its educational activity may be wiped out. On the one hand the tendency to nationalise educa- tion is in danger in some lands of being carried so far as to make education the monopoly of the state, or if private education is allowed at all to require it to con- form absolutely to state standards. This was the pro- posal in Chosen in 1914, when the Japanese administra- tion sought to bring all the schools into absolute conformity to a rigid system of instruction, curric- ulum, text books, organisation, etc., which included the abandonment of required religious teaching. There had been for a time some disposition to pursue this policy in Japan itself but it had been deliberately aban- doned there and the government, instead, both then and later, followed a generous policy of encouraging private education both in great universities like Waseda and Keio and in mission schools from lower grades to lower university rank, like Doshisha, and subsequently other institutions. After a few years also in Chosen itself Japan relaxed the restraints and moved toward the en- lightened course which she had adopted at home. The Indian Government has been moving in the direction of a far closer control of higher education by the state. Hitherto the provincial universities have been examin, ing and degree-conferring bodies like the University of NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 155 London, with a few university chairs. But now the constituent colleges, where the reformed scheme has gone into effect, as in the United Provinces, are re- duced to intermediate colleges, the upper two years hav- ing been transferred to the university as a teaching body. This takes all higher education out of the hands of private colleges, whether Hindu, Mohammedan or Christian. The one recourse open is to found a dis- tinct religious university as the Mohammedans have done at Aligarh and the Hindus at Benares. Private education is left free, however, from the intermediate college down. The most stringent control of private education at present is in Turkey. No new foreign schools are permitted. Many old ones have been closed. Those which are still tolerated are governed by the most exacting requirements as to hours, lan- guage of instruction, ages of pupils, passage from class to class. Teachers appointed by the government but paid by the school are imposed for certain subjects. A resident of Syria who has had close contact with the educational situation in Turkey, writes in a letter dated March 6, 1925: “Tn all Turkish primary schools, both public and spe- cial, the only language allowed is Turkish, regardless of what language the children use at home. Religious instruction may be given to the children of the faith of the founders of the particular school, Catholic to Catholic children, Moslem children from Moslem founders, Protestants in the same way. It was a very special concession obtained only after very hard work, that the Syriac community in Mardin got permission to teach a little Syriac on the ground that it is the language employed in the church ritual and hence necessary. All primary schools must have one or more Moslem Turk- ish teachers appointed by the government as must also 156 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS the high schools. The policy about paying these gov- ernment appointed teachers varies. In some cases the government pays them and in others the founders of the school must do so. In high schools Turkish must be the language of instruction but languages may be taught as languages. All schools are subject to govern- ment inspection at all times to see whether these gov- ernment instructions are being carried out as required.” There are leaders of public education in China who would go still further. At the meeting of the Na- tional China Educational Conference at Kaifeng, the capital of Honan province, in October, 1924, these were some of the resolutions adopted: “After full examination of the whole problem (that of schools organised by foreigners in China) we report on the necessity of the government’s regaining control of all educational activities now exercised by foreigners in China. Foreigners in China, in the conduct of their educational work, exhibit many evils, of which the four following must be emphasised: “TI. In every country education is a most important inner function of government. The schools operated by foreigners are not registered with the government, nor do they receive or observe the government instruc- tions. This gradually alienates the government’s ex- clusive right to educate. “TI. Each country has some ruling idea on which it builds its educational fabric. Foreign races by temperament and ideals are different from our people. The education of each country is, or should be, pecul- larly fitted to each; thus no other can quite harmonise with our needs. This means that they interfere with the attainment of our educational ideal. “III. Moreover, by the conduct of their peculiar systems they really buy the affections of our people, making them in reality colonists of their countries. Though this may not be the intent, no plan could have been more cunningly laid, for the change is all uncon- NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD I57 sciously going on. Thus those educated under a Japan- ese system learn to love Japan. So for England, Amer- ica, and France. Thus the peculiar national spirit of independence and the student’s mind, that should be first for his country, is impaired. Thus the content of the system of education devised by foreigners is ap- parent. The administrators of the schools are either preachers of religion, or they occupy their positions for the purpose of inculcating political ideas; the educa- tional is not their real aim. As far as method goes they follow their own inclinations and ideas. The curric- ulum is not in harmony with the government standards. “IV. For the above reasons necessity presses that the government should regain its rightful control of education. Means to this end are as follows: “tT, All schools and educational agencies established by foreigners should report to the government for registration. “2. Everything pertaining to the schools should be brought into harmony with national and provincial regulations before they are permitted to register. “3, All schools opened by foreigners must come under the control of an inspector appointed by the local magistrate. “4. All teachers employed in foreign schools must have the qualifications required by the Ministry of Education. “5. All foreign schools must collect fees in accord- ance with the scale set by the Ministry. Such scale of fees must not exceed that of other private schools in the district. “6, Pupils graduating from an unregistered school shall not be considered on an equality with the gradu- ates of the national schools when seeking government preferment. “7, Schools not permitted to register by the govern- ment shall be closed after a certain time, of which due notice shall be given. “8. Students in the foreign schools shall take care to observe all festivals, properties, and manners deter- mined for the regulation of the national schools. 158 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS “9. Foreigners should not use their schools or other educational agencies for the propagation of religion. “to, All foreign schools and educational agencies shall, within a fixed time, be taken over by the nation. “t1. After the foregoing has become law in opera- tion, no foreigner shall be permitted to establish agen- cies in the country.” And while this group represented at the time a very radical view and their resolutions are not government enactments, such a responsible and foremost scholar as Dr. Hu Suh, professor of Philosophy in the National University in Peking, supports their declaration of the desirability of divorcing education from all religious propaganda. Oregon and Nebraska, until overruled by the United States Supreme Court, proposed this same absolute state monopoly or control of some forms at least of education, advocated by the Kaifeng Confer- ence. Many forces have led on to this ultra-nationalistic feeling in education—the evidence of the power of gov- ernmentally controlled and directed education in the case of Germany prior to the war, the modern manipula- tion of propaganda and group psychology, the effort on the part of one or another section of opinion to use government mechanism for making itself dominant, the fear of foreign or sectarian influence introducing itself under economic, religious, philanthropic or educa- tional guises, the sense of national weakness or vanity on the one hand or of pride and confidence on the other, whether well or ill-founded. But whatever the forces back of it, it is a blunder when applied indiscriminately to education. In Great Britain and the United States and Canada we are convinced that it is both wise and obligatory on the part of the state to make room for NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 159 private education. Much of our educational progress and most of our new ideas in education have been worked out by private schools unbound by the rigid standardisation and policy of state education. The state will lose more than it will gain by repressing the life and freedom of private schools. It is quite legitimate for the state to establish min- imum requirements as to equipments and efficiency and degrees, and mission schools should not complain of these. But the state, especially in Asia and many other lands, too, needs the work which mission schools can do in establishing in each land a model Christian school, adapting western education to the life of the land or seeking to meet special needs in special fields of educa- tional experiment, such as rural education in India, in- dustrial education in Africa, medical education in China and Syria. In asking this opportunity of service of these nations they are asked for nothing more than is accorded to them. The missionary view of the right ideal and aim of education as a missionary agency was set forth by the General Board of the Christian Educational Associa- tion in China, at its meeting in April, 1925, “in view of widespread misunderstanding and not a little mis- representation of the purpose of Christian education in China”: “t. THE FuNcTION oF CHRISTIAN ScHoors. The special function of Christian schools, and the main justification for their maintenance supplementary to the public schools of China, is that they provide an educa- tion Christian in character for the children of the mem- bers of the Christian community and for others who desire to avail themselves of private schools of that type. “9. PRIVATE SCHOOLS IN A Democracy. It is in accordance with the spirit of democracy and with the a « *, 160 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS practice in all democratic nations of the modern world that permission should be granted to individuals or to special groups, who so desire, to establish and maintain private educational institutions, in addition to the public system of education maintained by the State. ‘This right is granted on condition that these private schools maintain the minimum standards legitimately imposed by the State upon all schools, both public and private, and that they do not conflict with the interests of the nation and of society as a whole. “3, PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND ProcreEss. It is generally agreed that progress in education is dependent upon the existence of diverse types of schools and the largest possible freedom of variation. To deny the right of variation, and to insist that all schools follow the same uniform procedure, would be contrary to the educa- tional interests of the State. Provided that private schools meet the essential requirements of all schools, the greater the freedom of variation allowed, the better for education, and for the State. “A, PRIVATE SCHOOLS AND RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. The maintenance of private schools in which religion forms an integral part of the educational process, is in accordance with the principle of religious freedom, which has been accepted in the constitution of the Chi- nese Republic, and with the practice in other democratic nations. Religious freedom includes not only the right of the individual to follow his own conscience in mat- ters of personal religious belief, but also to provide training in religion for his children. This principle applies equally to the adherents of any religious faith. “5. CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND THE NATIONAL PRo- GRAMME OF EpucaTion. It seems advisable that pri- vate schools in China should come under the cognisance of the public educational authorities and form part of the national programme of education. Such a relation- ship would naturally take the form of registration of the schools, the adoption of the essentials required for all schools, the attainment of recognised standards of efficiency, and a system of visitation to insure the main- tenance of these standards. Beyond this there should NEW DEMANDS ON, THE MISSION FIELD 161 be freedom. Christian educators welcome such a rela- tionship with the public educational authorities. Such supervisory control of these schools as is maintained by Christian agencies is solely for the purpose of promot- ing efficiency and is meant to supplement, not to take the place of, the general supervisory relation of the pub- lic educational authorities. “6, ETHICAL AND RELIGIouS TEACHING IN CBRIS- TIAN ScHoots. The primary purpose of all education is the development of personality and of moral charac- ter, and it is in this sphere that Christian people believe that they have a special contribution to make to the life of China. The insistence by the educational authori- ties upon conditions of registration that imposed re- strictions upon the ethical and religious teaching and life of the Christian schools, would not only be incon- sistent with the principles of educational and religious freedom, but would prevent these schools from achiev- ing the purpose for which they have been founded, and from making their distinctive contribution to the educa- tional needs of China. “7, CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS AND PatTrioTIsM. The Christian spirit naturally expresses itself in an en- lightened patriotism. Christian schools aim to develop in their students the love of country; if they fail to do so, they are to that extent untrue to their purpose. The idea of ‘denationalising’ students, or of using the Christian schools as the agencies of a ‘foreign im- perialism’ is abhorrent to the leaders in Christian edu- cation, both Chinese and westerners. “8. CHRISTIAN EpucaTiIon BECOMING INDIGENOUS. While Christian schools in China were originally estab- lished and are still largely maintained by foreign mis- sionaries and their supporters in the west, their purpose has been to serve the best interests of the Chinese peo- ple. It is their ideal, which is being increasingly real- ised, that Christian education should become Chinese in spirit, in content, in support and in control. ‘This is the expressed purpose not only of Chinese and western Christian educators, but also of the mission bodies which have in the past supported the Christian schools, 162 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS and of the Chinese Christian community which is gradually taking over their support and control. “go. THE PERMANENT FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIAN EpucaTion. The permanent maintenance of Christian education depends upon securing the whole-hearted support of the Christian community and of enlightened Chinese public opinion in general, not only treaties be- tween China and other nations.” » This educational problem is one of the two great ‘educational problems before missions to-day. It in- ‘volves, to be sure, many other problems such as our ability faithfully to fulfil the promise of such service as this if the opportunity is given to us. Are we pre- pared to unite our forces, as we must if this work is to be adequately done, and are we bent upon doing noth- ing but earnestly and effectively helping the nation to which we have gone? We ought to be able to answer these questions without hesitation or uncertainty. And we ought to strive to make our service so good and desirable that the people will want it. Experience has shown, however, that we may do this and still have to face political hindrances and opposition. We can only meet these as they arise in patience and prayer and love. The other of the two educational problems is equally serious, namely, the problem arising when missionary schools are still allowed to exist, but when their freedom of religious teaching is conditional or abridged or denied. This was the case in Japan for a short time in 1902-1903, when the educational authorities then in control denied the privileges of postponement of mili- tary service and of equal opportunity for the advance- ment of students into government schools of next higher grade, to institutions which made religious teaching a part of the curriculum or required attend- NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 163 ance at chapel service. The same pressure was exerted in Chosen later when it was required that schools ad- mitted to government registry and sanction should re- move religion from the regular course of instruction. In Turkey to-day no teaching of religion is allowed in schools except the religion of the pupils, Islam to Moslems, Christianity to Christians. The agitation of 1924-25 in China against all foreign influence, includ- ing foreign established and aided education, was directed specifically also against the use of education in any religious interest. The resolutions adopted at Kaifeng, as we have noted, included the following: “Foreigners should not use their schools or other educa- tional agencies for the propagation of religion.” The problem in India has taken a different form. In the past there has been no national state-supported sys- tem of education in India nor is there to-day. The plan adopted was the grant-in-aid scheme, under which the government established the standards and encouraged private initiative and gave subsidies from public funds. Under the new diarchy system of government, educa- tion is made a provincial affair and in each province is included in the departments transferred to Indian con- trol. In some of the provinces the continuance of the grants-in-aid has been made conditional on the acceptance by each aided institution of the so-called “Conscience Clause’? which allows the institution to give religious instruction and to hold religious worship only for those pupils whose parents do not request ex- emption, and only apart from the regular required curriculum. The question which missions face accordingly in different forms are such as these: What is the aim of missionary education? What are its relations to evan- 164 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS gelistic purpose and result? Do different principles govern the use of missionary gifts from the home Churches from those which apply to the use of educa- tional funds received on the field from fees or grants? Does required religious teaching accomplish better mis- sionary results than optional? If so, whose option should be consulted, the pupil’s or, as in India, the parents’? Can Christians do anything that is not Chris- tian; if so what is and what is not a Christian school ? If missionary schools give up their religious teaching, whether required as some insist they shall, or even optional as others demand, will there be adequate justi- fication for their existence, will the people who support missions support such schools, will the native Churches maintain them, or will the State itself long refrain from absorbing them, as the Chinese educators propose? These questions would draw out diverse answers. But it may be maintained that sooner or later only those schools will be maintained, or can maintain themselves, which can justify the contribution which they are making to the achievement of the great Christian aims. The diversity of our interpretation of those aims will produce similar diversity in our answers to these ques- tions. Those missionary societies will accomplish most which actually do succeed in producing the truest Chris- tian leaders and in releasing the forces of Christian life and faith in society. And this will probably result not so much from any particular methods as from love, courage, veracity, from Christian faith and influence, uncompromised and unconcealed, and working in fear- less unselfishness and efficiency. The problems of missionary education fundamentally are religious and educational problems. They do not differ in these respects essentially from the problems of NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 165 Christian education at home. And as we have seen, even in their political aspects, mission schools are only facing the same issues which have been raised in states like Oregon and Nebraska and in European countries where the educational freedom of minorities has been limited or refused. All over the world this old problem of the relation of politics and religion, of the State and the Church, is as living and perplexing as it has always been. The missionary movement has been inevitably - involved in it from the beginning. In the medizval period, as we have seen, religion and politics were again and again inextricably commingled or even identified. The first Roman Catholic missionaries were the con- quistadores, or went with them, both helped and hin- dered by them. Spanish and Portuguese conquest meant nominal Christianisation. In the eighteenth century even Schwartz was forced into political rela- tionships between the East India Company and Hyder Ali. Carey’s location at Serampore was determined by political exigencies and likewise Judson’s in Burmah. The same treaties which opened China to trade after the opium war opened it to missionary residence, and the treaties of 1858 covered both commercial and religious liberties. There is no escape from all this confusion. The most unworldly missionaries are not allowed to travel without passports of the nations to which they belong. And those who conceive their er- rand in the most spiritual terms are again and again involved in the complications inseparable from life in an organised, unitary human society. Dr. Lobdell and the early American missionaries in interior Turkey and Mesopotamia were separated from the home policies of the United States by the width of the world, but they could not restrain their testimony on the issue of 166 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS slavery. The China Inland missionaries seek most earnestly to preserve their work absolutely disconnected with politics and so do the American Missions in Japan. None the less the work of both of them is radically affected by the conduct of the nations from which they come, by the policy of Great Britain with regard to the Boxer indemnity Fund in China and by the immigration policy of the United States toward Japan. The questions which are at issue here are not dis- tinctly foreign missionary questions, They are the old and still unsolved problems of the relations of Church and State, by no means solved by the formula of “a free Church in a free State,”’ nor by the conception of the spirituality of the functions of the Church. Be- cause, in the first place, the State also has a spiritual foundation and spiritual functions, and in the second place, the Church cannot evade the facts of life or escape the responsibility for actualising its spiritual principles in human conduct and relationships. In the foreign field the difficulties of the home problem exist, increased by the fact that there are two States involved and sometimes two Churches, the State and the Church from which the missionaries come and those also to which they go. Here and there, as in the case of Trum- bull in Chile and Verbeck in Japan, the missionary gave up his old citizenship and became naturalised in his new home. That both simplifies and complicates the prob- lem. As yet we have no solution for it. It remains even where the missionary operates in his own nation, though as a foreign missionary, as in the case of St. Paul in the Roman Empire or Sheldon Jackson in Alaska. Without venturing into all the debatable questions which lie in this field it must suffice to suggest one NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 167 guiding principle and one point of present missionary policy, The guiding principle is the Lordship of Christ. That principle, however far we are from acknowledging it, is the supreme principle which ought to govern both State and Church. All action of the State at variance with it is wrong or imperfect. At present no state professes to act under it, certainly not the non-Christian nations and equally certainly not the so-called Christian nations. Either type of nation may now and then doa Christian thing. But all nations ought to do nothing but Christian things. The Church has a right to hold up before them always this ideal and to do this effec- tively she must hold it up to herself, and pre-eminently foreign mission agencies; and the Churches which grow out of them, though it is far harder for them than for the great Churches of the West, must live by the Christian law and under One Lord. The race issue offers one test in this regard. But it is easy to slip over into unreality, into a theoretical construing of actual conditions which assumes as present what lies far off in the future. The proper emphasis on social conceptions and on the wider relation of the Church in each nation and internationally involves as a necessary and fundamental implication the prior bringing into being of the personalities on which alone general movements and influences can be borne. No one can say how many of these may be re- quired. Our Lord was but one and in the generation following there was only one St. Paul. But then also it was not in the lifetime of either of these that the social effects of the Gospel were achieved except in individual persons and in the small separated Christian communities. In the Mission field to-day we are often expecting and demanding of Christianity more than has 168 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS yet been given starting point and fulcrum in actual per- sons, or than can be produced without the ripening of time. In China, for example, a social demand is made upon the nation also, to save the nation by some pro- cess or programme when as a matter of fact the living persons and the substantial character without which all processes and programmes are merely academic, are © not yet produced. The base of converted individuals is not yet broad and solid enough to sustain a new social order. The most fundamental and glorious of all the purposes of Christianity still calls to be done, the crea- tion of Christian men in numbers and quality adequate to furnish the foundation stones of a new building. If the Christian Church forgets this, she will be like a mason trying to carry up walls which rest on no sufficient base. These educational and political problems of foreign missions to-day are supplemented by a third which grows ever more acute and also more familiar, namely, the new form of apologetic attack and defence. At the beginning of foreign mission work, in all but the Mohammedan fields, the missionaries encountered frank and untroubled idolatry, philosophies which might or might not have points of contact with western thought, but in either case were unaware and careless of it. The virtues and might of western civilisation were claimed for Christianity while its vices and weak- nesses were as far as possible, and in many places with full success, disavowed. On the whole Christianity appeared as identified with civilisation, and in a few places even western names and garments were given to non-Christians. The non-Christian religions were not in all cases what they had always been, for they had NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 169 passed through many changes and some were less and some were more fitted to cope with Christianity by reason of these changes, but all were as yet unin- fluenced by Christianity itself and met it on the ground on which it then found them. In all these regards, and many more beside, the situation is wholly changed to-day. The non-Christian world knows Christendom and Christianity to-day with a very different knowledge from that which it received from the first or even later missionaries. A host of representatives from the western nations has gone out all over the world, some of whom have confirmed and supported the mis- sionary but most of whom in the past have discredited or denied his message. Many of these have done it by their own bad lives, but many others and in increasing numbers have done it in honest disbelief. They have created or confirmed the view that Christianity is out- grown and discarded at home. Western education which has rejected the Christian faith has assured Asia that it should not take up an outgrown superstition. Multitudes of students from non-Christian lands have gone abroad with results of deepest consequence to Christianity. For a time these students went, ten thousand at a time, from China to Japan, and came back detached from whatever religion they may have had and especially set against Christianity. It is be- lieved by some that the radical movement against for- eign and Christian education in China in 1924-25 came from men for the most part educated in Japan. But thousands more of the student class, not from China alone but from all lands, have thronged to Europe and America. There were about 12,000 such students in 170 THE, CHURCH, AND MISSIONS” the United States in 1925. Over 400 jews students have been enrolled in the University of Edinburgh alone. Our western life and the Christian Church have never met a more severe and searching trial than they are meeting to-day in the presence of these foreign students in our schools. These young men and women from many lands are testing the honesty of the political and social axioms which have constituted our Ameri- can and British tradition. They are proving the reality of our profession of Christian brotherhood and equality. Almost all of them came here full of confi- dence and hope. Many of them are going back dis- illusioned, some bitter, some sorrowful. Many of them received their first shock at the port of entry as they came in. Some of them went on and met with the very evils which they had come to the West to trans- cend. Some found that the Christianity which they had acquired from missionaries was not confirmed by the Christianity which they met in the land which had sent the missionaries forth. Not all have been disappointed. Thousands of them have gone home with strength and faith, having re- ceived that for which they came. They were able to distinguish between good and evil and to understand the struggle which was going on in our own national character. They met with people who did embody in their own lives and in their attitude and spirit toward others the Christian ideals of justice and equality and goodwill. And especially, ever since the days of Yung Wing and the students whom he brought from China, have those foreign students returned with what they came fer and what Britain and America were meant to give them, who found their way into western Christian NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD I7I home-life and saw the real springs of our national spirit. For the failures among these students the blame is not all on one side, but the larger responsibility is ours, and it is high time that the nation and the Church realised what the situation is and comprehended the test and the opportunity which it presents. For it is an opportunity. We have never had a greater one. Not another year should be allowed to pass without an adequate effort on the part of the nation and the Chris- tian Church to deal with it. We can, if we will, send back each year to their many lands an army of am- bassadors of goodwill and helpful intercourse, of inter- national confidence, of hope and peace. And the Church may find in these thousands of students as many missionaries to carry Christianity back to their own people. They will not carry back what they do not get, and they will not get what we cannot or do not give. Most powerful of all things in discrediting Chris- tianity and weakening the force of the missionary’s presentation has been the example of the nominally Christian nations. Long before the World War, Lord Salisbury candidly acknowledged this in a speech be- fore the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in London: “In the Church of old times, great evangelists went forth to this work, exposed themselves to fearful dan- gers and suffered all the terrors that the world could inflict in support of the doctrines which they preached and the morality which they practised. There was no doubt at the same time, a corrupt society calling itself by their name. But ... the means of communication —- were not active and were not as they are now, and 172 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS things might go on without attracting the attention of those who listened to the teaching of the earlier teach- ers or diminishing the value of their work. Now things are considerably altered, and that very increase in the means of communication, that very augmentation of the power of opinion to affect opinion and of man to affect man by the mere conquests we have achieved in the material domain; those very conquests, while un- doubtedly they are . . . an invitation from Providence to take advantage of the means of spreading the Gospel, are also a means by which the lives of many and the acts of many, which are not wholly consistent with the ideal which is preached in the pulpit or read in the Holy Book, are brought home to the vast nations which we seek to address. That is one of the great difficulties with which we have to contend, and that is the reason why this society and all missionary societies appeal with undoubted force and with the right to have their appeal considered—that as our civilisation in its measure tends to hamper missionary efforts, so in its nobler manifesta- tions and its more powerful efforts that civilisation, represented by our assistance, shall push forward to its ultimate victory, the cause to which you are devoted.” The conduct of Christian nations has displayed, since Lord Salisbury made this speech, a huge mass of in- consistency with the principles and spirit of Christ. It may be that statesmen have done their best, and one could even credit them with an honest effort to do right and still be unable to break the force of the feeling of the non-Christian world that, if modern politics em- body Christianity, the non-Christian world may have to adopt the politics but will abhor the religion which they embody. “The European War,” said a Hindu, Mr. Natarajan of Bombay, “and no less the European Peace, have dis- credited the Christianity of the Churches. The Christian missionary has no chance of getting a hear- NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 173 ing now, unless he distinguishes between Christ and Christianity and between Christianity and western civilisation. The material wealth, the political power and the dazzling civilisation which at one time undoubt- edly helped Christian missions in this country, have now become his great hindrance. Some missionaries to my knowledge used to descant on these things as the results of Christianity, and point the moral to Indians that the adopting of Christianity would lead to political power and material wealth. This was obviously wrong. In any case the wheel has turned and the Christian mis- sionary has rather to apologise for western civilisation as the term is ordinarily understood. ‘That is not his only difficulty.” (‘“Mahkzan i Masihi,” Sept. 1, 1923.) There may be great injustice in the present judgment of the non-Christian peoples upon western states. There is no doubt also great injustice in the judgment of the West upon the East. The one point urged here is that missions have to meet a new apologetic situation. It is on the whole of advantage that they should have to do so. It has been long foreseen and foretold that some day missions would have to meet the nemesis of this old confusion of Christianity and civilisation. It will do us all good to take whatever punishment is due us and to think out more carefully the right line of advance in the future. It is curious to note that some of those who are most strenuous in their demand for the socialisation of the missionary movement and of its motives and aims to-day are most severe in their criticism of those forms of the movement in the past which it took when it most closely conformed to this principle. They would have missions transfer their centre of gravity from the distinct Christian com- munity where the social problems are worked out in 174 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS the definite social cell of the Church, to society at large, where the risk of those very confusions and compro- mises which have encumbered the past is greatest. (The path of true advance is probably neither this path nor the opposite but a resultant of the effort of good and earnest people struggling forward to one goal by diverse roads of approach. In no respect is the apologetic situation of missions more altered than in the attitude and temper and charac- ter of the non-Christian religions. Mr. Gandhi is re- ported to have said recently, “I cannot tell where my Hinduism leaves off and my Christianity begins.” No one can tell. Christianity has exerted a positively transforming influence on the thought of all other religions. Amir Ali Syed’s “Spirit of Islam’ purports to be a statement of Mohammedanism, but it is a state- ment which could never have been written except by a man who was not himself unaware where Moham- medanism left off in him and Christianity began. From first to last it is an unconscious attempt to Chris- tianise Islam. Let any one take Rabindranath Tagore’s writings and compare them with Indian literature be- fore Christian ideas penetrated and pervaded it and what has happened will be as clear to him as daylight. All such transformations of the old religions by Chris- tian truth is to be welcomed. It is inevitable in any case. This is one of the ways in which the great end is to be won. Sir Charles Trevelyan, a far greater and better man than any one would ever judge from the caricature of Sir Gregory Hardlines in Anthony Trol- lope’s “The Three Clerks,” put the matter in prose as a result of his long experience in India: “Many persons mistake the way in which the con- NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 175 version of India will be brought about. I believe it will take place at last wholesale, just as our own an- cestors were converted. The country will have Chris- tian instruction infused into it in every way by direct missionary education, and indirectly by books of vari- ous sorts, through the public papers, through conversa- tion with Europeans, and in all conceivable ways in which knowledge is communicated. Then at last when society is completely saturated with Christian knowl- edge, and public opinion has taken a decided turn that way, they will come over by thousands.” But Clough has put it even better in familiar lines: “Say not the struggle nought availeth, The labour and the wounds are vain, The enemy faints not, nor faileth, And as things have been they remain. “Tf hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be, in yon smoke concealed, Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers And, but for you, possess the field. “For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. “And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light, In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly, But westward, look, the land is bright.” The great growth of the missionary enterprise and the measure of success which it has achieved in the -accomplishment of its primary aim to establish in- digenous Churches have brought new problems of relationship. One is the relation of the foreign mis- 176 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS sions of different denominations to one another. The other is that of the relation of the foreign missions to the native Churches. At first the foreign missions were in large cities where there was room, without overlapping or friction, for many bodies to work as though they were in al- together different parts of the world and also the agencies were few in number. In 1854 there were 18 foreign missionary societies with 395 missionaries and 21,299 native Christians in India. In 1881 there were 48 societies with 1,278 missionaries. Now there are 304 societies with 5,682 missionaries. In China there were in 1854, 18 foreign missionary societies with 120 missionaries. In 1877 there were 473 missionaries, and now there are 138 societies with 7,663 missionaries. In Shanghai in 1870, there were 26 missionaries of 8 societies. Now there are 673 missionaries resident in Shanghai, representing 51 Protestant agencies. In South America there were in 1870 a handful of mis- sionaries of a few societies. Now there are 1,736 missionaries of IIO societies or denominations. It is obvious at once that new problems of relationship have grown up here, due simply to the enlargement and proximity of the missionary forces of different Churches. These missionaries are not truly representing Chris- tianity if they are not seeking in every way they can to work together. They are indeed working together more closely every year. But how closely can they come together? Ought they to conduct as far as they can union institutions and seek to found only one native Church in each land? Some earnest missionary leaders like the late Bishop Bashford of China answered the first of these questions, yes, but the second, no. NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 177 He held that it was not wise to seek to found single national Churches. He advocated instead the de- velopment of world denominations which would be international, a universal Methodist Church, etc. He believed the Church should be a supranational organ- isation and he believed also that different types of organisation and experience were desirable and that it was better to use the great types which had grown up in the West rather than to have the Church in each nation divided, as he felt sure it would: be, into different denominations which would have behind them divisive personalities or the remembrance and alienation of personal conflicts or disagreement on pettier principles than those which had originated the present Christian denominations. On the other hand equally earnest men have argued for the establishment in each nation of a real national Church which would not perpetuate exotic divisions or waste energy in duplicate organisations but would unite the all too inadequate forces and re- sources of Christianity in a common programme and a common effort. In accordance with this view many of the missionary societies have sought to establish Churches in complete independence of the Churches of the West and to encourage them to unite with other Churches. Already in many fields kindred bod- ies, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, have united, and in some fields wider comprehensions have come, as in the union of the Presbyterian, Reformed and Congregational Churches in India. The other problem is not less difficult. What shall the relation of the foreign mission be to the native Church which results from it? The theoretical answer is plain—the relation of John the Baptist, the fore- runner. The business of the mission is to found the 178 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Church and then as soon as possible to fade away in it or behind it. The difficulties, however, in the way of the happy and instant and steady operation of this policy are great. Some of them are personal. Old missionaries must make way for native leaders. And on the other hand because the process is a long one old native leaders must make room for young foreign mis- sionaries, who also must understand and fit into this process of transition. The very chronology of this process is one of its great difficulties. There are often racial elements involved and sometimes inevitably also the political environment contributes other elements of trouble. But it can be honestly said that the native Churches are no more ready to take over responsibility than the mission agencies are to transfer it. More than this, the real difficulty is not to get missions to re- linquish power. It is to get the Churches to take it, to claim their prerogative from above and to assume the leadership in the evangelisation of the nation. This leadership unquestionably involves a genuine naturalisation and nationalisation of the Church in each land. But the adjustment of the Church to nationalism raises interesting problems in the life and work of the Church and of foreign missions. One meets in India, especially, to-day, the question, which was so familiar in Japan twenty-five years ago, as to the influence of the nationalistic spirit upon the ideal of the Church both as to organisation and as to doctrine, and many articles are written and many speeches are made with regard to the contribution which India should make in the development of Christian institutions and in the interpretation of the Gospel. It is always wholesome to have such questions raised, more wholesome perhaps even for the home Churches than for the Churches on NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 179 the mission field. We may be sure that life is an organic process and that it all hangs together. The roles of East and West would be exchanged to-day, if this were not the fact. In politics and economics and social progress and, just as truly, in religion, yes even more truly in religion, the East has a great deal more to learn than it has to teach. The East did teach its best to the West nineteen centuries ago when it gave it Christianity. It has nothing to give now comparable with that gift whose influence is responsible more than all else for the difference between the East and the West. If the West has not adequately understood Christianity or not adequately developed its institu- tions, the correction will be made as much by the West as by the East. I think that the view which Mr. Lowes Dickinson sets forth in his little book on the “‘Civilisations of India, China, and Japan,” is open to criticism, but I fear also that it holds a great deal of truth. “To sum up,’ he writes, “I find in India a peculiar civilisation antithetical to that of the West. I find a religious con- sciousness which negates what is really the religious postulate of the West, that life in time is the real and important life, and a social institution, caste, which negates the implicit assumption of the West that the desirable thing is equality of opportunity. I find also that in India the contact between East and West assumes a form peculiarly acute and irritating owing to the fact that India has been conquered, and is governed by a Western power, but the contact none the less is having the same disintegrating effect it produces on other Eastern countries, and I do not doubt that sooner or later, whether or no British rule maintains itself, the religious consciousness of India will be transformed 180 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS by the methods and results of positive science, and its institutions by the economic influences of industrialism. In this transformation something will of course be lost, but my own opinion is that India has more to gain and less to lose by contact with the West than any other Eastern country.” Mr. Dickinson closes his essay with the contention that the future civilisation will not be the balance or new synthesis of Eastern contemplative- ness and Western energy, that the West will not learn new lessons from the East while the East holds its ancient inheritance and traditions and learns some selected lessons from the West. ‘The West may re- ceive a stimulus from the East. It can hardly take an example. And the East taking from the West its in- dustrial organization will have to take everything else. I should look, therefore, for a redress of the balance in the West, not directly to the importation of ideals from the East but to a reaction prompted by its own sense of its excesses on the side of activity. And on the other hand I expect the East to follow us, whether it likes it or not, into all these excesses—and to go right through, not around—all that we have been through on its way to a higher phase of civilisation. In short, I believe that the renewal of art, of contemplation, of religion will arise in the West of its own impulse and that the East will lose what remains of its achievement in these directions and become as ‘materialistic’ (to use the word) as the West before it can recover a new and genuine spiritual life.” The consciousness and the conscience of Asia and especially of the Christian Churches in Asia, are right in resisting and seeking to falsify this forecast. Noth- ing will help them better in this effort than the actual facing of facts and the successful resistance of the NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 181 temptation to gloss facts over under the influence of the nationalistic spirit. In India, for example, the glorification of a past that never really existed, the attempt to read into the past, its institutions and its language, ideals that never were there, the composition of impossible eclectic programmes, the exaggerated imagination of social and intellectual and religious contributions which India has to make to Christianity and to civilisation, all these things are enemies of the truest life and the greatest power in the Indian Church, and the leaders of the Church should pray to be de- livered from them. This is exceedingly unpopular counsel, but is sound counsel none the less. The real contributions to human progress and to wider vision and larger life have not been made in this self-exalting way either by individuals or by races. If India, or China can develop simpler forms of Christian life, if they can find more effective ways of making Christ known to men and enthroning Him in their wills and in human society, if fresh methods of missionary propaganda can be devised, as it was hoped the National Missionary Society of India as an in- digenous missionary enterprise might devise them, if any lessons can be learned beside the obvious lesson from the amazing lack of organisation in Hinduism and the desultoriness and yet pervasiveness of its worship and activity, if individuals and groups will actually develop new methods of Christian achievement and pay the costs which such new discoveries ever involve, the whole Church throughout the world will be grate- ful. But it needs always to be kept in mind in these matters that one deed, one steadfast, continuous and persistent deed, is worth more than many dreams. India’s religious history shows her capacity for these 182 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS deeds, and many names, ancient and modern, rise to one’s mind. It is for the Indian Church to show, as it will show, how much more wonderful the achieve- ments of Christ in Indian hearts can be. It is for the Indian or Chinese Church to show, also, as it will show, | that such deeds can be done not in the spirit of separa- tism, of race assertion, or of national pride, but after the mind of Christ. The finest and solidest thing in foreign missions is the existence of real native Churches which are abso- lutely free, alive with a life and power of their own, dependent on no western Church and beholden to no man, but at the same time brotherly and trustful in their glad relations to the missions and Churches of the West. Such Churches are the Church of Christ in Japan, the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Brazil, the Church of South India and still others. These are the crown and demonstration of the work of foreign missions. The Church of Christ in Japan may be taken for illustration. The story of the founding and development of this Church is told in Dr. Imbrie’s little book, “The Church of Christ in Japan.” It is one of the most remarkable Christian Churches which have as yet been developed. It has nine presbyteries, with 99 _ self-supporting churches. Indeed, it recognises no church organisation as having the full status of a church until it is self- supporting. In addition to the self-supporting churches it has 131 other congregations with 81 additional organisations, which are connected with the affiliated foreign missions and which will in time pass over wholly to the Church of Christ. It has now a member- ship of over 38,000. Ten years ago it had 160 pastors and 161 evangelists and licentiates, 302 elders and 109 NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD 183 deaconesses. Of its 463 trustees then, 58 were women, 1,480 Sunday School teachers teach the 20,475 Sunday School scholars. The total value of the Church’s prop- erty ten years ago was, Yen 615,000. Its contributions in 1924 were, Yen 505,103. Two meetings of the Church which we attended in Tokyo some years ago gave us a clear idea of the character and influence of the Church of Christ. One of these was the meeting of its Women’s Missionary Society held in the beautiful home of one of the lead- ing doctors of Tokyo, whose wife was president of the society. There were present women of many social relationships from a viscountess down. It was just such a group of strong, capable, Christian women as might be met in one of our women’s missionary boards at home. They explained to us the work that they were doing at home and abroad and sent their greetings to the women in America through whom the best thing in life had come to them. The other gathering was at a luncheon given in honour of our deputation and the deputation of the Dutch Reformed Board at which there were present about sixty men and women of the Church. There were three members of Parliament, three generals in the army, three eminent lawyers and three of the good doctors of the city. There was a daughter of Prince Iwakura who led out from Japan the embassy which came back with the purposes and ideas which have made the new Japan. There was the executive secre- tary of the Red Cross Society and there were many of the men who stand at the head of the thought and life of the Christian forces of the Empire. It filled one with gratitude and with confidence to see such a group of Christian men and women and to think of the 184 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Church which they represented. These men under- stood the problems with which Christianity has to deal in the national life of Japan and in the modern world. No inrush of ideas or forces hostile to evangelical truth can surprise them. The Church of Christ is a body with which we can rejoice to co-operate in the evan- gelisation of Japan and the Christianisation of its in- fluence in Asia. The Church has many grave problems to face both within and without, such as the laxity of Sabbath observance, the loss of church membership through the migratory habits of the Japanese, the provision of an adequate number of strong men for the ministry, and the unification of their training, the promotion of Christian unity where denominational distinctions ap- pear to be fixing themselves somewhat after the fashion of the sects of Buddhism but without anything like their divisiveness and conflict. Outwardly, surely one of the most important problems is the strengthening of friendly relationships with the Churches in Korea and China. If the Christians of these countries cannot come together in love and trust what hope is there of the establishment of any interrelations of real friend- ship? There are many Chinese and Koreans, specially students, in Tokyo, but these have been holding aloof by themselves. Many of the Koreans are Christians and Mr. Uemura used to argue that instead of having their separate Korean Church, it would be better for them, as also for Japanese in the United States, to join existing local churches and mingle themselves with the Christian people among whom they are living. The Christian girls’ schools in Japan are doing a great deal to promote unity of feeling by the way in which the Japanese girls in these schools are treating the many NEW DEMANDS ON THE MISSION FIELD’ 185 Korean girls who are studying with them. But the Chinese and Korean young men hold apart. New measures need to be devised to make Tokyo not a place where racial feelings are intensified as at present, but a centre of brotherhood. And some way should be found also for closer acquaintance and relationship be- tween the Church of Christ and the Churches in Korea and in northern China. There is a chance here for large-minded and constructive Christian service which will prove to be a national service in the best sense on the part of the Church of Christ. The growth of these Christian Churches made up of men and women as truly human and as truly Christian as the men and women of any other nation is itself an answer to the race problem. That is the most acute problem of the modern world, rivalled only by the problem of economic justice in its two aspects, the duty of production and the equity of distribution. It can- not be said that even in the missionary enterprise racial prejudice and narrowness have been transcended. They will break out of human weakness and limitation any- where and many missionaries and native leaders alike are conscious of objectionable race feeling in others who are unaware of it in themselves. Nevertheless, the fundamental policy of missions and the true rela- tions already existing in part, and coming ever more and more fully to exist, between the indigenous Churches and the Churches of the West and their mis- sionaries embody the only right and possible solution of the race problem. All conceivable solutions of the race problem reduce themselves to three, race conflict, race amalgamation, race co-operation. Many hold that the first solution is the only practicable one, race struggle resulting in the dominance of the strongest. 186 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS But that means that there is no solution. No race 1s going to accept a place of permanent menialism and it is irrational to sutrender to such a barbaric and jungle conception of the necessary process of human history. Others hold that the one sure and inevitable solution of the race problem is universal miscegenation. They point out that there is not one pure race in the world, that history shows an ever-ceasing intermixture of the blood of all races, and that time alone is necessary to produce of all races one composite race. Only time can show whether they are right, but meanwhile it is open to us to seek a different and, we believe, a better solution. The principle of it is in our foreign missions enter- prise, the principle of race integrity and of differ- entiated, co-operating human service. Each human race is as capable of experiencing and _ illustrating Christianity as the white race. Each race needs it. It needs each race to bring out its infinite fulness and universal sufficiency. When the heavenly City comes down to dwell upon the earth it will embrace all the glory and the honour of each nation and race. They will differ one from another. But they are all neces- sary to the completed glory of the City. It is the business of foreign missions to testify to this truth and to provide a demonstration of it in the character and work of the Christian Churches, East and West, and in their relationship of understanding and unity and love. CHAPTER VI Tue Ricu FRUITAGE oF ForeIGN Missions THE foreign mission enterprise takes the Gospel seriously. It would never have originated otherwise nor could it have yielded the unequalled fruitage which has come from it. It is the greatest philanthropy in the world. It is the deepest political and social reform. It has produced great movements of national and racial education. It has promoted industrial progress and commercial intercourse helpful to all affected by it. It has expanded human knowledge. And it has been and done all this because its fundamental business has been deeper and more radical than all these’ things. It has conceived that men and the world need to be saved and that Jesus Christ alone can save them. Some years ago the New York Sun, at the time of the Ecumenical Missionary Conference in New York, commented on what it deemed the disappearance of the earlier note of foreign missions. It doubted whether the idea of the missionary hymn retained its vitality. “Salvation, O Salvation. The joyful sound proclaim, Till earth’s remotest nation Has heard Messiah’s name.” Perhaps Heber’s hymn is not sung so much as in for- mer days. Perhaps when it is sung some phrases are slipped over with hesitant accent. Perhaps there are those who do not regard themselves and the world as 187 188 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS in need of being “saved,” and who regard the mission of Christ in our world to-day as a work of teaching and leading rather than a work of saving. In current missionary apologetics and appeal it may be true that the missionary conception of Paul, of preaching the Gospel to people that they may be saved, is often slighted by being either assumed, rejected, or ignored, and that the emphasis is laid on other values of missions. It has even been argued that missions should be supported because they increase the political prestige of the nation from which the missionaries go or afford opportunity for the increase of its political power. On these grounds France, however she might deal with the Roman Catholic Church at home, assumed everywhere the role of protector of the Roman Catholic missions abroad. And Germany’s seizure of Kiao Chou Bay in Shantung, which helped to precipitate the Boxer upris- ing, was justified as reparation for the murder of Ger- man missionaries. Likewise foreign missions have been defended because they promoted trade and even because they served to lull into Christian resignation subject peoples who might otherwise have made trouble. Arguments of this sort and many more like them have helped to justify any fear and dislike on the part of the non-Christian world. The wonder is not that foreign missions have had to encounter unnecessary and unwar- ranted difficulties, but that they have been able to live down the curse of false support and misrepresentation. Even true friends and believers in missions, how- ever, are prone to set in the foreground secondary services or by-products of missions and to obscure their fundamental religious and redemptive character. We have spoken of the work of Dr. Nevius in North China in introducing fruit culture. He was one of the most THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 189 single-minded of evangelists but he began in North China the cultivation of the best American fruits, grapes, apples, peaches, pears, etc., and his name is blessed by all sorts of people in the Far East who are accustomed to sneer at missionaries as exclusively other- worldly and as unwarrantably engaged in imposing western ideas on the Chinese. We tell also of the work of the University of Nanking, a Christian co-operative institution, which is improving silk, cotton and wheat culture, and helping agriculture and promoting foresta- tion and flood and famine prevention. We tell of the schools which are teaching trades in Africa. As Sir H. H. Johnston says: “Tt is they (the missionaries) who in many cases have first taught the natives carpentry, joinery, masonry, tailoring, cobbling, engineering, book-keep. ing, printing and European cookery; to say nothing of reading, writing, arithmetic, and a smattering of gen- eral knowledge. Almost invariably, it has been to mis- sionaries that the natives of interior Africa have owed their first acquaintance with a printing press, the turn- ing-lathe, the mangle, the flat-iron, the saw-mill, and the brick mould. Industrial teaching is coming more and more in favour, and its immediate results in British Central Africa have been most encouraging. Instead of importing painters, carpenters, store clerks, cooks, telegraphists, gardeners, natural history collectors from England or India, we are gradually becoming able to obtain them amongst the natives of the country, who are trained in the missionaries’ schools, and who having been given simple, wholesome local education, have not had their heads turned, and are not above their station in life.” And we tell of the services whose benefits we enjoy Igo THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS at home. We owe the seedless oranges in America to a missionary named Schneider in Brazil. The University of Nanking saved the pear industry on the Pacific Coast by sending home a root which was immune to the American pear disease and on which the shoots of our threatened American trees were grafted. Let these illustrations out of hundreds which might be cited suffice. So rich is the store and so persuasive are they, that it is very easy for us in presenting the missionary appeal and in thinking of the work of missions to-day to let the fundamental thing fall into the background. It ought to be in the background. Its place is be- hind and beneath everything else. But it ought to be in the foreground too and it ought to control and shape all our appeals for support and govern and direct all our activities and policies and plans. The primary business of missions is religious. It is to proclaim the Gospel, to make Jesus Christ known as the Saviour of the World. And its primary and essential fruitage is converted men and women, individual persons who have accepted Him as their Lord and Saviour and are trying to follow Him. One of the old criticisms of missions was that it produced no such persons, but only “rice Christians,” clever frauds or poor ignorant folk to whom the only religion was daily bread. This sort of criticism is not as common as it once was. The Boxer uprising ended itin China. It was indeed already ended there for all intelligent men. In the last century there Was no more competent and severe critic of missions in China than Alexander Michie, for long years editor of the Tientsin Times, but he derided the idea of “rice Christians.” “Few as they may be when all is told,” said he, in ‘Missionaries in China,” “and mixed as they must be with spurious professors, it is a gratifying THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS IQI fact, which cannot be gainsaid, that Christians of the truest type—men ready to burn as martyrs, which is easy—and who lead ‘helpful and honest’ lives, which is as hard as the ascent from Avernus, crown the labours of missionaries, and have done so from the very beginning. It is thus shown that the Christian religion is not essentially unadapted to China, and that the Chinese character is susceptible to its regenerating power.’ And these true Christians are not few in number. Even the martyrs make up a multitude. The two of whom Dr. Dennis tells are representative of ten thousand: ‘A prominent Christian, with his mother, sister, and wife, were bundled into a cart and taken to a vacant lot outside of the village, singing meanwhile, “He Leadeth Me,’ as they thus journeyed to their death. One by one they were slain, each in turn refusing to recant. There is a certain realism about the faith of some of these Chinese Christians, which is both touch- ing and inspiring, as in the case of that member of the North Church of Peking—Hsieh by name—who in- sisted upon donning his best clothes, as if for a festal occasion, when he was led to his martyrdom. ‘I am to enter the palace of the King,’ he said, ‘and the best clothes I have should be used.’ No wonder the Chinese dug out his heart, to see if they could discover the secret of his courage.” And as Mr. Michie says, for every one who has died as a martyr, there are many more who have lived loyal and faithful lives, fulfilling in their measure the promise that the Gospel was to spread like the sea. There are still, however, those who disbelieve. ‘Do you really think,” asked an American who had been in Japan representing a great locomotive works, “‘that any one of these people has ever become a real Christian ?”’ Ig2 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS I wish this intelligent but ignorant man could have been at the luncheon which I attended some years ago in Tokyo of a few men and women of one denomination alone, and many of them members of one congregation, of which I have already spoken. Let me cite a few in- dividuals of other races whom I know. The first of these is Kaka. He was a grizzled old Kurd living in the city of Hamadan. Every one knew that he had been a fierce Mohammedan believer and that he came of a long line of Mohammedan ecclesiastics, and every- body knows too that now he is a Christian, going to and fro in Hamadan and the villages round about and openly preaching Christ with no one able to answer him or gainsay his word. We asked him one evening for his story, and this is what he told us. “Mirza Saeed and I were brothers.”’ Mirza Saeed is now one of the leading doctors of Teheran, and I shall tell his story later. “For seven generations,’ Kaka continued, “our fathers had been mollahs. Our neighbours were Chris- tians. Being Sunnis, we sometimes ate with them, but we never talked on the subject of religion. Forty- four years ago a Nestorian evangelist named Kasha Yohanan was sent from Urumia to the region of Kur- distan in search of a teacher of Kurdish, and he came to our city of Senneh. An Armenian Christian pointed out Mirza Saeed to him as such a teacher as he was seeking. Saeed was only a boy then, but very capable. He came to me as his older brother, as our father had died, to ask permission to give Kurdish lessons to Yohanan. I consented. For six months my brother taught Yohanan, and then one day he told me that some Jews were coming to Yohanan to discuss Scriptures. I said that this was nothing at all for us to consider, but I did not know that Yohanan had given Saeed the THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS I193 Bible and other books to read and that he stored these in his mind. Before long he began to absent himself from Moslem prayers. One day a blind mollah came to me for help. He knew the Koran by heart and was memorising a book on the birth and life of Mohammed. I was greatly pleased to help him. One day as the blind mollah was reciting this book, Saeed, who was listening, said that if these things were true, the Prophet should have foretold them. I reached for my rifle to shoot Saeed for reviling the Prophet, but the blind mollah seized the rifle. I certainly meant to kill Saeed, for I was one of those who are devoted to the Prophet, even the Prophet who came with a sword. The blind mollah took Saeed away and warned him to be more careful, bidding him to reflect what, if his own brother had tried to shoot him, another might have done. I soon noticed that Saeed was sad and troubled, and I asked him to tell me as his brother the cause of his sorrow, but he would say nothing. I asked him again one night later, and he said he would write it out for me, but when he had written the paper he hesitated to give it to me. A week later at midnight he brought it, saying “Whatever you intend to do, do. It is two years now since I have left Islam and accepted Chris- tianity on the basis of what I have read in the Koran and the Bible.’ It was winter-time and snowing, but I said to him, ‘Saeed, there is nothing I can do but turn you out as an apostate.’ So I opened the door and he went out into the night. I think he sat in a shop win- dow until morning, and the rest of the night I spent crying to God, ‘You have taken away my father and my mother and now my brother is taken from my hand.’ “In the morning Saeed went to the Imam Jum’eh I94 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS and said, ‘I have been reading such and such things in the Koran and the Bible. What do you say?’ Later I learned that thirty men had bound themselves to- gether to kill Saeed, so I too went to the Imam Jum’eh and asked him what to do. ‘Do nothing,’ said he, ‘but leave the matter to me.’ On Friday, accordingly, the Imam Jum’eh spoke openly in the mosque to all the people, saying, ‘Mohammed Saeed is my child. Leave him to me. I will bring him back with proofs from the Koran.’ But Saeed was lost to Islam forever, and because I relented and protected him, conditions be- came so bad that some of the Moslems of Senneh planned to kill me as well as Saeed. One day I found a letter at the post for Saeed, which I read, from Mr. Hawkes, bidding him to come to Hamadan. And I got a horse for him and sent him off by night. “When I got back, the neighbours gathered and wept over Saeed, and I thought of what he had written in his statement and of all that he had told me. Not long after I went to the mosque and heard a man read from Sirat el Navi, a book on the private life of the Prophet and his relations with his wives, I bought this book, and as I read it, I wondered how such things could be true of a Prophet. A little later I went to the Catholic Church in Senneh and talked with a Chaldean priest there and tried to get a Bible to read, but was unable to do so. While I was still endeavouring to get a copy, I one day saw a man named Ossitur of Hamadan coming through the bazar with a bundle under hisarm. I asked who he was, and upon learning, introduced myself as Saeed’s brother and got a Bible. As I read it, I came to the passage, ‘I will raise up a prophet like unto his brethren.’ I thought surely this meant Mohammed, and I decided to come to Hamadan THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS I95 and take Saeed off to Bagdad or to some other place where strong influences could be brought to bear upon him to win him back to Islam. So I sold my home and told the people I was going to get Saeed and to take him where he would be turned from his errors. Some of the people doubted my purpose and sought to detain me by offering me the place of leader of the prayers in the mosque, but at last I went, though I was not sure of myself. My heart had become two. “On reaching Hamadan, I found that Saeed was a pupil of Dr. Alexander, the medical missionary there, who welcomed me and gave me some books to read, among them ‘The Balance of Truth.’ As I read this book, I found in it the indictment of sin and the mes- sage of Christ’s love, and these began to have an effect on me. Each day I went to the big mosque, but I found nothing in the preaching. It was all about what Hassan had suffered. And as I saw more clearly what Islam and its preachers were, Christ’s words about the Pharisees came home to me—the upper seats, the wide borders. But what impressed me most was the contrast between Mohammedans and the missionaries and Christian preachers whom I had come to know and between their lives. I began to go to prayers at Dr. Alexander’s home and then sometimes, with great fear, to church. So things continued until twenty-four years ago, when Mr. Watson was going home to America and asked me to go on the journey with him to the border of Persia. I went, and on the journey was thrown from my horse and broke my knee-cap and was brought to the home of Dr. Holmes in Hama- dan. I had nothing to do but to read, and I read the Bible and found Christ. “As I was getting well, Hajji Mirza Hassein and 196 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS the chief preacher to the Shah were speaking here in Hamadan. I went to hear and got into a debate with them. They came for a renewal of the debate to the mission residence at the dispensary, and I saw that the truth was with Christianity. Saeed was there, and they could not answer his words. ‘Be silent,’ they said to him, ‘and let the Sahib do the talking.’ After the debate I called on these men, and they gave me a Moslem book to read, but it proved nothing, and I held to Christ. | “At first I was afraid to speak openly of my new faith, but now I am not afraid of anybody. For some years I had charge of the boys in the boarding school, but now for twelve years I have gone to and fro in the evangelistic work preaching the Gospel of our Saviour. The people do not resent my message. ‘If you are in doubt,’ I say to them, ‘the Koran itself says, Ask the people of the Book. Who are the people of the Book and what is the Book? I have the Book here. Let us ask it now.’ ” The old man, lame from the effects of his fall and grizzled like a veteran of many wars, whimsical, loving, and unafraid, with a living experience of Christ and an authoritative knowledge of Islam, is one of the most faithful and untiring preachers of Christ in Persia, and his children are following in his steps. Some weeks later than our talk with Kaka we spent an evening with his brother, Dr. Mirza Saeed Khan in Teheran. Dr. Saeed Kahn is one of the best known and most influential Christians in Persia. After study- ing in Hamadan he took a medical course in London and is one of the most trusted Persian physicians. One of his patients is the last governor of Kurdistan whose predecessor a few years ago would no doubt have felt THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 197 it to be his duty to respond to the demand of the mol- lahs in Senneh for Dr. Saeed’s execution for apostasy. He is a great student both of Christianity and Moham- medanism, with a keen eye for old Persian books of which he has sent a number to Prof. E. G. Browne, and he gave me for Mrs. Speer, with whom he and Mrs. Saeed formed a great friendship when we were in Hamadan in 1896 and 1897, one of the most beautiful copies of the Koran I have ever seen. It is a small book about two and a half by three and a half inches, exquisitely done by hand, with marginal decorations by some loving Mohammedan scholar, on parchment sheets with a lacquered binding with soft ornamental flowering. He told his story in choice English. It was just as Kaka had narrated it to us but with many added touches. After his father’s death as a boy of sixteen he had been given by the old mollahs a turban to wear and a school to teach. He was curious to learn other languages, and on that account, was willing to exchange his knowledge of Kurdish for Kasha Yoha- nan’s knowledge of Syriac. At first he had thought that all the Old Testament prophecies regarding the Messiah referred to Mohammed, and he used to rejoice in them and repeat them to Kaka. But when he came, in Isaiah, to the great chapter about the Servant who should not strive to cry nor be harsh or violent, he was halted. That certainly could not apply to Mohammed. When he himself had become convinced of the truth of Christianity and Kaka had become interested, one of their chief difficulties related to their father. He had been a good and earnest and honest man. Once he had found a bag of money and, though in great need, had kept it intact until its owner was discovered. How could so good a man, Kaka asked, be lost for not ac- 198 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS cepting Christ? Saeed’s reply had been that he and Kaka would be judged according to the light that had been given them, and that that light had never reached their father. It was after seven years of Christian teaching that Saeed had at last been baptised by Mr. Hawkes. Not long afterwards some European teachers of perfectionism had come to Hamadan, and, taken by their teaching, Saeed had gone to Sweden, but the second verse of the third chapter of the first Epistle of John corrected for him any thought of a present sin- lessness, and he went on to England to find many friends there and to prepare for his life work in Persia. More than once since his conversion has he returned to Senneh, at first with peril but at last with great honour. Once in his early years in Teheran the Senneh ecclesiastics sent a formidable communication to the Turkish legation demanding his death as an apostate, but it was intercepted by friendly hands and destroyed. And no one now would think of lifting a hostile hand against the familiar and honoured figure of this sincere and mature Christian who walks to and fro wherever he will in Persia, by life and by word bearing witness to the True Prophet and only Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ. The deepest and most powerful influence of foreign missions is represented in the lives of individuals like these. They and others like them are to mean to their nations just what Paul and the little groups of early Christian believers meant to the Roman Empire and to the Christian Church. And yet the power in these lives is the power not of these lives but of the truth that has begun to take hold of human life, however im- perfectly, through them, the truth of the Christian thought of God, of the revelation of God in Christ. THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 199 In one of the ablest and most refreshing missionary books of the last generation, “A Short Study of Chris- tian Missions,’ a book which should be freshly cir- culated in the present generation, the late Professor William Newton Clarke set forth the significance of this fruitage of foreign missions. Dr. Clarke was accounted a thorough-going modernist in his day and would be still so regarded, but he never for one moment conceived of Christianity as a confession of ignorance of the truth about God, and of missions as a co-opera- tion of Christians with people of all other religions in a search for an undiscovered Gospel. The New Testa- ment thought of God, he held, was final and the great aim and the supreme power of missions lay in giving that Christian thought of God to the whole world: “What then,’ asks Dr. Clarke, “is that excellence in Christianity by virtue of which it is entitled to be a missionary religion, and deserves to be received by all men? The answer is, Christianity is entitled to be a missionary religion and to displace all other religions, because of its God. “There are many glories in the religion of Jesus Christ, and it can do many services for men; and, what is more, it proclaims and brings to pass such an experi- ence of God as humanity has never elsewhere known. It is in this that we find that superiority which entitles Christianity to offer itself to all mankind. “Tt is necessary to tell in few words what this God is Who is the glory of Christianity and the ground of its boldness in missionary advances—this God so in- finitely excellent that all men may well afford to forget all their own religion, if they may but know Him. The God of Christianity is one, the sole source, Lord and end of all. He is holy, having in Himself the 200 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS character that is the worthy standard of all beings. He is love, reaching out to save the world from sin and fill it with His own goodness. He is wise, knowing how to accomplish his heart’s desire. He is Father in heart, looking upon His creatures as His own, and seeking their welfare. All this truth concerning Him- self He has made known in Jesus Christ the Saviour of the world, in Whom His redemptive will has found expression, and His saving love has come forth to mankind. “That the glory of Christianity is its God may most conveniently be shown by bringing this excellence into comparison with other excellences on the strength of which Christianity is often commended. Various ex- cellences have been placed at the front as justifying the missionary endeavour and the offering of our religion to the world; but when they are compared with this excellence, it will be found that they take their place as specifications under it, or as forms in which this supreme glory manifests itself. “Christianity is often offered as worthy to be uni- versal because it is ethically noble. It is entitled to supplant other religions because it surpasses them all in its conception of human duty, and in its power to secure the realisation of its ideals. It introduces solid and efficient ethical principles, and it produces high charac- ter, in a manner known to no other religion. “This statement is entirely true, but it is incomplete. It is weakness to declare the ethical greatness of our religion without telling what eternal reality it rests upon. Why is Christianity ethically noble and power- ful? Christianity has an ethical God. It knows a God with a character, and that the best possible character of God has been shown to us men, and lived out in our THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 20I presence in the character of His Son, Jesus Christ. It declares that the character of God is the standard for men, and that the good God has drawn near in self- revelation, on purpose to help men reach this standard. In its God, Christianity has the substance of the noblest ethics and the sure hope of attainment to high character ; for its God is the real and living God, Whose character is a reality, and Whose love for goodness is the most powerful ethical fact in existence. Thus the claim that Christianity may offer itself as universal because of its ethical nobleness is only a form of the broad claim that Christianity may offer itself as uni- versal because of its God.” The conception of God known in Christ is the most revolutionary and transforming of all conceptions. It changes the whole world for the animistic peoples. As Dr. Warneck points out in “The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism,” ““The Gospel brings to the heathen the living God; the story of salvation reveals Him to them as a God of saving deeds. Along with and com- plementary to this revelation they receive a second gift, a mighty experience; they are set free from their old slavery. The knowledge of God which comes to them from His revealed acts delivers them from bondage. The insurmountable wall that rises up between the heathen and God is not sin, as among ourselves (not in the first place at any rate); it is the kingdom of darkness in which they are bound. That bondage is shown in the fears that surround them, fear of souls, fear of spirits, fear of human enemies and magicians; in an ignominious dependence upon fate. The Gospel comes to unloose the ignoble bonds. It stands forth before their eyes a delivering power, a redemption.” But the Christian thought of God cuts as deep, if 202 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS not deeper, into the conception of the more advanced religions, into Hindu pantheism and Mohammedan fatalism and the sheer contradictions of Buddhism both of the Greater and the Lesser Vehicle, and into Con- fucian secularism and Taoist geomancy. ‘The spread of Christianity has altered the idea of God in almost every nation of the world. Many peoples who have not yet become Christian have had their conception of God radically changed in the direction of the Christian idea. As a Japanese writes: “Christianity has to a very marked degree transformed our conception of Kami. Formerly we thought of many Kami who were the deified forces of nature, the spirits of heroes, or the patron deities of different localities. Although the philosophy we had received from China spoke of “The Heavenly Sovereign,’ or ‘Celestial and Terrestrial Kami,’ these terms were very indefinite in their mean- ing. Christianity, on the other hand, has told us of a Kami who is the Supreme Personality, the Ruler of the universe. The thought contained in the English word ‘God’ has wrought a great change in Japanese literature, and also in our spoken language, so that most persons now think of Kami as the Lord and Ruler of heaven and earth. When Japanese now hear of such expressions as ‘the unseen Kami,’ or ‘the Kami of heaven and earth,’ instead of thinking of the Kami they once did, they spontaneously connect the word with the conception of Kami as taught by Christianity.” The missionary issue is not the correction of the Christian conception of God by the addition to it of truth which other conceptions are to contribute. It is such a proclamation of Christ to the world as will lead all men to come away from their partial thoughts to THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 203 Him; applying to their systems words which we long ago learned to apply to all of ours. “Our little systems have their day, They have their day atid cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.” We could find in St. Paul the warrant for sterner words, but warrant also for these. And both warrants are also in the words of the Lord. We are concerned here, however, chiefly with the thought of the fruitfulness in human life of the Chris- tian conception of God. And of this fruitfulness Christian missions throughout the centuries are the in- disputable evidence. The facts are set forth unanswer- ably as regards early and medieval Christian missions in Europe in Uhlhorn’s “Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism,” Storrs’ “Divine Origin of Christianity Attested by its Historical Results” and Brace’s “Gesta Christi.” For modern missions they are presented with convincing thoroughness in the Ely Volume published in 1881 and bearing the full title “The Ely Volume or the Contributions of our Foreign Missions to Science and Human Well-being,” and by Dr. Dennis in “Chris- tian Missions and Social Progress.’’ In his three great volumes of testimony, thoroughly documented, Dr. Dennis shows what the thought and the love of God as conceived in Christ have done when communicated to the world not by word only but by the utterance of that word in the lives of men and women in whom human need sees and feels the love of God going out visibly and tangibly toward it. As the expression of Christ’s thought of God and of God’s will for human life, mis- 204. THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS sions, as Dr. Dennis shows, have promoted temperance, opposed the liquor and opium traffics which are fatal to mutually useful trade, established higher standards of personal purity, cultivated industry and frugality, elevated women, restrained anti-social customs such as polygamy, concubinage and adultery and child marriage and infanticide, fostered the suppression of the slave trade, abolished cannibalism and human sacrifice and cruelty, organised famine relief, improved husbandry and agriculture, introduced modern medicine and medi- cal science, founded leper asylums and colonies, pro- moted cleanliness and sanitation and checked war. This is the testimony of the men who know, men like the Hon. Sir Arthur Lawley, G.C.LE., K.C.M.G., for- merly Governor of Madras: “I have worked for some eight years in South Africa, for nearly six years in India, and I have travelled leisurely through parts of Central Africa, East Africa and Uganda, so that I have enjoyed peculiar opportunities of observing and gauging the effect of various forms of religious en- deavour upon those matters of human well-being which are the special concern of any administrator; I mean, for example, such things as security and peace, justice and liberty, and social progress. With that experience gained, I am proud and glad to have this opportunity of saying that I declare that, whether in Asia or in Africa, missionary influence among the coloured races of those continents is wholly for good. There is not one community, whether in Asia or in Africa, that has embraced Christianity but has risen with a bound from its former degraded position, and entered into a new and a nobler and a more lasting life.” (“The Record,” May 8, 1914.) Two recent visitors to China, both wholly uncon- THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 205 nected with foreign missions, have borne such em- phatic testimony to the fruitage of the enterprise that their witness has been challenged as extreme. One of these is Mr. Henry B. Thompson of Princeton. “What good has the West ever brought to China?” he asks, and answers: “I would like to say that I believe that most of the good that has been done in China has been done by missionaries.” The other is Mr. Frederick W. Stevens of the University of Michigan Law School, who has been for several years in Peking as the rep- resentative of the American interests in the Interna- tional Bankers’ Consortium which has sought to secure co-operation and equity in foreign loans to China. “T have come to believe,” says Mr. Stevens, an extremely careful and just man, “that America’s greatest con- tribution to China, greater even than America’s politi- cal friendship, is the work of the American Christian missionaries in China. This statement may indicate the importance I attach to the need of moral regeneration which must precede any great political and industrial improvement. In all China there is not a single organ- isation, on a scale of importance, that aims at moral improvement, or that is calculated to bring it about, that is not traceable in its origin to the Christian mis- sions. I have inquired among all kinds of people from all parts of China for such an activity of non-Christian origin, and without finding one.” These testimonies have been questioned as excessive. But time will re- veal whether they are not a sound estimate of the place of foreign missions as a force of progress in human history. At any rate, they are in accord with the judg- ment of the great geographer, Meinicke: “It is scarcely possible to deny the extraordinary importance of the missionary efforts of our time; they are yet really in 206 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS their infancy; yet it is certain that they will wholly transform the nature and the relations of the un-Chris- tian peoples and will thereby produce one of the most magnificent and most colossal revolutions that human history contains.” Foreign missions have always been charged with a distinctly destructive function. We have seen the di- rect and uncompromising way in which the early and medizeval missionaries assailed and sought to over- throw all that they regarded as evil. Sometimes, as in the case of slavery in the early Church, the issue was committed to time and the sure operation of the prin- ciples which Christianity released. At other times, as when Boniface hewed down the sacred oak at Geismar, missions struck with a bold and immediate blow. It may be that at times missionaries have destroyed what was innocent or might have been preserved and used, but in the main it may be maintained that they have been a great protecting and conserving power and that they have had to contend in their effort against the deadly destruction of political, economic, intellectual or moral forces from the West as well as against in- digenous influences of disintegration. Christian missionaries have been the great conserv- ators of the languages and literatures and history of the non-Christian peoples. Sir William Hunter said of Carey and his associates: “They created a prose ver- nacular literature for Bengal; they established the mod- ern method of popular education. They gave the first great impulse to the native press; they set up the first steam engine in India; with its help they introduced the manufacture of paper on a large scale; in ten years they translated or printed the Bible or parts thereof in thirty-one languages.” “Religion, commerce and sci- THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 207 entific zeal,” said Professor William O. Whitney, “rival one another in bringing new regions and peoples to light and in uncovering the long-buried remains of others lost or destroyed; and of the three the first is the most prevailing and effective.” Of many languages missionaries made the first dictionaries, Morrison of Chinese, Hepburn of Japanese, Gale of Korean. And Christian missions are seeking to save the best of the past of all peoples. Christianity is salvation in this as in other ways. With loyalty to truth it is seek- ing to test all things, to destroy all that is evil and to hold fast all that is good. In this effort it has to con- tend against betrayal from the rear as well as against natural opposition in front. Bertrand Russell’s “The Problem of China” is a good illustration. This book is an unconscious warning to every man to guard against colour blindness. Professor Russell is so honestly and so unconsciously wrong on so many things that every other man, however sure of his hon- esty, is forced to ask himself: “Can it be that I too without ever being aware of it, but thinking on the other hand that I am absolutely right, can be mistaken and as ignorant of it as Professor Russell is?” Never did a book reveal more clearly the humanness of the philosopher and his liability to all the mistakes of ob- servation and conclusion to which mere common men are exposed. | In its warm sympathy with the Chinese people and its admiration for the worthy qualities of their history and national character, “The Problem of China” is worthy of high praise. It tries to view the issues which are dis- cussed with full respect for the Chinese position and without any foreclosed Western bias. Indeed, its error is just the opposite of the ordinary books by Western 208 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS authors. Professor Russell is more ready to do justice to China than to Great Britain. The bias is all pro- Chinese and anti-Western. Under the influence of this bias he idealises Chinese civilisation and would exclude if he could many of the forces of change which China herself is introducing and encouraging. He detests Western civilisation, “the fierce and cruel system” which is miscalled civilisation. China does not need anything from the West. “We have forced trade upon them solely for our benefit, giving them in exchange only things which they would do better without.” The inhabitants of China, Mr. Russell thinks, “at the pres- ent moment are happier on the average than the inhab- itants of Europe, taken as a whole.” And again, “I am inclined to think that Chinese life brings more hap- piness to the Chinese than English life does to us.” “The Chinese are gentle, liberal, seeking only justice and freedom. They have a civilisation superior to ours in all that makes for happiness.” But when he comes to Japan, Professor Russell thinks that what that country needs is not the retention of its old civilisation but more of the West. “If Japan is to emerge successfully, a much more intense westernising must take place, involving not only mech- anical processes and knowledge of bare facts, but ideals and religious and general outlook on life.” Russell seems to think the Japanese more different from the Chinese than either race is from the western races. “It never occurs to a Japanese, even in his wildest dreams, to think of a Chinaman as an equal, and although he wants the white man to regard him as an equal, he himself regards Japan as incalculably superior to any white country. His real desire is to be above the whites, not merely equal with them.” So the philoso- THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 209 phers can generalise as wildly as ordinary men from facts which they have not tested. Professor Russell is opposed to some of the elements in Chinese life which in the past have been regarded as among its chief elements of strength. He thinks that “filial piety and the strength of the family generally are perhaps the weakest point in Confucian ethics, the only point where the system departs seriously from common sense.” And he welcomes “the inevitable fight against the family.” Professor Russell has not been very strong on family stability, and this may colour his view of China. He dislikes also the old economic principles of Chinese society as well as those of the West, and argues for national and international social- ism as the only way of securing peace and freedom. “Only international socialism can secure both; and ow- ing to the stimulation of revolt by capitalist oppression, even peace alone can never be secure until international socialism is established throughout the world.” This would seem to be strong faith, such as becomes a philos- opher, in doctrine, but Mr. Russell will not allow other people to view their doctrine as he regards his. Chris- tianity, which he seems to regard as synonomous with the Y.M.C.A., “involves a contempt for the rest of mankind except as potential converts and the belief that progress consists in the spread of a doctrine.” But perhaps the doctrine of international socialism is differ- ent. Certainly Mr. Russell has no sympathy with the spread of Christian doctrine nor with the morality of Christian peoples. One of his chief encouragements in China is in the socialistic and liberalistic movement of thought among students, especially as it breaks up the old family ideals, and leaves behind the traditions of Chinese life. One 210 . THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS of his grounds of complaint against the mission col- leges is that they are too tender toward China’s past and do not produce as radical or socialistic a type of student as the government schools. ‘This is a reversal of the old criticism. It used to be said that mission- aries destroyed the old traditions of the non-Christian peoples. Mr. Russell complains because they are not sufficiently destructive. It is a complaint which is a tribute. Christian missions ought to seek to conserve and transmit all that is good in the national, racial or religious traditions, And Christian missions have conceived salvation to include human bodies, They are, as has been already deliberately said, the greatest philanthropy in the world. They are now 1,157 medical foreign missionaries with 858 hospitals and 1,686 dispensaries which treated in 1924, 4,788,258 patients. A great many of the con- temporary proposals to reconstruct the foreign mission enterprise are very mute regarding medical missions. They would find it hard to sustain the view that it is presumptuous for us to offer medical science to the na- tions, as though we had something to give anybody; that our medicine ought to go out to learn, not to share; that the day has now come to transfer our hospitals to native doctors—as please God, let it come as soon as it can; that we ought not to be so impudent as to offer medical aid to Asia and Africa because there is sickness also at home; that each nation must develop its own medical science and that truth is only relative; that we must have done with the old slanderous practice of foreign missions of describing human evil and appeal- ing for missionary service on the basis of human suf- fering and sin. How curious such views sound to men and women who are actually dealing with conditions THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 2II such as Dr. Lichtwardt, a medical missionary in far Eastern Persia, describes in this personal letter : “Tt is generally known that the infant mortality in Persia is very large, and, in order to find out approxi- mately how great it is, we secured statistics from 200 women of various ages and classes; villagers and city women, women who came for medical treatment, and women who were not ill, but merely accompanied some patient to the hospital. This we thought would give us fairly representative statistics even though the series is not very large. These 200 women have 325 living children, 619 of their children have died under the age of five, and they have had 189 miscarriages. This in- dicates an infant mortality (of children under five years of age) of 63.6 per cent., if the miscarriages are not included in the figures. If the miscarriages are in- cluded, the infant mortality is 71.3 per cent. “These are very conservative figures, because if proper statistics were available it would be seen that of these 325 living children, of those under five years of age now, a certain percentage will die before they reach the age of five. It would probably not be an exaggera- tion to say that out of every four babies born in Persia, three die before they reach the age of five years. These figures for a so-called ‘civilised’ country are appalling, and are nearly as bad as conditions in ‘savage’ tropical Africa, of which Dr. J. Howard Cook writes: ‘In Uganda, 75 per cent. of pregnancies end in abortion or miscarriage, premature labour, or still births, or else the infants die within the first week of life. (‘Medical Practice in Africa and the East,’ p. 44.) The condi- tion here in Persia is much worse than in Egypt or India, both of which are situated in a more tropical climate. In ‘War Against Tropical Disease,’ p. 146, Balfour writes: “The infant mortality of Egypt is ap- palling, one-third of the children born dying in in- fancy.’ Dr. Neve states that the infant mortality in Kashmir is nearly 50 per cent. (‘Mercy and Truth,’ Aug., 1921, p. 147.) When we compare these statistics 212 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS with those from America or England, where only one out of twelve children dies in infancy, the backward condition of Persia and other non-Christian lands can be seen. Ashby (‘Infant Mortality,’ p. 23) states that in England, up to twelve years of age, there is a mor- tality of 8 per cent. All these figures are but an addi- tional argument for increased medical work in this land of Persia, for the greater proportion of these chil- dren could be saved with proper pre-natal obstetric and pediatric care. It is especially emphatic of the need of women doctors and graduate nurses.” Because Christian missions have set a new valuation on human life and have devoted the best character and capacity we possess to fighting sickness and disease and salvaging life they have been one of the greatest pro- tective and preservative influences operating in the world. They have done the work with very inadequate resources as to equipment and support because they have commanded the best personal ability and devotion. “The work that these men have done,” said Dr. Wil- liam H. Welch of Johns Hopkins University, of the medical missionaries in China, “is beyond all praise. I would like to pay the highest tribute to those men who felt the impulse to treat men’s bodies as well as their souls. Considering the insufficient staffs and meagre equipment, it is wonderful what they have done. Much of the work has developed around strong per- sonalities. You cannot help being stirred and inspired by some of them. It is an education in itself to come under the influence of such men.” Christian missions have been the fertile source of new and recreative ideas, ideas of universal utility, neither Eastern nor Western but human. It is often alleged against the enterprise that it is seeking to foist a Western religion upon the peoples of the East, that THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 213 the Christian message which missionaries carry is a hopelessly occidentalised message. Well, it is true that the missionaries have been until now Western. Even the Nestorian missionaries who went to China in the sixth century were Western. And if Thomas, the Apostle, went to India, as he is declared by tradition to have done, he certainly was a missionary from the West with a message, so far as India was concerned, most distinctly Western. We are of the West and we can- not go to the East except from the West. And yet all this is a matter of words. As a matter of fact mis- sionaries come to China and Japan to-day not from the West but from the East, and the message which all missionaries bear to Asia they got from Asia. The sacred books they carry were all written by Asiatics, and the great Christian ideas belong to and fit the life of Asia as well as they belong to us and fit our life. It is because they are universal, and universal because true, that the Christian conceptions lay hold of the non- Christian peoples and remould their life. Fundamental among these ideas is the sense of in- dividual worth and freedom. ‘“‘You cannot realise,” said a Japanese to a Western friend, “how the Chris- tian ideas in the English language and the spirit of American life have revolutionised the world for me. I never used to think or say ‘T and ‘you,’ but I do now. The sense of personal individuality has been an eman- cipation to me. Furthermore, I never understood what liberty was before. In Japan I felt like a person in a box, watched on every side and bound under regula- tions. In America all I needed to do was to do right and neither government nor police nor law seemed to exist for me. It was experiencing the law of liberty.” Dr. Willoughby speaks of the absence among the 214 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS Bantu African people of any sense of individual equal- ity and freedom and personal worth: “Birth fixes for life (if not for ever) the social status of each individ- ual. Where Bantu society is much disintegrated, it is possible for a slave to usurp the position of chief by intrigue or military adventure; but this is an anomaly, and we are discussing regular Bantu life. It has al- ways been possible for an individual to break away from his family; but if he does, he goes forth stripped of his possessions, and is regarded as what our fore- fathers used to call ‘a masterless man.’ The choice be- fore such a man is, either to remain an outlaw, or to put himself under another master, which, with rare ex- ceptions, means lower status. What I mean by status is that a man’s rights and duties are born with him, being conditioned by his precedence in the family and the precedence of his family in the tribe. Nothing is farther from Bantu thought than the doctrine that all men are endowed by nature with fundamental equality and an inalienable right to liberty (whatever the defini- tion of the term). That doctrine is arch heresy to the Bantu and subversive of good morals. They cannot admit for a moment that any man but a chief is born free, and they cannot conceive how any two men can be born equal. Everything in their political system is built on status; and status is a matter of birth. Well, all this means, in brief, that the individual does not exist in Bantu society.” And Mr. Natarajan in an ad- dress to the missionaries in Bombay, on July 9, 1923, bore his testimony to the way men like himself in India had been affected in their governing thoughts by Chris- tian Missions. “It is, of course, unnecessary for me to tell you that I am not a professing Christian, though I cannot sufficiently acknowledge my spiritual debt to the THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 215 life and teaching of Jesus. To a Hindu, like myself, the great defect of Protestant Christianity is the ab- sence of a metaphysical background to it. Hinduism has this in ample measure, but the picture does not stand in sufficient relief. Hinduism is the great blue sky in which the sun, the moon, the stars, the comets and the clouds have each their proper place and time. Many good Hindus have painted the figure of Christ prominently upon this background, and they find that it suits it quite well. . . . Nobody knows more than I do that the direct work of conversion represents a very small fraction of the work of Christian Missions. Your educational, medical and other philanthropic work, and, above all, the example of the devoted lives of men and women among you, often in isolated places, have influenced a very much larger circle than that represented by the small Protestant Indian community. Personally, I think that this is the most abiding result of Christian Missions in India. . . . Many of the most prominent Hindu leaders, like the late Sir Narayan Chandavarkar and Mahatma Gandhi, have openly ac- knowledged their obligation to Christian teaching. I asked Mr. C. R. Dass the other day whether his reli- gious ideas were not greatly influenced by the Bible. He said they certainly were. . .. Sow the seed of Christian teachings broadcast, more by your example than by your preaching and precepts. Then you will serve your Master and India, and through India, hu- manity.” (‘“Makhzan i Masihi,” Sept. 1, 1923.) Mr. Natarajan’s address contained some frank and critical comment on missions and the Christian Church in In- dia, but it set in the chief place the spirit and influence of Christ, and advocated the view that Hindus and Mohammedans, imbued by that spirit, should remain 216 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS in their own communities. Many Indian social ideals and relationships are undergoing a complete though long-drawn-out transformation under these ideas. A new missionary in Western India wrote recently of an experience which was a revelation to him of the extent to which Christian ideas had penetrated even in Hindu religious teaching: “Our pundit invited us to attend a bhajan-singing and preaching from one of the Hindu sacred books, of which they have a very great many. The gathering was held in the lecture room of a summer home of a Hindu lawyer from Bombay. He opens his beautiful home for daily services all through the month of May. The Guru—teacher, preacher, singer, now a demi-god, and after death to be deified—is from the barber caste. For the first time in my life, I took off my shoes before listening to a service, but that is a very proper thing to do out here. We were received with many salaams. Truly, these people are inherently polite. They wel- comed us to the very front, and we sat down at the feet of the famous Guru, who was sitting on a nice soft mattress. The rest of us were on the hard stone floor. The speaker, a reformer among the Hindus, preached strongly against idolatry and Pantheism, and argued against the popular view that this present life is a mere illusion. JI understood it only in part, for he spoke in Marathi; but some features were very beautiful. He spoke of devotion to the One True God, and calls his sect the “God Disciple.’ They invited us back, amid many salaams, to name the date when we would tell them of the claims of Christ. They promised to hear us gladly, and with open minds. Of course we are going. “As we went home, our marvel was not at the invita- tion: it was at the fact that around the Guru was a Parsi (a fire-worshipper), Hindus of many castes and even women. They listened approvingly as old errors were shattered, and as joy, love and service were ex- THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 217 alted. Truly the impact of Christianity is a mighty in- fluence, even in the highest circles. They will not now openly accept Christ, but the old soil of caste and idol- atry is being broken up. Then as they see their own philosophies (reformed as they will be) failing to trans- form society, they will at last turn to that Living Dy- namic, Christ Jesus the Saviour of the world. They admit now that they know better and boast of doing better than their religion.” On the occasion of a prize distribution at a Moham- medan High School in Bombay, on the 15th of Janu- ary, 1923, His Highness, the Aga Khan, one of the most distinguished Mohammedan leaders in India, made an address in the course of which he urged the Mohammedans to take part in the uplift of the de- pressed classes. While doing so he paid the following tribute to Christian Missions: “In the days of my youth it was the fashion amongst certain classes of all communities to look with amused indifference upon the work that was being done by the missions of all European denominations and coun- tries. ‘To-day is there a single honest man who will refuse to honour and respect the great heroic and mag- nificent work at the cost of enormous wealth and la- bour, which Christian missions of all denominations, and some of the most important coming from foreign countries like America, France and Germany, carry on in this country amongst the depressed classes? I am glad that some of the leaders of the Hindus are starting to pay the Christian missions the greatest of all com- - pliments—imitation.” But there is more than imitation here. There is slow and unconscious, and tardily prolonged, but real social conversion. And the conversion is not social only or of the spirit 218 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS of men who remain in the old communions. The cen- sus returns show that the avowed Christian community in India is growing faster than any other. Indeed, in some recent decades, the Hindus have lost ground. In Benares, in August, 1923, to a gathering of nearly 5,000, representing all sections of the Hindus com- munity, orthodox, Brahmans, Sanyasus, Arya Sama- jists, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains and the depressed classes, the president, Pandit Malaviya, said in the course of his presidential address: “We the Hindus, do not realise our situation. In the course of time, we will slowly be converted by Christians and Mohammedans and we will become an extinct race!” He also exhorted the audience not to have any ill-feeling toward other reli- gious communities such as Christians and Moham- medans. (‘“The Times of India,” Aug. 22, ’23.) In olden days a great deal was made of the reflex in- fluence of missions. What men had in mind was the reflex spiritual influence, the evidence of the sure spir- itual law that those who give most ever have most to give and that the Christian Churches at home are en- riched rather than impoverished by all that they send abroad. In later years the argument from the reflex benefit of missions was commercialised and it was ar- gued by some that trade and political influence were ad- vantaged by missions, That use of the argument de- stroyed it. Missions are a pure unselfishness, and any other way of construing them is poisonous. But now that we have asserted this view, and it is to be hoped are in no danger of allowing false views to taint the missionary motive, we need to return to the truth that giving is enriching. Participation in missions enriches our conception of God. The enterprise is an effort to share a worthy thought of God with the world, and THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 2I19 the process enlarges and enriches that thought. Dr. Endicott of Toronto set forth this true idea in an ad- dress at the Washington Missionary Conference in 1925: “T have had three unexpected experiences in life. The first was when I became a Christian. I was not a candidate. I was taken unawares, but I was really brought to my Lord Christ. Christianity from that day has always been a real, an amazing, a beautiful and gracious factor in my life. It has never become com- monplace. Again, I did not expect to be a Christian minister and even less did I expect to be a foreign mis- sionary. “What, then, was it about this missionary movement that most deeply moved me and led me to its support in thought and life? “Tt actually brought to me an enrichment of the very conception of Christianity itself. That is an advantage well worth gaining. I have had conceptions of a dif- ferent kind presented to me, and I have lived under the dominion of them for many years of my life—for example, a conception something like this: Christianity, as an unearthly thing, so unrelated to the life of the world, so precarious and so narrow, so aloof that the best way to suggest it by picture would be as a little ditch or as a narrow channel, in which is a canoe in which a man sits bolt upright for fear that it will cap- size. That is Christianity, as it has been often pre- sented. Now, what the foreign missionary enterprise did for me in this realm was to suggest another picture of a sailing ship out on the broad ocean with all its sails unfurled, and bounding over to the ends of the earth, looking for new cargo, wholly unafraid and in no sense restricted. “Tt makes a tremendous difference which conception is to prevail in the minds of the people. I have ceased to wonder that some folk shrink from the Christian religion, that they see no attractiveness in it, that it makes no large appeal to them; but I have found in the 220 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS foreign missionary movement, to which I have dedi- cated my life, something which makes the Christian reli- gion spacious, ennobling, divinely generous, really giv- ing us a God Who is big enough to worship, and a human race worthy of being redeemed, and worthy of commanding my service.” A large part of the movement toward Christian unity during the last century has been due to foreign mis- sions. The essential unity and simplicity of the mis- sionary aim, the magnitude and urgency of the task, the pressure of the work, its objects, its nature, its con- ditions, the fundamental community of the Christian motive, the singleness of the love and Lordship of Christ are only a few of the considerations which have drawn together missions on the field and the mission- ary advocacy and administration at home. And this solidarity of the foreign mission work and of its forces has reacted on the life and organisation and spirit of the home Church. Our denominationalism has been moderated and our purpose of co-operation confirmed. Many of our great united undertakings at home are the direct fruitage of the foreign missions spirit. From the outset the work of the foreign missionaries embraced those social ideals and ministries which the Church at home is only now recovering as part of her programme and mission. Social settlements are a con- ception whose origin falls within the memory of the present generation, but the first foreign mission station was nothing but such a settlement, and foreign mission stations have been nothing else ever since. The current controversy over the social gospel, as we have already seen, was settled instantaneously by the foreign mis- sions enterprise at the outset, and it has always bound THE RICH FRUITAGE OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 221 together the oral statement and the personal and insti- tutional expression of the Gospel. And we owe a great debt to foreign missions for their contributions to our wider acceptance of the Christian view of mankind and the world. To the great majority of missionaries the ideas which lie back of the League of Nations and of all movements for human sympathy and co-operation are axiomatic, and the influence of missionaries has been one of the most powerful forces in the world working for inter-racial understanding and for human unity. But we turn back again from these gains which we have reaped at home from foreign missions to note four great services which have been of the very warp and woof of the enterprise. (1) It has brought eman- cipation to woman and has done more than anything else to supply her in Christianity with the one influence which teaches her to use her liberty. (2) It has pene- trated, as we have seen, the non-Christian religions and has moulded in every one of these its fundamental views of God and the world and human society. (3) It has powerfully affected ideas of race and race rela- tionships by its actual practice, with whatever short- comings and limitations, of race equality. As Mr. Loram, of Natal, testifies of South Africa: “Tt is said that a certain wise old Native chief divided Europeans into two classes, viz., white men and mis- sionaries. The distinction is significant. To the thoughtful Native the white man is the disintegrating force which has broken down his tribal customs and sanctions, and has replaced them with nothing but in- numerable and vexatious governmental restrictions in- troduced for the benefit of the white man. On the 222 THE CHURCH AND MISSIONS other hand, he knows the missionary to be his friend. It is the missionary who educates his children, who writes his letters, who cares for him in sickness and sorrow, who acts as a buffer between him and the local storekeeper or Government official, and whose motives are always altruistic.” (4) And lastly, however inadequately and ineffectively, still with real fruitage and result, the enterprise of for- eign missions has preached Christ. It has made Him known all over and through the non-Christian world. And He is always and everywhere the deepest spring of life and change. “Behold,” says He, “I make all things new.” INDEX Aga Khan, 217 Amir Ali Syed, 174 Banerjea on Duff, 102 Barton, James L., “Daybreak in Turkey,’ 132 f. Bashford, James W., 176 Bliss, E. M., “A Concise His- tory of Missions,” 40 Bliss, Howard E., “The Modern Missionary,” 88 f. Bohme, 13 Boxer troubles, 20 Brainerd, David, 106 ff. Brewer, Justice, 121 Brown, William Adams, 53 f. Bryce, Lord, 83 ff. Buddhism, 49 Carey, 41 f., 96 ff., 206 Chesterton, 58 China and Education, 156 ff. China Treaties, 128 Christie, Dugald, 85 Christo Samaj, Memorandum of, 50 ff., 75 ff. Church, Ideal of indigenous, 54- 63, 176 f., 182 f. Church of Christ in Japan, Creed of, 63 f., 183 f. Clarke, “A Short Study of Christian Missions,” 199 ff. Clough, 175 Coates, Harper H., 49 Cotton, Bishop, on Duff, 1or Curzon, 69 f. Das, Andrew Thakur, 61 f. Dennis, “Christian Missions and Social Progress,” 191, 203 f. Denominationalism, 68 ff. Dickinson, Lowes, 179 f. Duff, Alexander, 100 ff. 223 Ebina, 146 Education, 77 ff., 150 ff. Eliot, Charles W., 81 f. Elvira, canon of, 27 Endicott, James, 219 Evarts, Jeremiah, 112 Fulton, George W., 48 Gandhi, 174 Grant, President, 129 Gregory VII, 38 Griffin on S. J. Mills, 108 £. Harnack, “The Expansion of Christianity,” 12, 23 ff., 28 ff. Hebich, Samuel, 114 Hiraiwa, 47 Hofmann, 13 Holzmann, 13 Hort, 58 Hunter, Sir William, 206 Imai, 46 India, United Church in, Creed of, 64 ff. Indians in South America, 138 International Missionary Coun- cil on Co-operation, 89 ff. Jackson, Arthur, 85 f. Janvier, C. A. R., 79 Japan, education in, 80 Johnston, Sir H. H., 189 Judson, Adoniram, 109 f. Kaka, 1092 ff. Keshub Chunder Sen, 71 f. Kosui, Abbot, 49 Lawley, Sir Arthur, 204 Lichtwardt, Dr., 211 Loram, Charles T., 151, 221 224 THE CHURCH Lowrie, Walter, 112 Lucas, Bernard, 61 Lull, Raymund, 39 McGiffert, “The Age,” 11, 12f., 18 McLean, John, 78 MacLear, ““The Missionary His- tory of the Middle Ages,” 32 ff. Maine, Sir Henry, on Duff, 102 f. Malaviya, Pandit, 218 Meinicke, 205 Methodist Missions, 41 Michie, Alexander, 190 Mills, Samuel J., 108 ff. Miyagawa, 46 f. Moravians, 41, 42, I14 Morgenthau, Henry, 82 Mozoomdar, 72 Muller, Hugo A., 92 Apostolic Natarajan, 172 f., 214 National Missionary Society of India, 139, 181 Nevius, John L., 43, 111 f. Okuma, 49 Paul’s Missionary Methods, 18 ff. Relations of Missions and Church, 73 ff., 177 f. Religions, non-Christian, as in- fluenced by Christianity, 169 f. Religious liberty, 127 f. Rowell, Newton W., 143 f. Russell, Bertrand, on China, 207 ff. 124 ff., Saeed, Mirza, 192 ff., 196 Salisbury, Lord, 171 f. Sawayama, Paul, 62 AND MISSIONS Schlegel, 32 Seward, William H., 129 Siam and religious liberty, 130 Smith, George, on Carey, 98 ff. State and Christianity, 12t ff. State and Education, 153 ff., 162 f. Statistics, 176, 210 Stevens, Frederick W., 205 Students, Foreign, in the West, 169 f. Sun, The New York, 187 Taikyo Dendo, 45 Taiping Rebellion, 44 Thoburn, Bishop, 116 f. Thompson, Henry B., 205 Tientsin Times, 190 Trevelyn, Sir Charles, 102, 174 Trumbull, David, 166 Turkey and religious freedom, Tati, — and education, 155 Uemura, 46 f., 184 Union and co-operation, 60 f. United Church in India, Creed of, 64 ff. Unoccupied fields, 137 f. Vail, Charles E., 86 Venn, Henry, 103 ff. Verbeck, Guido, 151, 166 Von Schubert, “Outline of Church History,” 13, 39 Von Welz, 40 Wanless, W. J., 86f. Warneck, 201 Welch, William H., 212 Westcott, 13 Whitney, W. O., 207 Willoughby, on Bantu ignorance of equality, 213 f. Wittichen, 13 THE END wi | 1012 010 Date Due a Ag rT ity fi You | ‘ we - = | ‘ ‘ee Ss ¥ cn « , mi : Fj ar | Pit das ag sl : & ate ie ay? as > es ese oa te hte Ta ee pees hee) 2 7 Z Saeco SESS ine! ¥ Ny ae yy ath yt ix away 9 Mi . “ x 53 dor oot in BPP, Cte et ins ata