THE MISSIONARY CENTENARY.
THE difficulties which impede missionary effort have heen greatly Changed in the century of whiCh the ArchbishOp of Canterbury spoke to his vast audience in St. Paul's on Monday. It is no longer, for instance, difficult to raise the money for the work done, though it is still not collected for the work which its advocates are most eager to do. The number of families who give largely does not increase in the same ratio as the Wealth of the country, and of the thirteen thousand parishes only five thousand send up regular con- tributions ; but Still the- sum raised is large, while a still greater difficulty—the reluctance of devout men to give them- selves to such a task—has entirely disappeared. It is hard rifov even to believe that the Church Missionary Society could 4.4)1 at first neither candidates nor funds, and that even when the latter were forthcoming its managers were compelled to import seventeen. Germans, mostly from Easle, some of whom, though by no means all, were more distinguished by devotion than ability. We have talked with German missionaries who were peasants simply, and with men who would have honoured any theological or philosophical chair. There are now a Sufficiency of English. candidates ; and in truth missionary work has come to be recognised as in some sort a profession, —to its great injury, its few enemies allege. This, however, is not- true. That, with improved education and the decay of the crude idea that a heathen is necessarily destined to hell, there has been some decline in the fire of enthusiasm, is probably the case, but, it has been replaced by a passionate sense of duty as true and as well obeyed as that of the bravest soldier. The missionaries and their wives go forth nowadays intending to lead the lives of active clergymen and their wives, if possible in decent manses and amid decent sur- roundings, but intending also, if need be, like soldiers, to face all that may come to them in the path of duty,—discomfort, danger, even martyrdom and death by torture. The present writer knew for many years the secret history of the missionary world, and while he has known many inadequate missionaries, he can confidently affirm that not 1 per cent. of them ever shrunk from the path to which they felt themselves called, ever quailed because of any physical fear, or ever turned aside in hope of any personal advantage. They were almost exactly like good soldiers, willing to live in cantonments if their work could be well performed from thence, but ready at the first call to go to the field, and struggle there even if the contest was hopeless, and painful death on the field or from long- continued suffering the only reasonable prospect. All over earth they go without a qualm, so that now in the interior of Africa, or what is worse, of China, in the deepest recesses of the tropical forest or the most dangerous quartiers of the overflowing river cities of China, there is always a missionary, English or American, teaching, preaching, guiding a small flock, and keeping alive a lamp whose brightness the very savages clearly recognise. The converts they make do not seem many when we talk of converting nations, though the total number now runs to hundreds of thousands, but the ideas they ray forth affect the thoughts of millions of pagans, modify and raise their ideals, and shake them out of that dread- ful crust of indurated habit which now, as in the ancient world, is the greatest obstacle to the reception of the Gospel. This is, we think, now generally perceived at home, and missionaries are no longer depressed by the vulgar ridicule which once made their lives a torment; or regarded as merely fanatic persons with- out sense, who were throwing away lives which might have been useful, in the vain hope of changing barbarians who had much better remain barbarians to the end. The unreflecting expect too much, forgetting what our own barbarian converts must have been like when they first accepted Christianity, and the prejudice against dark converts therefore lingers still ; but no one now affirms that a dark skin is a final barrier to Christian teaching, and an idea with which the writer was once strangely familiar, that missionaries damned thousands by showing them the. light which they would not follow, has totally disappeared. Missionary work is, in fact, accepted as a logical and natural outcome of genuine Christianity.
The obstacles that still remain are immense. We wonder if-those who criticise-the "results" of missions, and complain that, converts are few in comparison to the expenditure in- curred in enlightening them,- have ever reflected on the diffi- cult* which impede the use of what must always be the Mat instrument of the workers,—via.; oral persuasion. There can hardly be a missionary Whitfield, for there can hardly be a missionary orator. There have been men -of- the kind, but as a rule the missionary, even if he has the gift of persuasive eloquence, which is rare enough in Europe, can hardly use it with full effect in tongues and among men whose thoughts are so foreign to his own. He may have the power of acquiring languages—though that in its perfection is rare, for the scholar is seldom also a histrion—but command of words is not snfflPient ; he must make them bite into brains which are full of other conceptions, which reject his arguments as instinctively as he rejects theirs, or which are so dense that the words, how- ever eloquent or burning, carry to them no meaning. It is easy to say the Gospel is simple, but do the clergy at home find it so easy to convey its teaching to unwilling minds or to the cloddish minds which, though neither willing nor un- willing, are closed against argument like waterproofs against rain ? The wonder is that in an Indian bazaar, or an African forest clearing, or a Chinese riverine port any should listen to words which must seem to them what the outbursts of ranters in our own parks seem every Sunday to ourselves. Or has he ever remembered that the great " snare " and perplexity of the preacher in Europe—the disparities in the intelligence of his hearers, the first row using ten thousand words, while the last does not understand five hundred—is multiplied throughout Asia more than tenfold, while in Africa it almost precludes an address to a large audience 7 Or has it ever occurred to him, if he believes in conversation rather than in preaching, that the Indian, the Chinese, and the negro almost equally refuses to put his mind to yours, that he never produces the arguments in which he really believes, that missionary and catechumen constantly resemble in talk two trains which, though they seem occasionally almost to touch each other, yet never meet ? Just try to convince an Irishman of Kerry that fairies do not exist, or an English peasant that his favourite superstition involves a contradiction in terms, and you will understand the hopelessness which often comes over the missionary's mind, and makes him almost satiric when men talk to him of a " flock " which understands him as little as an actual flock would do if the shepherd talked of meteorology. The man who can get over this difficulty, who can break through the case which encloses the Indian, or the Chinese, or the savage mind, must have rare powers either of insight or of sympathy, and neither necessarily belong to the man whose piety or whose sense of duty may yet be of the first order. Add that the preacher is a hereditary European, with all, both of qualification and disqualification, which that implies, and that his audience are hereditary Asiatics or Africans, with all implied in those descriptions, and the dis• passionate man, however convinced a believer, will, we think, wonder that there is ever success in the work at all, that even a few thousands can be so persuaded that they will face martyrdom, whether social or physical, for the sake of a new faith.
From this what deduction? That it must be through native missionaries ultimately, to be developed by native Churches, that the reaping work will be done. The European can only sow the seed. When he is experienced he knows that, and admits it more or less fully, but the knowledge is very hard to him. The teacher even in Europe does not wish to live wholly in his disciples. Not to mention that he probably feels that vanity of the converter which shook the Churches even in St. Paul's time, he dreads giving up his authority, dreads letting the native Churches loose, dreads the new teachers who may, because they understand their audiences and are understood of them, have great success. There will be such originalities, such aberrations, such prominence given to sides of Christianity of which Europeans scarcely think. The tendency in every native Church, in the mind of every great native pastor, is to heresies, and the European missionary naturally shrinks from them with fear. He decides that the time for independence is not yet, and with the decision the hope of a native apostle fades silently away. If only a Roman or a Hebrew is to rule the Church, St. Paul cannot be either effectual or free. The decision is the more certain because of a certain temptation which besets almost every missionary,—the lurking wish to civilise as well as con- vert his followers, to make of them not only Christialft:, but Christians who _ shall think and feel as European clergymen feel and think, a wish which, if native Churches are set free, will, of course, never be realised. There is, therefore, a silent resistance to the enfranchisement of native Churches which, though it is declining, still impedes the cause, and must pass away wholly and for ever before the work can be finally successful. We must expect, especially in India and China, a new crop of heretics, Gnostics, Manicheans, and Eutychians, and remember that in spite of them all the world, once Christianised, started upon a new and higher career. The first Christian ancestor of the Arch- bishop of Canterbury was probably a brutal rough, but the germ was in him, as it will also be found in the subtly heretical Christian of India, the inert Christian of China, or the brutalised Christian of Uganda or the Congo forest. "Go on in patient but hopeful resignation, but enfranchise your converts," that is the sum and substance of our advice to the section of our world which supports the great missionary effort.
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