Sin,—Your article last week on this subject opens with the -
remark that " the May Meetings this year do not breed in us much new hope on the Missionary side ; " and the ground of this remark is that the societies rely too much on the British mis- sionary, and too little on native agency. Let me say that if the- writer had been at the meetings of the Church Missionary Society—and I do not know to what others he can refer, for no other society of the kind he refers to met in the May Meet- ing week—he would have heard one thing more constantly mentioned than any other by speakers from India, China,. Africa, and Oceania, and that was the importance and value and the actual results of native agency.
The fact is that we agree heartily with almost every sentence in your article. I could take sentence after sentence and show• that they express substantially the convictions and the policy of the Church Missionary Society, and, so far as I know, of the societies generally. The greatest difficulty in carrying out that policy is that so many of our Asiatic and African brethren- resent our efforts to avoid all that denationalises them. We- struggle against the Europeanising tendency of some of them, but not always successfully. I refrain from adducing proofs and illustrations, but I can do so if the correspondence should.
ChurchMissionary Society, May 12th.
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