Missions Un
der Scrutiny WHATEVER view be taken of the place of foreign missions in the life of the Christian Church to-day —and it would be astonishing if in an age of religious questioning missions alone had escaped the general ehallengeit is hard to exaggerate the part they have played in the life of the Church in the past. It was foreign missionaries who carried the Christian gospel from Palestine throughout the Roman Empire, foreign missionaries from Rome. and Ireland who brought the gospel to England, foreign missionaries like St. Francis Xavier who carried it into Eastern Asia. And so far as this country and North America are concerned to-day there is hardly an organized religious body that does not reckon foreign missionary activity as in integral part of its work. But foreign missions have come under heavy criticism, some of it just, some unjust, and enough doubt regarding them still remains to make a scientific examina- tion of missions actually at work in the field both valuable and necessary.. Such a study, geographi- cally limited in scope, was carried out a few years ago by a Commission on Christian Higher Education in India, under the chairmanship of the Master of Balliol, and there is now available* the report of a larger com- mission sent out at the instance of a group of influential American laymen to investigate exhaustively missionary methods and their results in India, Burma, and China.
In a passage that the missionary or the supporter of missions of a generation ago would have found not a little startling the American investigators portray the great religions—Hinduism, Buddhism; Islam, Christianity —as all alike exposed to the same challenge (" It is no longer Which prophet ? or Which book ? It is whether any prophet, book, revelation, rite, church, is to be trusted "), and they see all, not indeed allied, but aligned together, in defence of some sort of faith against the onset of scepticism and materialism. That estimate of the situation obviously opens up large problems. It rules out finally the old conception of the missionary setting out, often with no more equipment than a holy apostolic zeal—indispensable, wholly laudable, but very far from sufficient in itself—to win individual converts from the Hindus of India, the Taoists of China or the Buddhists of Japan. Individual converts there still must be. The idea of a Christian Church in China, in India, in Japan is fundamental, and the more, and the sooner, it becomes a national Christian Church, depending less and less on extraneous help from Western countries, the more fully will be the best and highest aims for Christian missions be fulfilled. But the missionary of to-day, and still more the missionary of to-morrow, convinced though he still must be that the new society he is striving to create must be based on. individual lives inspired by the ideals he has come to preach, will set himself rather to emphasize the features common to Christianity and the great Oriental religions, than to follow the old crude plan (never perhaps so prevalent as its critics assumed) of destroying as prelude to building up.
On their less distinctively evangelistic side Christian missions to-day stand in small need of defence. Every colonial administrator will bear testimony to the enor- mous value of what the missions have done and are doing increasingly for health, for education, for industrial
*.Re-Tkinking Missions. Harpers. 8.9. 6d. training. In many wide regions of our Colonial empire there is virtually no native education except what mis- sionaries impart, and the co-operation between missions and the administration is close and cordial. To that general truth there are no doubt exceptions ; incom patible personalities can quickly change harmony to antagonism ; but, broadly speaking, the generalization can be justified. All that, it is only fair to the missionary to add, is based on ungrudging personal sacrifice. Finan. cially, socially, professionally, the missionary lays aside all ambitions for the sake of what for him is the single and the higheSt purpose. Here and there due recognition comes—to a Livingstone, a Schweitzer, a Grenfell—but the ordinary missionary looks, and is satisfied to look, for no honour from his fellow-men. He will work harder than a trader or a newspaper corre- spondent at mastering the language of the country where he works ; he will settle in regions which either of them would pronounce impossible for white men ; and he may still, like a Hannington or a Pattison, sacrifice his life, as he has always been ready to sacrifice it.
But if all that be true, as in fact it is, it is not enough to enable Christian missions to achieve their purpose in the fourth decade of the twentieth century. The relation between Christianity and other faiths has to be thought out afresh. The relation between the different Protestant denominations (must a Parsee be taught to distinguish between Methodism and Presby- terianism ?) to say nothing of that between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, is far more vital. The various union universities, supported jointly by a number of missions, the National Christian Council in China, and still more the United Church in South India, arc evidences of wise and enlightened progress. To that extent the lines for the future arc largely set. But the new con- ditions demand as missionaries men and women of a higher culture than the missionary of past generations commonly attained. It is no longer a question of preaching to the heathen in his blindness, but of reasoning with Indians and Chinese and even Africans on whom Western ideas have impinged for better or worse in a dozen forms. Finally, there is the vital question of the message the missionary has to proclaim. No conclusions could be recorded on that which would not be controversial—not, at any rate, till the differences conspicuous in the Church at home have disappeared. The American commissioners, by the very breadth of their findings, will inevitably invite criticism. They recognize rightly that for missions the religious question is central, but in dealing with it they offer an interpretation of the meaning of Christianity that is bound to provoke widespread discussion, for " the simple, non-partisan religion of the modern man " to which some members of the commission incline is something that no two modern men would define alike. But under the influence of that conception they make the striking proposal that the seven denominations to whose work their report relates should set up a single unified administration for the conduct of their combined work. That is probably for many reasons impracticable, but this and other like suggestions impose on missionary societies throughout the world an imperative duty to examine, not indeed their basic faith, but their methods.
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