PROTESTANT MISSIONS.
IT is curious and not a little perplexing to watch the dim- culty of placing religious men en rapport with the tone of the secular intellect of the day. Two of the ablest men in England, one a statesman of Cabinet rank, with religious instincts and orthodox opinions, the other a divine, with all the ideas and some of the tact of worldly politicians, have this week addressed the country on behalf of Mis- sions, and neither of them will raise a shilling for the cause they have attempted to befriend. Mr. Walpole's speech at Salisbury is a prose version of Bishop Heber's Missionary Hymn, eloquent no doubt, and even instructive, but then no one of the thousands he might influence ever doubted that from "Greenland's icy mountains and India's coral strand," from ancient rivers and palmy plains, there is a genuine cry for the light which apart from miracles European thought can alone bestow. Nor will many Churchmen question that their favourite institution supplies, as the Bishop of Oxford eloquently requires, a Missionary organization as free from American Puritanism—which, by the way, has succeeded in Burmah—as from the Mariolatry which cannot be said to have totally failed among the wild tribes of Spanish America. Unfortunately the point at issue is not the comparative value of this or that system of propagating Christianity among Pagans, but .the use of propagating it at all, not the necessity of extending the Missionary system, but the propriety of maintaining it. The educated class, to whom men like the Bishop and the statesman intend to address their thoughts, are not doubting that Pagans exceed Christians in number, or that Erastianism works, but whether men without philosophy can possibly instruct Brahmins, whether teachers on the average less competent than the English clergy can convince Pagans on the average more hostile to the truth than English laymen, whether preachers who cannot and do not affect them can or do affect men in whom race and creed and training conspire to produce moral deafness. So long as the majority of believers accepted the creed that none but Chris- tians could be saved, utterances like those at Salisbury sufficed to stir languid consciences, but as the Christianity of hate dies out and is replaced by the Christianity of Christ, men require arguments more nearly applicable to their secret thoughts, and of these statesman and Bishop appear equally and fatally unconscious. Are there reasons why those who believe that the Messiah did not descend in order to fail, who hold that His work was done for humanity and not for a half million, who assert that He rules and cares for mankind, and not for this or that limited class or sectional division, who esteem humanity as much above the elect as the State is above the Church, should yet support organizations for the external propagation of religious truth ? And further, can they support with safe consciences the existing organiza- tions ?
We hold that they can, and intend, in order to prove that proposition, at the risk of incurring the enmity of both sides, to state what we believe to be the absolute truth about modern Protestant missions. On the whole, after allowance for all drawbacks and many defects irritating not only to the taste but to the consciences of observant men, they succeed, but not in the way in which, guided by the prevalent demand among the churches, they try to describe their own success. Of the accusations levelled against them by men offended with their foibles or disgusted with the disparity between their objects and their success, a great majority must be allowed to be at least partly true. Partly from the radically bad organization of the Societies, which ought to be representative of all classes, and really represent only a special class, partly from the fact that missionary work has become a profession,—the diplo- matic service as it were of Christianity,—but chiefly from the superior capacity of the half-educated for enthusiasm, the average of missionaries sink below the average of English clergymen. The best among them rise almost indefinitely above that standard, but then the worst sink almost indefi- nitely below it. There are few parish pastors worthy to stand in line with Dr. Livingstone, or Williams of Erromanga, or Henry Martyn, or the founders of Baptist Missions, or the still living leaders of the Free Church Mission work, but there are fewer still who are not the superiors of the worthy German peasants, innocent of every recommendation except faith, with whom several of the societies have supplied their remoter stations. The reports which the mass of them send home, again, are on the whole untrustworthy. Every now and then the churches receive a statement like those repeat- edly drawn up by Judge Wylie, the able Indian advocate of Missions, or like the speech recently addressed to Exeter Hall by Mr. Sampson, the teaching missionary of Serampore, but the British public demand individual conversions as they demand the palm trees which the late Mr. Ingram used to insert in Indian photographs, and of course they get them. Not that anything is invented. In the course of an experience covering hundreds of missionaries in two quarters of the world, the writer has met but two instances of wilful misrepresentation, but when an article is urgently demanded, demanded with threats, that article will be supplied even by honest men. What with the re-echo of expressions taught by themselves, and the purely emotional sayings of dying men, and sentences uttered because those who utter them know that they will be acceptable, and the extraordinary confusion which almost every missionary alive contrives to make between his hopes and his knowledge—a confusion as visible in the minds of discoverers as of missionaries—most of the stories of con- versions are mythical legends. All are not. No reasonable men, sceptic or Christian, familiar with missionary converts, their ways and their temptations, will doubt that here and there among multitudes of professors appears a man of whose history and conversation and present life there is no reasonable explanation, save that a power higher than man's, call the power what you will, has touched and purified heart and brain. It is not for money that a savage shuts himself up with lepers, not for human praise that a Mussulman prefers torture to a great command, offered at the price of a secret denial of his faith, not for purely intellectual conviction that a Hindoo leads for forty years a life such as if fairly related to Englishmen in their popular dialect, instead of the nasty terminology of the sects, would draw tears of admiration. But the majority of such stories are coloured unconsciously till those who know the facts often become in their disgust the bitterest opponents of missionary effort. The demeanour of the missionaries towards their countrymen, as in Bengal and Africa, is often the result of a prejudice caught from the natives by whom they are surrounded, sometimes, as in New Zealand, of that thirst for class power which besets them as it beset the early Christian teachers,—" I am of Paul, I of Apollos,"—and as it besets classes like the civilians, who are not so strongly reprimanded for its display. Then the mis- sionary position does not usually come up to the ideal pre- valent in the Churches of self-denial, and privation, and physical misery and mental toil. They are usually pretty comfortable, not as comfortable as the clergy of European communities, —that is an invention,—but as comfortable as men usually are who will not waste limited time and more limited means in doing work less cultivated and less responsible men can very well do for them. The rough work has been done. Men can preach comfortably in the shade on the spot where Mr. Kincaid, the American Burmese, faced torture for three hours, and there is no conceivable use in the head of a great college wasting his time by waiting on himself in the daily necessities of a tropical life, and he does not do it, and so sneering ob- servers remark that the servant of all men now has servants of his own. Above all, the home organization of all missions alike is wretchedly bad, so bad as to be a justification for the popular contempt. Money meat be had, and it is raised by a system of platform oratory which fosters lying as a hot- house fosters cucumbers. Nothing can be more disgusting than the way in which money is often raised from a pro- vincial church, the outpouring of unctuous eloquence, the exhibition of dirty little idols, the relation of monstrous stories coloured till they resemble the facts as childrens "gays" do the objects they are intended to represent. There is not a worse scene to the man who loves truth than a country mission- ary meeting, unless indeed it be a county meeting, to hear the-
candidates for a seat in Parliament, and the result of the two is pretty nearly identical. The House of Commons is a clean precipitate of all manner of dirty practices, and so is the missionary body.
We admit all this and much more, and admitting it, still maintain that the missionary work taken as a whole, as des- cribed by observers who do not spare, and who do not believe that God can have left the salvation of a man in Africa at the mercy of a collection made in Finsbury, is still an agency for the diffusion of light and the spread of civilization of which England, Germany, and America may be proud. It is so far as we know the one absolutely unselfish work done by civilized man. Corporations seated in London, New York, and Basle collect with infinite pains, and by means often offensive to their own taste and love of truth, the funds which enable them to ray out over the whole Pagan world men whose sole objects are to spread belief in a purer faith, to diffuse enlightenment, and to stand, often haughtily, always firmly, between the conqueror and the poor. There is not among the hundreds of missionaries now employed by them one, whatever his education, or intellectual capacity, or power of industry, whose teaching does not serve to arouse that spirit of inquiry which it is the first necessity of all the great Pagan cults to suppress. No matter whether, like Dr. Duff, he opens a college, or like Mr. Williams talks by the wayside, or like a Moravian organizes a village, or like the Bishop of Oxford's enemies, the American Puritans, tries to govern an utterly evil community by repressive laws, or like Dr. Livingstone simply throws himself among savages, or like many a worthy and stupid German in India stands up to denounce his own colour, the one patent effect of him, about which there can be neither doubt nor question, is to break up the intellectual torpor which has in the ages fallen upon the majority of mankind. Very often the result of his teaching is the rapid spread of simple and somewhat lawless Deism. In some instances, particularly among Mohammedans, it abso- lutely intensifies belief in the faith which it is his object to destroy. In a few it produces simply the dissolution of all belief, an intellectual anarchy amid which many of the exter- nal restraints which enforce the cardinal morals on society disappear. But in all cases it is life, a rustling among the dry bones, an awakening from the sleep which clouds the sight of so many millions who, whether Moses understood cosmogony or not, are, if we are, at least men. In all cases the missionary, by the mere necessity of his position, by his foibles as well as by his virtues, by his crave for power as well as by his resolve to fulfil his function, is forced to become the centre of an intellectual stir. That is good, how good only those who really know some one of the grand Paganism- Hindooism, or Buddhism, or Fetichism can thoroughly under- stand. The corpse stirs, and though the revived man may be a villain, still vivification and not murder is the work of the physician. This, the first and greatest function of the Mis- sionary body, the one which, competent or incompetent, honest or dishonest, silly or wise with a wisdom not of this world, they must perform, wholly escapes English attention, is never alluded to in meetings, and will probably seem to Exeter Hall worthy only of contempt. There is, again, no missionary but is compelled by his position to be a source of enlightenment and civilization. Grant that he is a mere professional, a man who goes out to India, or Africa, or Polynesia, merely to earn his bread, to whom his salary is an object, and who looks to physical comfort as much as the barrister or the planter, still, like barrister or planter, lie must do and does do his profes- sional work, contract a professional pride, thirst for professional power. And his professional work is to make men better, his professional pride to make civilization visible, his professional power dependent on his reducing intellects otherwise anarchi- cal into working order. That also is good, how good only those who have seen some dunderheaded German reduce a savage village into civilized order, coerce it by mere dint of intellectual hammering into morals, and decency, and cleanli- ness, and willingness to learn, can ever thoroughly compre- hend. And then, finally, there is not a mission in which it is not possible that the great hope may be accomplished, that amidst the crowds whom they teach, or move, or spoil—as inspectors spoil cesspools—some one pupil may arise subtle with all the subtlety of the East, rich with all the knowledge of the West, a head like that of Loyola, a heart stirred like that of the t° superstitions" Monk of 4ffurtem- burg who saw the Devil and redeemed half Europe, to be to his countrymen, with whom he can sympathize as no missionary can, the apostle of a faith which is of itself the equivalent of a high philosophy and of a civilization rich in all the possibilities yet offered to man. One such Christian-
ized Hindoo might change India, one such Arab re-organize Asia, one such African bear upwards from the Cape the lesson which more than all expeditions or any conquest would throw open Africa. If Mohammed was possible, why is that a dream ? and if it be not a dream, the mil- lion a year we spend may be spent for a thousand years, and yet to a population which believes that light is the greatest gift to be received by man, may be most amply repaid.
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