GOOD GOVERNMENT AND MISSIONS.
In a recent lecture at Calcutta, India, Mr. A. J. Fraser-Blair, editor of The Englishman, discussed the question as to how more cordial relations can be established between Europeans and Indians. After speaking of the lack of real interest in the Indian people manifested by Englishmen generally, he turns to the missionaries as a shining example and pays them the following tribute:— The missionaries have, practically unaided, created modern India. I am now, of course, regarding their work from a purely political and educational point of view, leaving its religious aspect to be dealt with by those better qualified to review it than myself. If we carefully consider the careers of Warren Hastings and Alexander Duff, and mark their effect upon history, which, weighing everything, shall we say did more for India—the English adventurer or the Scottish missionary? And, looking to Warren Hastings’ successors, may it not be truthfully asserted that the glittering procession of titled persons who have held high office in India during a century and a half have left it very much as they found it, while every missionary teacher throughout the same period has been the center of influences which are now transforming the whole Eastern world? This great work has been accomplished by dint of determined efforts of the missionaries to know the people and make themselves known; to learn their many languages and then inoculate them with the speech and knowledge of the West. Further, missionaries have taken infinite pains to penetrate the dim interior of the native mind, which can only be reached by the intricate avenues of its religious beliefs. It is by these means that the missionaries have come to know the people and to gain their love and confidence in so many cases. It is thus that they have become at crises the right hand of the district officer, and the intermediaries between the rulers and the ruled. Their work, from a purely secular standpoint, is exactly that which was done by the Founder of Christianity Himself.