THE WORK OF MISSIONARIES.
In telling “What are Christian missionaries trying to do?” Robert E. Speer, in the Christian Work, well sets before us the true object and spirit of missionary effort in the following (italics ours):— We do not send Christian missionaries to clothe the heathen or to alter their style of dress. In China the women dress more modestly and sensibly than ours do, tho not so cleanly. Elsewhere the women do not dress so properly, and there are many improvements resulting from missionary influences, but the missionaries do not go out as dress reformers. We do not send missionaries to improve the industrial conditions of Asia and Africa. They have introduced American fruits in northern China, and American vegetables in many lands. They have taught new industries to thousands of boys and girls in India and Africa, and have improved the native industries everywhere. But our missionaries would not have gone simply to accomplish these ends. Nor do the missionaries go out to reform politics. . . . The missionaries are not political propagandists. They do not go out for the purpose of turning monarchies into republics, far less to turn independent States into dependencies upon European or American governments. And, again, we do not send missionaries to reform morals or check social abuses. There is abundant room for such work. . . . Christian lands are infinitely cleaner, morally, than other lands. Where every man may have a private brothel under the forms of law, as in Mohammedan lands, and call it his family; or where divorce is so easy that it becomes the end of one out of every three marriages, as in Japan; or where polygamy and divorce are both unnecessary because of a general moral rottenness, as in India, there is no localization of vice, or such sharp line between it and virtue, as makes the immorality of Christian lands stand out so startlingly. In quantity and heinousness the moral evils of heathenism are worse than the moral evils of Christendom. But beyond this, the worst vice of Asia exists under the shadow and sanction of religion. In America it is in the face and against the protest of religion. The foulest cities of Asia are the holiest—Mecca, Meshed,13and Benares. And some of its sacred books are most intolerable. It is true of one of the sacred accounts of the greatest Hindu god that it is so indecent that the British Government has forbidden its translation. But morality is merely the product of the inner life, and missionaries do not go to heathen lands to try to amend behavior, any more than a husbandman regards it as sane horticulture to go out and tie fruit on the limbs of his trees. His aim is to make the trees produce the fruit. Now, it does not affect the truth of what has been said to allege that the missionaries do interest themselves in the physical and moral condition of the people, and that they do introduce changes of dress, and industry, and medical treatment, and that their work does spread enlightenment, and make the people discontented with ignorance, injustice, tyranny, and wrong. All these things result from the missionary work, because the missionary goes out to sow the seed of the plant of which these are the leaf, and flower, and fruit. The primary business of the missionary is a religious business. Missionaries are the product of the conviction that Christianity is a divine life in man, and that every Christian is different from other men, not in this or that external, but in the fact that he is alive and other men are dead. The church may have become so much like the world as to have lost sight of this truth; but the New Testament is falsehood and delusion, if there is not in the Christian the power of a supernatural life which is absent from the non-Christian. It is to give men that life that the church sends out missionaries, and all kinds of accessory and blessed consequences flow from missionary work, because the life of Christ planted in men can not be restrained from producing such results. This is what Christian missionaries are trying to do. Men may say they are trying to proselytize, if they wish to say so. But proselytizing with Christians is not the attempt to lead men to change their opinions or their mode of worship. It is an attempt at resurrection. The missionary is taking life to dead men, and life, not in the sense of quickened intellectual movement or refined moral taste; but in a supernatural sense, Christianity is a personal divine life dwelling in the lives of men. In this matter Christianity refuses to be classed with other religions. . . . Yet this is a trifling part of its claims. It asserts that they are only systems. It is a life. They are dead. It is quick with divine presence. God is in it in a sense above and beyond the sense in which He is everywhere, and ruling all things. Of course, this is fanaticism in the eye of the modern world. But it is not the fanaticism of missions only. It is the essential character and claim of Christianity. To the extent that Christianity at home abates or betrays this claim, it is untrue to itself, and it surrenders its power. Missionaries and their supporters may lose sight of their true aim and duty. Political or philanthropic or social motives may be dominant with them. It is not wrong to be touched with sympathy for the famine orphans of India, or the child wives of Moslem harems, or the sick and uncared-for sufferers of many lands. But such sympathy is wise and discriminating when it does not content itself with relieving the symptoms merely, but strikes at the disease. To give all the sick people in China to-day the benefit of Western medical science would be a purely temporary measure. The missionary theory is to plant in the Chinese people those principles of life which will bear their fruitage in such sympathies and ministries in China, and make them indigenous thereto, as now bless every Christian land. There may easily be waste or comparatively unprofitable expenditure of life and toil in missionary effort through our failure to discern true principles. Philanthropic and educational work are worth while, as they help to plant deep in the life of individuals and nations the supernatural life of Christianity. If they merely ripple the surface of social life, or end in comfort or clothes or cleanliness, they serve a not useless purpose, but they are not in line with the real work of missions, which is the lodgment in human life of the supernatural life of Christ. Whenever men believe in Christianity as a unique supernatural life, they will go out into the world with it. When they don’t, they won’t. My reporter friend [whose question Mr. Speer is answering] was a heathen, alike in his knowledge and in his experience of Christianity. He did not know what it was. Neither books nor men nor his own heart had told him. To such a man Christian missions will naturally appear unintelligible. And there are many such in the church. The fact that they do not thrill with the missionary spirit shows that they do not understand what Christianity is. What Christian missions are trying to do is the direct and necessary consequence of this view of Christianity. Of course, if Christianity is not this, but merely a moral system, finer than the moral systems of other religions, and richer by the superior wonder and admiration which Jesus has awakened, but, after all, the same in kind as they, indifference to its extension is intelligible—and also indifference to its acceptance. A religion that is not so good that all the world ought to have it, is not so good that any one man must have it. But if Christianity is what the New Testament represents, and the experience of millions of Christians proves, it is the business of all who have received it to support the missionaries who are trying, not to bear this or that fruit of Christianity to heathen lands, but to plant there its roots, that they may produce among each people the living works of God.