Meager Support of Christian Missions.
IN the prelude to one of the "Monday Lectures" in Boston, Joseph Cook recently gave some interesting facts in regard to foreign missions. They are interesting, and yet they should cause the ears of American Christians to tingle with shame; first, because this "Christian nation" spends so much more money to debase itself than to elevate the race, and second, because converts from among the heathen are more ready to give93for the support of the gospel than are those who have always enjoyed Christian privileges. Here are the extracts:— It would not be necessary for me to open the Scriptures to make me zealous for missions, because the philanthropic attitude of soul is enough to give us zeal in this particular. There are three hundred millions of women now on this planet who have only the Buddhist hope of being born again as men instead of toads or snakes. There are eighty millions of women in Moslem harems. There are uncounted millions of men and women and children growing up in the most degraded superstitions, and suffering in mind, body, and estate from inherited pagan customs. In the name of mere philanthropy and secular prudence, Christian missions ought to receive a support, immediate, abundant, permanent, unflinching. All that united Protestant Christendom together raises annually for missions would not pay the liquor bill of the United States for three days, nor that of the British Islands for two. At the opening of the century all Protestant Christendom expended only $250,000 annually for missions. It expends to-day $7,500,000 for that purpose. This is a large sum, you think. It is a bagatelle. The dissipations of Saratogas and Newports and Brightons would hardly find this sum worth mentioning in the hugeness of their expenses for self-gratification. The churches are penurious toward missions. . . . . In China there is not an ordained missionary to-day for a million people. In the population accessible to the American Board there is as yet only one missionary for some 700,000 inhabitants. Modern Christendom has thrown one pebble into the great ocean of missionary effort, and stands with an amused childish conceit on the shore of history watching the wide ripples produced by that pebble, and supposes that it is reforming the world. Another century will sneer at us for our conceit and penuriousness. . . . . In Bengal alone, out of a population of sixty-three millions, there are, according to Dr. W. W. Hunter, the government statistician of the Indian Empire, ten millions who suffer hunger whenever the harvest falls short, and thirteen millions who do not know the feeling of a full stomach, except in the mango season. ("England's Work in India," by W. W. Hunter, LL.D., London, 1881; p. 78.) . . . . In populations poverty stricken and often famished, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, almost alone among the missionary managing bodies of the world, is insisting on large or complete self-support by the native churches. In Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, Canton, Fuhchau, Shanghai, Kobe, Kioto, Tokio, and Yokohama, ten representative cities of Asia, it was my fortune to put to large gatherings of missionaries of all denominations and nationalities a series of questions on the religious condition of India, China, and Japan, and, among them this inquiry: "Ought native Christians to be encouraged and instructed to give a tenth of their income to the support of their churches?" With not half a dozen exceptions, in at least a hundred cases, missionaries outside the field of the American Board replied: "No, not yet;" but missionaries inside the field of the American Board said: "Yes;" and so did the foremost of their pupils and converts. One evening in Bombay, the second city of the British Empire (for Bombay is now larger than Calcutta, or than Glasgow or Liverpool), I was putting a series of written questions to a company of missionaries and civilians, and this question about self-support was among the inquiries. Scotch and English missionaries, one after the other, rose and opposed such a pressure as is brought to bear on native churches by instructing them to give a tenth of their income for the support of their pastor; but, finally, uprose a converted Brahmin from out of the field of the American Board, and, in the most incisive, almost classic English, almost turned the feeling of the company in favor of the American plan. I had a similar experience in many a city, and I found the converts, especially the most intelligent of them, quite as emphatic in defending this system of self-support as the missionaries of the American Board themselves.