14th March. Tue King of Abyssinia is reported to have complained of the English; " First you send your missionary into my country; then you send a consul to look after the missionary; and then you send an army to look after the consul and there was a great deal of truth in the complaint. The missionary societies at home do nobly endeavour to carry out the injunction first given to the apostles, that they should go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature; and cheerfully ready as their envoys are to suffer persecution and even martyrdom, without expecting their country to avenge them, they do not lose their nationality when they enlist wuder the banner of the cross, and their country must: still protect them if it can. The knowledge then that the mistakes or recklessness of one missionary may involve his country in difficulties culminating possibly in a war, should make the society that dispatches him extremely careful in selecting him, and not too ready to accept with unquestioning eagerness any man whom religious enthusiasm, a love of adventure, or even, as must be sometimes the case, a difficulty in finding employment at home, may tempt to offer himself as an evangelist.
This, however, is far from being the only point of view from which the fitness of a candidate for missionary work should be judged. It is not even the most important, if we consider how very rarely the missionaries are the cause of serious trouble between their own government and that of the country in which they labour. It is far more necessary that the boards at home should ascertain before they commission a man that he has the mental and moral qualities that should distinguish an evangel list, particularly if his sphere is to be a civilised and educated country like China. No one who interests himself at all in what the missionaries of nearly all denominations have done and are doing in China, will doubt that the societies have been on the whole singularly fortunate in the men they have recruited; even in the case of the whole+ sale enlistment carried on by the China Inland Mission it is not often that we come across a man who has obviously—to use a mild phrase—mistaken his vocation. As the dyer's hand is subdued to what it works in, so the profession the man adopts reacts upon him and raises or lowers his tone according as he was originally below or above it.
In the Asiatic Quarterly Review for January is an article by Mr. Frederic H. Balfour on "The Model Missionary in China and missionary boards at home would do well to. ponder the advice of so sympathetic a critic. His treatment of the subject is wider than his title; for he considers the aims of missionary work as well as the qualities that should distinguish the model missionary., The-more thoughtful of the missionaries themselves will readily join him in his first objection, to indiscriminate diffusion of the Bible among the Chinese. He gives two absolutely unanswerable reasons for his objection and they have been given so often that it is enough to merely quote them as a reminder, and pass on. "In the first place, the Bible contains many stories and many precepts which, apart from careful and judicious annotation, are revolting to the moral instincts of the Chinese. In the second place, it con tains much that is simply Greek to them. Christianity, considered as a philosophy,—indeed, with regard to the intricacies of Pauline theology, we may almost say a science,—has a termino+ logy of its own; and that term-sinology is simply wnmeaning to the uninstructed Chinese mind." It is not necessary to have lived in China twenty years to recall stories to illustrate these joints, even more striking ones than solid when fe animadverts on the im-Mr. Balfour gives. His ground is equally
perfections of the current. translations of the Bible, while doing full justice to the labour and scholarship that have been expended by missionaries upon the work.
Mr. Balfour's second matter is " the attitude which ought to be assumed by the Christian missionary towards the existing faiths of the people." His contention as to this is already accepted by the leading spirits among the present generation of missionaries, The missionaries of to-day are conservative reformers not radicals; they see that it is more profitable to adapt the existing fabrics, they do not try to level to the ground what they find existing and build entirely anew. We may pass over Mr. Balfour's little story of his personal experience at Nanking many years ago, when the China Inland Mission was in its youth, to note how deservedly he praises the work done by the medical missionaries, and by those who are de-direc ly in the schools, or indirectly by voting themselves to education, either
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.