Dee. Ir is confidently stated that within the next year or sv China is to be invaded out one thousand more missionaries of Protestant Eh i They are t of them young and which y journals, but the re few, and they do not realise ing aul sowing and weeding have to be done before auity one, would question should be presented to those who are going to devote their lives to such an arduous and uuthankfal task as converting the Chinese, if before tarting from home they were set to study on-Christian View of Hsi ailures", by a Veteran in the October number the sAstatic Quarterly Review, isa tremendous indictment, and is pub: lished not as the personal belief of the writer, but as a summary of what is; thought in the non-Christian East—by educated people—of Christian Missio The skilful general finds out by his spies the extent of the enemy's forces and their disposition before attacking them; and the missionary who wants to attack successfully what he calls heathenism " must enter into the wind, as it were, of his opponents, and examine their position from the inside; for thus only can he prepare his plan and execute it, with any prospect of success." Of the thousand missionaries who are said to be coming probably not ten will do this before they leave home; and so the first few years of their life in China will be spent in finding out what they have come to do and how to do it; and many of them will be beaten back discouraged for want of this preliminary knowledge. he writer of the article begins with an illustration, Ata Viceregal reception in Cal-cutty not long since there was one native official conspicuous as the only one who had come in entirely Indian costume, A flippant—aide-de-cam joked him on his conservati: "Thank you for your compliment, Sir!" was the reply. "We Orientals, you know, are very conservative. Our dress not only suits owr country, but our forefathers also have used it for untold centuries, long before yours had learned to de-cerate their naked bodies with woad and ochro." This is really the text of the article. 'I'he Eastern nations have had for centuries religions which have suited them, have been good and useful tothem. Christianity comes and asserts that it is the only true, good, and real religion. "It not only asserts its own goodness, but it claims goodness exclunity has never made any progress, says the writer, in a country which had a religion already, and, though it started in Asia, "it never crossed the Euphrates and tigris in force or permanently. Practically it does not exist even uow to the eastward of Mesopotania". It had its cradle in Judea, but it has never converted the Jews. For centuries its progress was continued to the Roman empire and the barbarian hordes who broke up and dismembered that empire; and it succeeded there because Greece and Rome and the barbarians of Europe had no religion, When it attacked Persia, Zoroastrianisia conquered it, though Zoroastrianism itself fell before the more nervous arm of Islam. When Mohammedanism came in contact with Christianity, it "wrested y, and still holds, all the north of Africa (where 200 bishops, we are told, once had sees), and many other places. Nothing, except Spain, has Christianity ever won back from Islam.
Materially, Mohammedanism tore way entire countries from Christiani and spiritually it inoculated Coustat tinople with iconoclasm." Christianity has been fighting Hindovism for 350 years, and now numbersunly 2,000,000 u0- minal adherents out of the 280,000,000 in India; and its reported converts include tens of thousands of Eurasians, who are not Christians at all, "many thousands who during childhood have been purchased—absolutely bought and Christiauised—during -the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.