Customs.
[SirRobert Hart is the best known fo: eigner in China. His knowledge of things makes him authority on the various adni trative, social and religious questions w have lately vexed the Empire. While the Rev. Dr, "Arthur J. Brown was in Peking recently he had a Tong conversation on th missionary question in China with Sir Robert, who afterward put the substance of his re: marks into the form in which it is here printed. During his present. visit to the Orient as Secretary of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, Dr. Brown is acting as special correspondent of "The Great Round World."}
The missionary question is likely to re main a debated one for years to come, but in the meantime what we shall continue to sce is this: Christian countries will subscribe funds, Christian communities will supply volunteers, and devoted men and women will take their lives in their bands and carry the Gospel everywhere. In China missionaries will seek to do good according to their light, and in doing so the; will be followed by the defects of their qualities. Their labour will benefit many, but will probably offend more; and China being what it is, I think it would be well if their future marching orders could in some way suggest to them what they are not to do; not in the faulty form of a list of details, but in the handy and conve-ut shape of a principle.
The active benevolence of the Golden Rule, "Do unto others," ought to go hand in hand with the restraining common senso of its counterpart, "Do not." Missionaries ate grown-up people, and must be very much left to themselves to decide what duty requires at each step in their career. They carry with them the Master's orders, "Preach the Gospel to every creature that is their Divine commission, But they are also the agents of the societies which send them forth and support them, and every such society has indubitably the right to indicate the policy its envoys are to adopt and practise a3 men among men, and the "do not" axiom ought to be as liberally interpreted and as zealously followed as its mate,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.