Pitfalls to be Avoided Friday night's meeting of the Conference was devoted to a paper on the "National Christian Council viewed in the Light of Experience in other Lands." This was delivered by the Rev. J. H. Oldham, v.p., Secretary of the International Missionary Council. In the course of this he said that if the National Christian Council was to succeed it must be national, that was to say Chinese in its genius, outlook and expression.
He frequently received warnings from his Scottish friends that he must be careful not to become imhued too much with American ideas or infected with American methods because they were not suited to Scotland, and he was equally aware that if a scheme had too pronounced a British flavour it was at a disadvantage in the United - States. He was confident that it would not be possible for his friends in Scotland to carry out successfully a programme drawn up and handed to them by his friends in America, and he was nearly as sure that Americans as a whole would find it eaually difficult to adopt and carry out a policy framed by the Scottish mind. And therefore he could not believe that the Chinese were likely to be satisfied with or to work successfully something that foreigners had creat-
He hoped that China might soon have a Church Council in the fuller sense. But that was something entirely different from an advisory body. and any attempt to confuse the two things, or to do through the one what could only be done through the other, meant that they would miss their aim. As he understood, all that they proposed to do here was to create an advisory body as the China Continuation was. the only difference being that the Chinese churches would have a larger say in the appointment of that body and that it would concern itself more in the future with questions which interested the Chinese churches as d tinct from the problems of the missions. That was admittedly a limitation, but if they had a clear idea of what the instrument was that they were using and of what it could and what it could not do, he believed that they could in a few years make immense advances along these lines.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.