Church Societies, while expressing their sympathy, preferred not to send members. But with this exception, the International Conference seems to have fairly represented the sense of Protestant Christianity on the issues involved.

The first result of its scrutiny is to bring out certain fundamental differences in the problem of proselytism at the beginning and at the close of the period under its review. During the hundred years, the convictions of Christendom in regard to missionary work have undergone a profound change. When Carey, the father of Protestant missions in Bengal, propounded at the meeting of Baptist ministers a century ago the duty of preaching the Gospel to the heathen,' the aged president is said to have sprung up in displeasure and shouted: Young man, sit down. When God pleases to convert the heathen He will do it without your aid or mine.' A second Pentecost, he thought, must precede such a work. To another pious Nonconformist divine the proposal suggested the thought, 'If the Lord would make windows in heaven might this thing be.' Ministers of the Kirk of Scotland, which has since laboured so nobly for the education of India, pronounced the idea to be 'highly preposterous,' and extolled the simple virtues of the untutored savage. A Bishop of the Church of England, the Church whose missionaries now compass the earth, argued publicly and powerfully in opposition to such schemes. The British nation as represented in Parliament declared against them. Its servants in the East regarded the missionaries as dangerous breakers of the law. But for the benevolence of a Hindu money-changer the first English missionary family in Bengal would at one time have been without a roof. But for the courage of a petty Danish governor, the next missionary party would have been seized by our authorities in Calcutta and shipped back to Europe. A hundred years ago the sense of the Churches, the policy of Parliament, the instinct of selfpreservation among the Englishmen who were doing England's work in distant lands, were all arrayed against the missionary idea.

The missionaries had to encounter not less hostile, and certainly better founded, prejudices among the non-Christian peoples to whom they went. For until a century ago the white man had brought no blessing to the darker nations of the earth. During three hundred years he had been the despoiler, the enslaver, the exterminator of the simpler races. The bright and brief episode in Pennsylvania stands out against a grim background of oppression and wrong. In America, ancient kingdoms and civilisations had been trodden out beneath the hoofs of the Spanish horse. In Africa, the white man had organised a great export trade in human flesh. In South Asia, cities had been sacked, districts devastated, by the Portuguese. Throughout the Eastern Ocean, the best of the nations of Europe appeared as rapacious traders, the worst of them as pirates and

buccaneers. In India, which was destined to be the chief field of missionary labour, the power had passed to the English without the sense of responsibility for using their power aright. During a whole generation the natives had learned to regard us as a people whose arms it was impossible to resist, and to whose mercy it was useless to appeal. Even the retired slavetrader of Bristol looked askance at the retired nabob from Bengal.

But just before the beginning of the century of missionary labour commemorated last month, Englishmen at home had grown alive to the wrongs which were being done in their name. And with this awakening of the political conscience of England, the religious conscience of England also awoke. At that time and ever since, the missionary impulse has been intimately associated with the national resolve to act rightly by the peoples who have come under our sway. During a hundred years, the missionaries have marched in the van of the noblest movements of England. In the abolition of slavery, in the education of India, in the exposure of the liquor traffic which is bringing ruin to the African races, in the protection of the aboriginal tribes for whose welfare England has made herself responsible in many parts of the world, the missionary voice has uniformly expressed the moral sense of the nation. It is because I recognise in missionary work an expiation of national wrong-doing in the past, and an aid to national right-doing in the future, because I honestly believe that the missionary instinct forms the necessary spiritual complement of the aggressive genius of our English race, that I, a plain secular person, venture in this Review to address persons like myself.

Whatever may be the statistical results of missionary labour, missionaries hold a very different position, in the opinion alike of Christendom and of the non-Christian peoples, from that which they held a hundred years ago. Many competent critics, clerical and lay, still decline to unreservedly accept their statements. But the character of the criticism to which those statements are subjected has changed. Sydney Smith's sneers at 'the religious hoy riding at anchor in the Hugli river' would now be regarded not only as in bad taste, but also as irrelevant. The majority of Englishmen are fairly satisfied that the work is in the right direction, and only doubtful as to the practical results. The ancient seats of orthodoxy which were the strongholds of contemptuous indifference to the missionary idea now send missions of their own. The Universities' Mission to Central Africa has its stations from among the rescued slaves of Zanzibar, inland to the very source of the slave-trade, and is training up a native ministry in its own theological college. The Oxford Brotherhood in Calcutta discloses the strange spectacle of men of birth and scholarship living in common a life of apostolic simplicity and self-sacrifice. The Cambridge brethren at Delhi present a not less attractive

picture of culture and piety. Medical missionaries represent the hard-headed University intellect of the North. The missionary idea, once popularly associated with the Chadbands and Little Bethels, has taken root in our public schools. Eton has its vigorous and most practical mission to the East of London; Harrow, Winchester, Charterhouse, Clifton, Marlborough, Haileybury, Wellington, and many other of our great seminaries of manliness and learning, each supports its own special work. The Year Book of the Church of England gives the details of twenty-six Public School and College Missions, including several foreign ones, besides the three Oxford and Cambridge Missions mentioned above. The nation at large recognises with increasing liberality, if not with assured confidence, the claims of missionary effort. Carey's collection of 13l. 2s. 6d. with which to convert the heathen' a century ago, has grown into an annual income of 2 millions sterling from Protestant Christendom. The two half-starved preachers making indigo for a livelihood in 1795 have multiplied into an admirably equipped and strongly organised force of 6,000 missionaries, aided by a trained native army of 30,000 auxiliaries engaged in active work. Three million converts, or children of converts, have been added to Protestant Christianity within the hundred years.

Let us clearly understand what this last statement implies. Protestant apologists are accustomed to add up the number of the Protestant nations and confessions in the world, and to display the total as the strength of the Protestant Church. But we are assured by more careful statists that the actual number even of professing Protestants-that is to say, of real or nominal communicants-does not exceed 30,000,000. If this estimate be correct, the 3,000,000 converts from non-Christian religions assume a new significance. For it discloses not only that Protestant Christianity has received an enormous numerical increase of 3,000,000 converts, but also that this increase bears an important ratio to the actual Protestant Church. So far as can be inferred from the available data, the statistical probability is that the darker races will within the next century constitute a very large proportion of the professing Protestants in the world. For the increase has of late years gone on with cumulative velocity. The missionaries claim, indeed, that their hundred years of labour have produced numerical results not inferior to the first century of Christianity. A comparison of this kind lies. beyond the range of ascertained statistics. It receives countenance, however, from several more cautious inductions. The late Governor of the Punjab, a scholar and a careful thinker, comes to the conclusion that at no other period since the apostolic age has conversion gone on so quickly. In another great province of India, in which we can absolutely verify the rate of progress, the native Christians are increasing six times more rapidly than the general population.

VOL. XXIV.-No. 137.

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To a man like myself who, during a quarter of a century, has watched the missionaries actually at their work, the statistics of conversions seem to form but a small part of the evidence. The advance which the missionaries have made in the good opinion of great nonChristian populations well qualified to judge, such as those of India and China, is even more significant than their advance in the good opinion of sensible people at home. I shall speak only of facts within my own knowledge. But I know of no class of Englishmen who have done so much to render the name of England, apart from the power of England, respected in India as the missionaries. I know of no class of Englishmen who have done so much to make the better side of the English character understood. I know of no class who have done so much to awaken the Indian intellect, and at the same time to lessen the dangers of the transition from the old state of things to the new. The missionaries have had their reward. No class of Englishmen receive so much unbought kindness from the Indian people while they live; no individual Englishmen are so honestly regretted when they die. What aged Viceroy ever received the posthumous honours of affection accorded to the Presbyterian Duff by the whole Native Press? What youthful administrator has in our days been mourned for by the educated non-Christian community as the young Oxford ascetic was mourned in Calcutta last summer? It matters not to what sect a missionary belongs. An orthodox Hindu newspaper, which had been filling its columns with a vigorous polemic entitled 'Christianity Destroyed,' no sooner heard of the death of Mr. Sherring than it published a eulogium on that missionary scholar. It dwelt on his learning, affability, solidity, piety, benevolence, and business capacity.' The editor, while a stout defender of his hereditary faith, regretted that 'so little of Mr. Sherring's teaching had fallen to his lot.' This was written of a man who had spent his life in controversy with the uncompromising Brahmanism of Benares. But the missionary has won for himself the same respect in the South as in the North. If I were asked to name the two men who, during my service in India, have exercised the greatest influence on native development and native opinion in Madras, I should name, not a governor, nor any departmental head, but a missionary Bishop of the Church of England, and a missionary educator of the Scottish Free Kirk.

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It is considerations of this class that lead many Indian administrators to bear public testimony in favour of missionary work. careless onlooker may have no particular convictions on the subject, and flippant persons may ridicule religious effort in India as elsewhere. But I think that few Indian administrators have passed through high office, and had to deal with the ultimate problems of British government in that country, without feeling the value of the work done by the missionaries. Such men gradually realise,

as I have realised, that the missionaries do really represent the spiritual side of the new civilisation and of the new life which we are introducing into India. This view is not the product of a Clapham clique, or of any narrow Evangelical tradition. It is possible that down to a certain period, zeal rather than judgment may have influenced some of the witnesses, although the shrewd and hard sense of Lord Lawrence would certainly have laid bare imposture or exaggeration of whatever sort. But for twenty years the old Clapham Evangelicalism has been a discredited, and latterly almost a defunct, tradition in India, so far as the great body of the officials are concerned. The opinion of a Viceroy like Lord Northbrook, or of a clear-headed administrator like Robert Cust, on the actual value of Indian missionary work is beyond suspicion. Such men range themselves unhesitatingly, as at the late International Conference, on the side of the missionaries. But if you closely watch them, you will find that whenever the spirit of bigotry is in the air they keep out of the way. They never make themselves a party to exaggeration; and if their authority is cited to support views of which they disapprove, they do not fear to protest. One of these gentlemen, at the risk of severing the ties of a lifetime, lately stood forth to unhesitatingly expose what he believed to be the over-statements of the party to which he belonged. I have mentioned two names, because these names are public property in regard to missionary work. But they only form prominent names among a large body of Indian administrators who are deliberately convinced that the missionaries are doing for England the very best work which any private Englishmen can do in India. Mr. Cust took as the motto of his memorable missionary lecture to the youth of Oxford, Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.

This national aspect of missionary work has been rather lost sight of amid the outburst of evangelical enthusiasm during the present century. But it is not a new view. Each of the great European nations who went forth to conquer the world in turn recognised the importance of disclosing the spiritual as well as the material side of its character to the subjected races. Religious instruction not less than military aggrandisement formed the basis of the Portuguese policy in India. Saint Francis Xavier wrote solemnly to King John in 1548 urging that the obligation of spreading Christianity' rests upon the Viceroy,' and begging his Majesty to bind himself by oath to punish governors who neglected this duty with close imprisonment for many years.' In the next century, when the Dutch expelled the Portuguese from Ceylon, they established the reformed religion in that island, and required the conformity of the natives as a condition of civil employment. In 1649 the English Parliament passed an Act creating a Corporation for the Promoting and Propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ in New England' among the