Indian tribes. The Unitas Fratrum, or Moravian Brotherhood, which has since won the admiration of Christendom, commenced its missionary labours in 1732 among the slaves of the Danish West Indies, and well earned the official support which the Government of Denmark long gave to evangelistic enterprise. George the First of England addressed a royal letter to the missionaries at Tranquebar.

The ascendency of the East India Company gradually arrayed the policy of Great Britain against attempts at proselytism, until at length Carey, at the end of the last century, founded missionary work definitely on its proper basis of private Christian effort. No sensible man would now propose that the State should interfere; in India any such interference would be a political crime. But this should not make Englishmen blind to the fact that missionaries, especially in India, are doing a really national work; a work not necessarily of conversion, but of conciliation and concord. In spite of occasional disagreements, the missionaries are recognised by the natives as a spiritual link between the governing race and the governed. I believe that the three quarters of a million subscribed for missionary work in India strengthens England's position in that country in a greater measure than if the entire sum were handed over to the Government to be expended on education, or on the army, or on any administrative improvement whatsoever.

An important change has come over the methods of missionary work. It is not very long ago since the popular conception of the missionary, derived from many a frontispiece and vignette, was an excited preacher under a palm-tree. A half ring of blacks of a low physical type listened in attitudes of admiration. This may at one time have represented the facts; it may still represent the facts in parts of the world of which I have no knowledge. But in the great fields of missionary labour, in China, India, and throughout the Muhammadan countries-that is to say, in regard to the religions whose followers outnumber by eightfold the whole Protestant population of the world-it is a mere travesty of the truth. A merely zealous preacher would there find himself surrounded by no gaping circle of admirers, but by amused and caustic critics. As a matter of statistics, the old-fashioned form of 'simple preaching' failed to produce adequate results wherever it came in contact with educated races. Nearly three-quarters of the century commemorated by the International Conference had passed away, leaving only 14,000 Protestant native communicants in India. During the last thirty years more scientific methods gradually developed, and the number of native communicants increased close on tenfold to 138,000. Simple preaching often hit hard, and many a random shot told. But the leaders of the church militant now perceive that the Christian campaign must be fought with weapons of precision. During the last

twenty-five years the study of the Science of Religion, or, speaking more accurately, of the histories of religions, has profoundly modified missionary methods.

That study has led the world, and is compelling the Church, to acknowledge the good in other faiths. It has disclosed the services. which all the greater religions have performed for mankind, the binding power which they supplied to the feeble social organisations of ancient days, the support which they gave to the nascent moral sense, the function which they have discharged in developing the ideas of national obligation and of domestic duty. It was these religions that removed the most important relationships of life, alike in the family and in the State, from the caprice of individual option, and gave security to human intercourse by sanctions which the individual man did not dare to challenge. For a moment it seemed that this recognition of the noble aspects of other faiths might enervate the energies of our own. One still remembers when Buddhism almost promised to become a fashion at Oxford, and only last autumn a Canon of York eloquently declared the merits of Muhammadanism in the Times. But all great religions, and especially the Christian religion, have proved that zeal is not incompatible with knowledge. Indeed, without the capacity for solving this permanent problem, no creed could continue great. The Science of Religion has now stated its main conclusions; but Christian missionary effort has enormously increased in volume, and has distinctly improved in character, quality, and results. It is by no accident that the editor of the Sacred Books of the East is also the author of the Universal Missionary Alphabet. Between the missionary conceptions of the beginning of the century and of the present day there is all the difference between St. Peter at Joppa and St. Paul on Mars' Hill. In the non-Christian religions the early Protestant missionaries beheld only unclean things, four-footed beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. The modern missionary to the Hindus takes the tone in which the great proselytising apostle addressed the Brahmans of Europe at Athens; he quotes their literature, and starting from their devotions at their own altars, he labours to supplant an ignorant worship by an enlightened faith.

This is not the place, and I am not the person, to treat of the theological aspects of missionary work. But the Science of Religion, or more correctly the study of the development of religions, has armed the missionary with new weapons. In controversial combats, it enables him to wield the sharp blade of historical criticism with an effectiveness hitherto unknown. In dealing with individual inquirers, it qualifies him to point out how the venerable structure of their ancestral belief was no supernatural edifice let down from heaven, but was distinctly and consciously put together at as

certained periods by human hands. In popular appeals, it gives him the means of accurately and powerfully pressing home the claims of the religion which he advocates as against those which he would. supersede. For the great religions of the world took their present form in ages when mankind was very unhappy. In the East the logic of extremes accepted, once and for all, the conclusion that existence is in itself a long suffering, and extinction the sole deliverance. Hinduism and Buddhism embodied their deep despondency in different terms-Liberation, Absorption, or the Blowing-out of one's Being as a woman blows out a lamp. But underlying all their euphemisms is the one conviction that life is not, and cannot be, worth living. Christianity avoided the difficulty arising from the obvious miseries of mankind by another answer. From the first it declared that life might become worth living, if not here yet elsewhere; and the later developments of Christianity have directed their energies to make life worth living here also. Apart from other aspects, Christianity as a help to humanity is a religion of effort and hope; Hinduism and Buddhism are religions of resigned acceptance or of despair. They were true interpreters of Asiatic man's despondency of the possibilities of existence, in the age in which they arose. They are growing to be fundamentally at variance with the new life which we are awakening in India. I believe that Hinduism is still sufficiently plastic to adapt itself to this new world; that it has in it enough of the vis medicatrix naturæ to cast disused doctrines, and to develop new ones. But the process must be slow and difficult. Christianity comes to the Indian races in an age of new activity and hopefulness, as a fully equipped religion of effort and of hope. And it comes to them in a spirit of conciliation which it did not disclose before. It thus presents its two most practical claims on human acceptance. For, although to a fortunate minority Christianity may be a religion of faith, yet I think that to most of us it is rather a religion of hope and of charity.

I should not be candid if I left the impression that I expect, even with the present improved missionary methods, any large accession from orthodox Hinduism or Islam to the Christian Church. It is rather from the low castes and the so-called aboriginal peoples that I believe direct conversions will chiefly come. At this moment there are fifty millions of human beings in India sitting abject on the outskirts of Hinduism, or beyond its pale, who within the next fifty years will incorporate themselves in one or other of the higher faiths. Speaking humanly, it rests with Christian men and women in England, and with Christian missionaries in India, whether a great proportion of these fifty millions shall accept Christianity or Hinduism or Islam. But, apart from direct conversion, the indirect influence of missionaries is a factor of increasing power in the religious future of India. The growth of new theistic sects among the Hindus, such as

the Brahmo Samaj, under the impulse of Christian teaching, has long been a familiar phenomenon. The Centennial Missionary Conference brought to light corresponding movements among the Muhammadans. The account given by an eye-witness, of exceptional opportunities for observation, and of most commendable caution in statement, regarding the growth of a critical historical school among the Muhammadans in Southern India was very significant. In Islam, as in Hinduism, there is an enlightened party who are shaking off the trammels of old superstitions, and are labouring to bring their hereditary faith into accord with the requirements of the times. The treatises which Indian Muhammadans have lately published to disprove the formerly accepted duty of Jihad, or war against the unbelievers, indicate a political aspect of the new school. It would be untrue to allege that the new school, either among the Hindus or the Muhammadans, show a tendency to accept the Christian faith. It would be hazardous to assert that they are a direct outcome of missionary teaching. But it is certain that the leader of the new Muhammadan school in the south, and the chief Hindu reformers in the north, are men who have been in close contact with missionaries, and who, both as to the methods employed and the results obtained, are powerful, even when unwilling, witnesses to missionary influence.

To the more enthusiastic advocates of Christian proselytism such a statement may seem vague and perhaps discouraging. But any gain in precision could only be attained by a sacrifice of accuracy. In a country like India, where many new influences are at work, it is not safe to single out any one of them as the cause of complex religious and national movements. We only know that the State does not and cannot give spiritual teaching in its schools; and that, as respects the higher education of the people, the missionary colleges alone redeem Western instruction from its purely secular character. We also know that the modern Indian reformers, whether of Hinduism, or of Islam, or of social hardships like those inflicted by child marriage and the enforced celibacy of widows, are almost invariably men who have been educated in missionary schools or colleges, or who in adult life have deeply conversed with missionaries on the subjects in regard to which they stand forth to lead and enlighten their countrymen. The indirect results of a great spiritual influence, like that of the missionaries, among a susceptible and profoundly religious Asiatic people, do not admit of being expressed in compact formulæ. At the same time I feel that both the supporters and the critics of missionary enterprise have a right to demand some statement of direct results. I shall therefore take the country with reference to which I have personal knowledge, the largest field of missionary labour in the world, and almost the only one in which we can test missionary statistics by a periodical census conducted by

official experts. I shall briefly state the facts of missionary progress in India from 1851 to 1881. These thirty years include the whole period for which verified statistics exist, down to the most recent census.

In 1851, the Protestant missions in India and Burma had 222 stations; in 1881, their stations had increased nearly three-fold to 601. But the number of their churches or congregations had, during the same thirty years, multiplied from 267 to 4,180, or over fifteenfold. There is not only a vast increase in the number of the stations, but also a still greater increase in the work done by each station within itself. In the same way, while the number of native Protestant Christians increased from 91,092 in 1851, to 492,882 in 1881, or five-fold, the number of communicants increased from 14,661 to 138,254, or nearly ten-fold. The progress is again, therefore, not alone in numbers, but also in pastoral care and internal discipline. During the same thirty years, the pupils in mission schools multiplied by three-fold, from 64,043 to 196,360. These enormous increments have been obtained by making a larger use of native agency. A native Protestant Church has, in truth, grown up in India, capable of supplying, in a large measure, its own staff. In 1851 there were only 21 ordained native ministers; by 1881 they had increased to 575, or twenty-sevenfold. The number of native lay preachers had risen during thirty years from 493 to the vast total of 2,856. In the opinion of the most cautious of the Anglo-Indian bishops, the time is close at hand or has already arrived, when this great body of Indian converts and of Indian clergy and lay preachers ought to be represented in the episcopate. It is hoped that the Pan-Anglican Synod, now assembling at Canterbury, will find itself able to come to some distinct declaration regarding the appointment of native bishops for the native Church of India.

The foregoing figures are compiled from returns carefully collected from every missionary station in India and Burmah. The official census, notwithstanding its obscurities of classification and the disturbing effects of the famine of 1877, attests the rapid increase of the Christian population. So far as these disturbing influences allow of an inference for all British India, the normal rate of increase among the general population was about 8 per cent. from 1872 to 1881, while the actual rate of the Christian population was over 30 per cent. But, taking the lieutenant-governorship of Bengal as the greatest province outside the famine area of 1877, and for whose population, amounting to one-third of the whole of British India, really comparable statistics exist, the census results are clear. The general population increased in the nine years preceding 1881 at the rate of 10.89 per cent., the Muhammadans at the rate of 10.96 per cent., the Hindus at some undetermined rate below 13.64 per cent., the Christians of all races at the rate of 40.71 per cent., and the native Christians at the rate of 64.07 per cent.