As regards progress, therefore, the missionaries in India may well look back with thankfulness to the past and with hopefulness to the future. But some of my Hindu friends, when I first published these figures, correctly pointed out that they have another aspect. For, although the rate of increase is great, the net result is small indeed compared with the population of India. They hold that half a million Protestant converts out of two hundred and fifty millions of people is no source of alarm to Hinduism or Islam, and should be a subject of very modest self-gratulation to Christianity. They regard with equanimity this result as a moderate and natural product of the capital expended, and of the energy, ability, and really friendly nature of the agency employed. They point to their own religious activity during the same period, and to the larger totals which have been added to the two great native faiths. They have little fear of Christian effort in the future, because they believe that that effort, although strongly supported by money and made honourable by the lives and characters of its men, does not proceed upon lines likely to lead to important results. The Muhammadan ideal of a missionary is a lean old man with a staff and a couple of ragged disciples. Among the Hindus, for the past twenty-four hundred years, every preacher who would appeal to the popular heart must fulfil two conditions and conform to a certain type-he must cut himself off from the world by a solemn act, like the Great Renunciation of Buddha; and he must come forth from his solitary self-communings with a simple message to his fellow-men. Our missionaries do not seem to Indian thinkers to possess either of the initial qualifications necessary for any great awakening of the people.

Many years ago, when I lived in an Indian district, and looked out on the world with keen young eyes, I noted down certain personal observations which I may venture to reproduce here. The missionaries enjoyed the popular esteem accorded in India to men of letters and teachers of youth. They were even more highly regarded as the guides who had opened up the paths of Western knowledge, and who were still the pioneers of education among the backward races. The mission printing presses might almost be said to have created Bengali as a language of literary prose; and they had developed ruder tongues, like Santali or Assamese, into written vehicles of thought. But whatever might be the self-sacrifices of our missionaries, or the internal conflicts which they passed through, their lives did not appear in the light of a Great Renunciation. To the natives,' I wrote,

'the missionary seems to be a charitable Englishman who keeps an excellent cheap school, speaks the language well, preaches a European form of their old incarnations, and drives out his wife and little ones. in a pony-carriage. This friendly neighbour, this affectionate husband, this good man, is of an estimable type, of a type which has done much to raise the English character in the eyes of the natives,

but it is not the traditional type to which the popular preacher in India must conform. The missionary has neither the personal sanctity nor the simple message of the visionary who comes forth from his fastings and temptation in the forest. Instead, he has a dogmatic theology which, when he discusses it with the Brahmans, seems to the populace to resolve itself into a wrangle as to the comparative merits of the Hindu Triad and the European Trinity, and the comparative evidence for the incarnation of Krishna and the incarnation of Christ. The uneducated native prefers, if he is to have a triad and an incarnation, to keep his own ones. The educated native thinks that triads and incarnations belong to a state of mental development which he has passed.'

Since these words were written, a new form of missionary effort has arisen in India. The great Evangelical societies to whom the rapid progress of the past thirty years has been chiefly due go on with their work more actively than ever. But side by side with them, small Christian brotherhoods are springing up-ascetic fraternities living in common, and realising the Indian ideal of the religious life. In Bombay, in Calcutta, in Delhi, certain houses of Christian celibate brethren are becoming recognised centres of influence among the Indian university youth. They consist of English gentlemen of the highest culture, who have deliberately made up their minds to give their lives without payment to the work. They are indifferent to hardships, fearless of disease, extraordinarily patient of labour, and in no hurry to produce results. The Cambridge mission at Delhi has got into its hands the chief share in the University teaching in the ancient Mughal capital. Six hundred students in its college and a well-filled hostel attest the confidence which it has gained with the upper and educated classes, notwithstanding its public training of a constant supply of Christian native youth as masters for the provincial schools. The Oxford brethren in Calcutta, while conducting a purely Christian seminary, exert their special influence by discussions and personal interviews with the graduates and undergraduates of the University. Every afternoon a brother sits waiting to see any young man who cares to call, and to talk with him on any question which he chooses to start. If he wishes to be alone with the missionary, no one else is present: if two or three youths come together, the missionary is equally at their service. Some of these young men have told me of the patience, the humility, and the dexterous Socratic methods, with which their doubts and difficulties are treated. No one is pushed or hustled to desert his ancestral faith. But every one carries away material for deep reflection. Student clubs formed under the auspices of the Oxford brotherhood diffuse the effects produced by this private teaching. At their meetings and lectures the brethren meet the Calcutta undergraduates on the common ground of intellectual men interested in the subjects

of the day. Young Hindus at the University are anxious not only to listen to them, but to dwell together subject to strict moral regulations under their supervision, if the houses could be procured.

The relations of the Oxford fraternity to the natives are of the courteous Pauline type; the unclean-beast theory regarding nonChristian religions is conspicuously and conscientiously absent. When I was asked to become president of a Hindu society formed in connection with them, I thought it discreet to first look through the reports and epistles of the mission. From first to last I did not. come upon the word 'heathen.' One of the offshoots of this activity is a students' club for the critical study of Jesus Christ. I am informed that its members are, with a few exceptions, non-Christian graduates or undergraduates of the university. What should we think if a society arose among the English university youth to seriously and accurately inquire into the teaching of Buddha? The truth is that the example of these Oxford men's lives, their simple and unostentatious asceticism, their daily service to others without a thought of themselves, are creating a deep impression. Their deaths produce a deeper impression still. It would be unwise to overrate the narrow sphere within which they at present work. But it is difficult to over-estimate the value of their influence within that sphere. I myself do not expect that any Englishman, or any European, will in our days individually bring about a great Christian awakening in India. But I think it within reasonable probability that some native of India will spring up, whose life and preaching may lead to an accession on a great scale to the Christian Church. If such a man arises he will set in motion a mighty movement, whose consequences it is impossible to foresee. And I believe that, if ever he comes, he will be produced by influences and surroundings of which the Oxford brotherhood in Calcutta is at present the forerunner and prototype.

It is to be regretted that this new form of missionary effort was not represented at the Congress of last month. At the same time it is not difficult to appreciate the reasons which led the ascetic Christian brotherhoods, and several of the High-Church societies, to abstain from that public demonstration. One cannot help feeling that such gatherings sometimes fail to disclose the most genuine aspects of missionary work. In their eagerness to intensify enthusiasm and to prove their case, they are liable to lapse into methods not calculated to carry conviction to minds which are simply desirous to get at the facts. The first Open Conference, for example, dealt with a controversy which had filled many columns of the Times, and which has since occupied the thoughts of serious men in many lands. Is it true, or is it not true, that the non-Christian races of the world are being rapidly absorbed into Islam, and that Muhammadanism, by its discountenance of strong drink, exercises

on the whole a higher moral influence than Christianity? Here were distinct issues in regard to which dignitaries of the Church, experienced travellers, and others well qualified to speak, had ranged themselves on opposite sides. They were issues which delegates from the missonary societies of Europe and America had come to debate. Many of these gentlemen brought the careful observation of a lifetime to the subject, and a little pile of cards had been handed up to the chairman by those who wished to take part in the discussion. Yet, with the full knowledge that the time allowed for the meeting was strictly limited by the hands of the clock, certain zealous persons, in the body of the hall, insisted on interrupting the proceedings by a resolution demanding an interval for prayer. It is clearly right that such a meeting should commence and should close with an act of devotion. But it is most damaging to the missionary cause that a series of careful statements of evidence should be broken in upon by an irrelevant resolution of this sort. In any other class of meeting a chairman would decorously ignore such a proposal. But at Exeter Hall he is made to feel that this course is not open to him. A speaker who followed with a unique personal knowledge of the facts was coldly received, and some of the subsequent proceedings had a declamatory character adapted rather to elicit cheers than to leave behind conviction.

I am convinced that the really noble work done by the missionaries abroad often suffers, in the opinion of candid and serious men, from the methods employed at home. It suffers also from a vague but general impression that only a part of the evidence appears. It is well known that many experienced missionaries believe the chief obstacles to the spread of Christianity are to be found in certain degrading customs and institutions which make themselves specially prominent in Christian communities. Among this class of thinkers, the Professor of Chinese at Oxford holds a distinguished place. His thirty-four years of successful labour as a missionary, his erudition, his orthodoxy, and the unrivalled position which he holds as the translator and expounder of the sacred books of China, give weight and authority to his views. He holds that as long as Christianity presents itself infected with the bitter internal animosities of the Christian sects, and associated with the habits of drunkenness and the Social Evil conspicuous among Christian nations, it will not do its work, because it does not deserve to do its work, in the non-Christian world. When Professor Legge was asked to take part in the Centennial Conference, he explained that he would have to clearly put forward his convictions-with the result that he did not take part in it at all. It may be that some of the ground which he would have occupied lay beyond its scope, and could not be satisfactorily dealt with by it. But incidents like these, although perhaps isolated ones, tend to weaken the authority of such an assemblage, and to

create a suspicion among fair-minded men that they have not been placed in full possession of the facts.

I have thought it right to refer to these defects because I feel that I should be chargeable with the same one-sided advocacy if I feared to raise my voice against them. I think that the late Congress, in its fifty meetings, gave a true and, on the whole, an accurate and a complete presentment of missionary work. I know that its projectors and managers were sincerely desirous to overstate nothing and to conceal nothing. But I cannot help feeling that these good intentions were sometimes overborne by the old hankering after unctuous declamation which at one time made missionary statements sneered at even by clergymen, and suspected by all accurate critics, whether clerical or lay. The able biographer of Carey has acknowledged that occasion was given by at least one coadjutor of that truly great man for Sydney Smith's ridicule. The time has come for missionaries themselves, and for those who have watched the simple and noble spirit in which they labour, to protest against every form of exaggeration or insincerity in popular expositions of their work. They must purge their cause of bigotry and cant. Of bigotry, such as the injustice which some pious people in England do to the Roman Catholic clergy in India; to that great Church which is quietly and with small worldly means educating, disciplining, and consoling a Christian population three times more numerous than all the Protestant converts in India put together. Of cant, such as the tirades against caste and other indigenous institutions, which accomplish for a densely crowded tropical population what the Primitive Church did for its own little communities, and what later Christianity fails to effect, namely to support the poor without State aid. You may pass a whole life in contact with the missionaries who are doing the actual toil, without having to listen to a single insincerity. The results of their labour need neither overstatement nor concealment. I believe that those results justify the expenditure of money, and the devotion of the many lives, by which they are obtained. And I am convinced that, if Englishmen at home knew the missionaries simply as they are, there would be less doubt as to the merit of their claims and as to the genuine character of their work.

W. W. HUNTER.