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THE IMPORTANCE OF A DOMINANT PURPOSE.

The modern demand for intelligent co-operation The same demand in relation to Foreign Missions The need for a definition of purpose The failure of our present reports in this respect Is definition of purpose desirable? It is necessary for formulation of policy Societies with limited incomes cannot afford to pursue every good object The admission of diverse purposes has blurred the purpose of Medical Missions The admission of diverse purposes has confused the administration of Educational Missions The admission of diverse purposes has distracted Evangelistic Missions Hence the absence of unity in the work Hence the tendency to support details rather than the whole The need for a dominant purpose and expression of relations The need for a statement of factors which govern action The need for a missionary survey which expresses the facts in relation This demand is not unreasonable

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.

SURVEY OF THE STATION AND ITS DISTRICT.

The Work to be Done, and the Force to Do it.

THE EMPHASIS LAID UPON DIFFERENT TYPES OF WORK.

THE MEDICAL WORK IN THE STATION DISTRICT.

The tendency to treat medical and educational work as distinct from evangelistic Medical and educational boards and their surveys The difficulty of determining the aim of the medical mission First of medical missions as designed to meet a distinct medical need Two tables designed to present the medical force in relation to area and population The necessity of considering non-missionary medical work in this connection The extent of the work done in the year Then of the medical mission as designed to assist evangelistic work The extent to which evangelists work with the medicals Caution as regards the use of this table The extent to which medicals assist the evangelists outside the institutions The extent to which the evangelistic influence of the hospital can be traced

EDUCATIONAL WORK IN THE STATION DISTRICT.

The difficulty of determining the aim of educational missions The difficulty presented by different grades and standards The reason for excluding Colleges and Normal Schools at this stage First of the educational mission as designed to meet a distinct educational need Two tables designed to present the educational work in relation to area and population The necessity of considering non-missionary educational work The existence of non-missionary schools may either increase the need for missionary schools or decrease it The extent to which education is provided for the better educated and the more illiterate The extent to which education is provided for boys and girls, for Christian and non-Christian scholars The extent to which mission schools receive Government grants throws light on their character and purpose The extent to which education is provided for illiterate adults The importance of this The importance of the distinction between Christians and non-Christians in this table Then of the educational mission as designed to assist evangelistic work The extent to which evangelists work with the educationalists in schools Caution needed in the use of this table The extent to which educationalists work with evangelists outside schools The importance of the work done by educationalists outside the schools The immediate evangelistic results of education given The difficulty The table proposed The support given by the Natives to medical and educational work

CO-OPERATION.

The importance of the relation between the different parts of the mission The relations already expressed in earlier tables The chief difficulty lies in the relationship between medicals and educationalists The importance of medical work in schools The table showing the work of medicals in connection with schools The importance of educational work in hospitals The table showing the work of educationalists in hospitals Summary of co-operation between evangelists, medicals, and educationalists

THE NATIVE CHURCH.

The end of the station, a Native Church This end a condition into which the Church must be growing Survey must therefore deal with the Native Church The reason for beginning with self-support The meaning of self-supporting Churches In rare cases it means independence of external support In most cases it means attainment of an arbitrary standard In most cases it does not represent the power of the people to supply their own needs In most cases it is not sure evidence of growing liberality Nevertheless we must begin by considering the self-supporting Churches We ask for proportion of self-supporting Churches This will not reveal the power of the Churches to stand alone We inquire then the proportion of inquirers in self-supporting Churches We inquire then the proportion of unpaid workers in self-supporting Churches Where self-supporting Churches are not recognised we inquire--

Power of Christians to conduct their own services Power to order Church government Power to provide expenses of Church organisation

SURVEY OF DISTRICTS WHERE TWO OR MORE SOCIETIES ARE AT WORK. SURVEY OF MISSIONS WITH NO DEFINED DISTRICTS.

SURVEY OF THE WORK IN A PROVINCE.

THE RELATION OF THE STATION TO THE WORLD.

A world-wide work can only be conducted on world-wide principles These world-wide principles must govern the work in every part, however small No country, however large, can be an isolated unit from missionary point of view How shall we gain a view of this large whole? We suggest that four tables would suffice for our purpose:-- A table showing the force at work in relation to population A table designed to reveal something of the character and power of the force A table showing the relative strength expended in evangelistic, medical, and educational work A table showing the extent to which the native Christians support existing work This is only a tentative suggestion proposed to invite criticism

THE IMPORTANCE OF A DOMINANT PURPOSE.

It is a marked characteristic of our age that every appeal for an expression of energy should be an intellectual appeal. Emotional appeals are of course made, and made with tremendous force, but, with the emotional appeal, an emphasis is laid to-day upon the intellectual apprehension of the meaning of the effort demanded which is something quite new to us. Soldiers in the ranks have the objective of their attack explained to them, and this explanation has a great influence over the character and quality of the effort which they put forth. Labourers demand and expect every day a larger and fuller understanding of the meaning of the work which they are asked to perform. They need to enjoy the intellectual apprehension of the larger aspects of the work, and the relation of their own detailed operations to those larger aspects; and it is commonly recognised that the understanding of the meaning and purpose of the detail upon which each operative may be engaged is a most powerful incentive to good work. In the past leaders relied more upon implicit, unreasoning obedience, supported often by affection for the leader's own character, and profound trust in his wisdom, and a general hope of advantage for each individual who carried out orders unhesitatingly and exactly; but they did not think it necessary, or even desirable, that the common workers should understand their plans and act in intelligent co-operation with them: to-day, intelligent co-operation is prized as it has never been prized before, and its value is realised as it has never been realised before.

If this is true in the world of arms, of labour, of commerce, it is equally true in the world of foreign missions. The common worker, the subscriber, the daily labourer, is beginning to demand that he shall be allowed to take an intelligent part in the work, and missionary leaders are beginning to see the importance of securing intelligent co-operation. In the past the appeal has been rather to blind obedience, and immense stress has been laid upon the "command"; the appeal has been to the emotions, and love for Christ, love for the souls of men, hope of eternal blessings, hope of the coming of the Kingdom, and trust in the wisdom of great missionary leaders or committees, have been thought sufficient to inspire all to put forth their best efforts; but to-day, as in the labour world, as in commerce, as in the army, so in the world of missions, the intellect is taking a new place. Men want to understand why and how their work assists towards the attainment of the goal, they want to know what they are doing, they want to understand the plan and to see their work influencing the accomplishment of the plan.

It is no doubt true that the demand for intelligent co-operation, both on the part of the subscribers and workers on the one side and of the great leaders and boards of directors on the other, is at present slight, weak, uncertain and hesitating; but it is already beginning to make itself felt, and must increase. Certainly it is true that the support of a very large body of men is lost because they have never yet been able to understand the work of foreign missions. They are accustomed in their daily business to "know what they are driving at," and to relate their action to definite ends; and they have not seen foreign missions directed to the attainment of definite ends. They have not seen in them any clear dominant purpose to which they could relate the manifold activities of the missionaries whom they were asked to support; and they cannot give to the vague and chaotic that support which they might give to work which they saw clearly to be directed to the attainment of a great goal which they desired by a policy which they understood. The attitude of these men is the attitude of those who await an intelligent appeal to their intelligence.

For a true understanding of foreign missions it is necessary first that their aim and object should be clearly defined. Without such a definition intelligent co-operation is impossible. Unless the objective is understood men cannot estimate the value of their work. They cannot trace progress unless they can see clearly the end to be attained; they cannot zealously support action unless they are persuaded that the action is truly designed to attain the defined end. There may indeed be many subordinate objects, and men may be asked to work for the attainment of any one of these, but there ought to be one final end and purpose which governs all, and intelligent co-operation involves the appreciation of the relation between the subordinate and the final end. Consequently if many objects are set before us, as they are in our foreign missions, it is essential that these many purposes and objects should be presented to us not simply as ends to be attained, but in their relation to one another and in their relation to the final end which the directors of our missions have clearly before their eyes.

Now it is just at this point that we fail to attain satisfaction. All societies publish reports and statistics, but the reports and statistics do not provide us with any clear and intelligible account of progress towards any definite end. They seem rather designed to attract and to appeal to our sympathy than to satisfy our intelligence. They set before us all kinds of work unrelated, indefinite, changeable, and changing from year to year, as though the compilers selected from the letters of missionaries any striking statements which they thought would attract support in themselves and by themselves. No goal is set before us, and the progress towards that goal steadily traced from year to year; still less is the relation between the different methods and means employed to attain each subordinate objective expressed so that we can see, not only what progress each is making towards its own immediate end, but what is the effective value of all together towards the attainment of a final end to which they all contribute.

So long as foreign missions are presented to us in that way, so long as any mission may serve any purpose, we cannot possibly take any intelligent share in foreign missions as a whole. We are lost. We cannot co-ordinate in thought the activities of the missions, as we see plainly that they are not co-ordinated in action in the field itself. And it is practically impossible for us to imagine that the missions are directed on any thought-out policy, because a policy seems to involve necessarily the sub-ordination of the aim deemed to be less important to another which is deemed to be more important, and the less or the more must depend, not upon personal predilections, but upon closeness of relation to some one dominant idea; and, therefore, the definition of the dominant idea is the first necessity for the establishment of a reasonable missionary policy.

To some minds the idea of a policy in connection with missions seems to be abhorrent; but can a society with an income of something between half and a quarter of a million pounds, or even less, afford to aim at every type and form of missionary activity? Is it not necessary that it should know and express to itself, to its missionaries, and to its supporters what forms of activity it deems essential, what less important, what aims it will pursue with all its strength, and what it will refuse to pursue at all? It cannot afford to pursue every good or desirable object which it may meet in its course. It must have a dominant purpose which really controls its operations, and forces it to set aside some great and noble actions because they are not so closely related to the dominant purpose as some other.

A society with the limited resources which most of us lament cannot do everything. In medicine it cannot afford to aim at a strictly evangelistic use of its medical missions and at a use which is not strictly evangelistic. We hear men talk sometimes as if it were the business of a missionary society to undertake the task of healing the physical afflictions of the people almost in the same sense as it is the business of a missionary society to seek to heal their souls. We hear them talk sometimes as if it was the duty of a missionary society to supplant the native medical practice by western medical science as surely as it is their business to supplant idolatry by the preaching of Christ. And the tolerance of these ideas has certainly influenced the direction of missions. The evangelistic value of medical missions has not been the one dominant directing principle in their administration, and the consequences have been confusion of aim and waste of power. Nor has any other dominant purpose taken control; no other purpose, philanthropic, social, or economic, ever will take control so long as the vast majority of the supporters of foreign missions are people whose one real desire is the salvation of men in Christ. But the admission of another purpose has blurred the aim.

Because they have been pioneers in education, missions earn large praise and not in-considerable support from governors and philanthropists; but they have sometimes paid for these praises and grants dearly in confusion of aim. Many of them started with the intention of relating their educational work very closely to their evangelistic work; but because the evangelistic idea was not dominant, a government grant sometimes led the educational mission far from its first objective. Similarly, the establishment of great educational institutions altered the whole policy of a mission over very large areas, because no dominant purpose controlled the action of the mission authorities. The institutions demanded such large support, financial and personal, that when once they had been founded they tended to draw into themselves a very large proportion of the best men who joined the mission. In this way a great educational institution has often altered the policy of a mission to an extent which its original founders never anticipated, and a mission which was designed primarily to be an evangelistic mission has been compelled not only to check advance, but even to withdraw its evangelistic workers and to close its outstations. But that was not the intention of the founders of the institution. The difficulty arose because there was no dominant purpose which governed the direction of the mission. There was no purpose so strong and clear that it could prevent the foundation of, or close when founded, an institution which was leading it far from its primary object.

Again it is notorious that what we call the work of the evangelistic missionary is so manifold and variegated that it includes every kind of activity, every sort of social and economic reform. Our evangelistic missionaries are busy about everything, from itinerant preaching to the establishment of banks and asylums. Can we afford it? What purpose is dominant, what aim really governs the policy of those who send out evangelistic missionaries? What decides the form of their work and the method by which they pursue it? It is hard to guess, it is hard to discover, it is hard to understand.

Now when our missions are presented to us and we are asked to support them on all sorts of grounds, as though a society with its slight funds could really successfully practise every kind of philanthropic work, we begin to doubt whether it can really be wisely guided. Each mission station, each institution, seems to be an isolated fragment. The missionary in charge often appeals to us as an exceedingly good and able man, and we support him, and we support the society which sends him and others like him. And we call this the support of foreign missions; but foreign missions as a unity we do not support because we can see no unity. The directors of foreign missions appear not to have hitched their wagon to a star, but rather to all the visible stars, and we cannot tell whither they are going. So we fall back on the individual missionary, or the isolated mission which at any rate for the moment seems to have an intelligible objective.

Hence the common conception of missionary work as small. We look at the parts, and the smallest parts, because our minds instinctively seek a unity, and only in the parts do we find a unity, nor there often, unless we concentrate our attention on one aspect of the work. But by thinking of foreign missions in this small way and speaking of them in this small way, we alienate men who are accustomed to think in large terms of large undertakings designed on large policies.

What we need to-day is to understand foreign missions as a whole. We want to take an intelligent part in them viewed as a unity. We want to know what is the grand objective and how the parts are related to that end. We do not want merely to support this mission because this missionary appeals to us; we want to know what dominant purpose governs the activities of the different societies, directs, and controls them, deciding what work good and excellent in itself the mission cannot afford to undertake, what it can and must do with the means at its disposal in order to attain an end which it has deliberately adopted.

We need more, we need to know on what principles the missionaries are sent here or there. We need to know what facts must be taken into consideration before any mission, evangelistic, educational, or medical, is planted in any place, what facts decide the question whether work is begun, or reinforcements sent, to this place rather than to that. It is not enough to be assured that there is a need. There is need everywhere. We cannot supply all need; but we can have some settled and clear judgment what facts ought to weigh with us, what information we must possess before we can decide properly whether the claim of this place is more urgent than the claim of that. We ought to have same basis of comparison. The mere appeal of an earnest and devoted man, the mere clamour of a body of men, the mere insistence of a persevering man, is not sufficient to guide us aright. The mere offer of some supporter to provide a building ought not to suffice. Acceptance of the offer may alter the whole balance and character of the mission. We ought to know what facts must be considered and how.

We need therefore a reasoned statement of the work of our foreign missions expressed as a unity, which sets forth the work actually done in different departments showing their relation one to another and the relation of all to a dominant object. In other words, what we need is a survey of the missionary situation in the world in terms of these relationships.

It may be said that such a claim is outrageous and impossible; but we are persuaded that with our present enlightenment, with the means of knowledge which we now possess, we could, if we thought it worth while, lay our hands on the necessary information. Our firm conviction is that, if we did that, and set out the results of our examination in a form intelligible to thoughtful laymen, we should obtain the support of a great number of men to whom foreign missions at present appear as nothing but the ill-organised, fragmentary and indefinite efforts of pious people to propagate their peculiar schemes for the betterment of humanity. Without some such statement we do not know how anyone can take an intelligent, though he may take a sentimental, interest in foreign missions.

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.

It is this purpose or end which decides what is to be included and what is to be excluded from the survey. If, for instance, we are making a survey of the acoustic properties of church buildings in England, it is not scientific to introduce questions as to the character of the gospel preached in them. A scientific survey is not necessarily a collection of all possible information about any people or country; that is an encyclopaedia; a scientific survey is a survey of those facts only which throw light on the business in hand. A scientific survey of foreign missions ought not then necessarily to look at the work carried on from "every point of view". The point of view must be defined, the end to be served defined, and then only those factors which throw light upon that end have any place in a scientific survey. We cannot be too clear about this, because in survey of a work so vast and so many sided as foreign missions we might easily include every human activity, unless we defined beforehand the end to be served and selected carefully only the appropriate factors. Carefully defined, missionary survey is not the unwieldy, amorphous thing which people often imagine. There is indeed a dangerous type of survey which starting with a hypothesis proceeds to prove it by collecting any facts which seem to support it to the neglect of all other facts which might disprove it. The procedure advocated here is the adoption of a definite and acknowledged purpose for which the survey is to be made and the collection of all the facts which bear upon the subject in hand. The facts are selected, but they are selected not by the prejudices or partiality of the surveyor, but by their own innate and inherent relationship to the subject.

A scientific survey can only be a collection of facts; but inferences will certainly be drawn from the facts which will direct the policy of those who administer foreign missionary societies. The drawing of these inferences from the material collected must be carefully distinguished from the collection of the material . The latter precedes the former and is independent of it. Inferences hastily drawn, or prematurely adopted, would only tend to discredit missionary survey as a means to the attainment of truth. The adoption of a hypothesis and the making of a survey in order to prove it by a careful selection and manipulation of facts would not discredit survey as a means to the attainment of truth; it would only discredit and debase the moral character of the man who made such a survey.

We may well acknowledge that the aim which above all others has appealed to us is the aim of the establishment in the world of a Christian Church, native, indigenous, living, self-supporting, self-governing, self-extending, independent of foreign aid. That has no doubt coloured our work and will perhaps render it less acceptable to some; for the facts which must be included in a survey which accepts that aim are precisely the facts which societies do not now tabulate and are often estimated with some difficulty.

But though this thought has inevitably governed our conception of survey and we have made no attempt to conceal it, we have nevertheless tried to avoid the danger of selecting for survey only those facts which might serve to support a theory of the method by which that aim is to be attained; and we have kept in our minds constantly the needs of men whose idea of the aim of foreign missions differs from our own.

The survey, therefore, should be not simply a single act but a continual process. Mission work is not a task which can be undertaken and finished on a predetermined plan, like the construction of a railway. It is a task the conditions of which vary from time to time, and consequently plans and policies and methods must vary, and this variation can only be rational if it is determined by recognition of the changing circumstances, and the change of circumstances can only be understood and appreciated if the survey of missions is a continuous process kept constantly up to date. It is a form of mission history in which the omission of a few years may break the connection of the whole narrative.

Take, for example, this extract from a letter written by a firm in the United States of America which deals with candy securities:--

When individuals work individually, for themselves, as they please, statistics are only necessary for the onlooker who wants to compare individual effort with individual effort; the individuals who want to make no comparison of their own work with that of others, nor to keep any record of the progress of their work, need keep no statistics; but societies always want to keep a record of their work, and that record must be largely statistical.

It is vain to attack statistics to-day. Every society publishes statistical sheets. Every society by publishing them shows that it recognises the value of statistics. The difficulty to-day is not that the societies do not publish statistics, but that the statistics which they publish are not related to any aim or purpose, and do not include factors or standards which enable us to measure progress.

It may also cause surprise that we ask for estimates in some cases where exact information is not immediately accessible. It may be said that statistics are misleading, but estimates are hopelessly misleading: let us have correct figures or none. That attitude is easily understood, but under the circumstances it is vain. "Correct figures," that is, meticulously exact figures, are unattainable. An estimate is in nearly all matters of daily life and business the basis, and rightly the basis, of our action. It will be noticed that in that letter which we quoted above concerning the statistics of the candy trade in the United States of America, estimates had a place, and foreign missions involve matters about which "correct figures" are more difficult to obtain than the candy business. An estimate carefully made and understood, a deliberate statement expressed in round numbers, is not unscientific: it is only unscientific to mistake such figures for what they do not profess to be. When men object that the figures are not exact, if the figures do not profess to be exact, it is the objector who is unscientific, not the statistics.

Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that the admission of estimates and round figures does open the door to serious error. Men will be tempted to mistake an estimate for a guess. An estimate is a statement for which reasons can be given, a guess is--a mere guess. The great safeguard against guesses, as against all slipshod statistical entries, is the assurance that the statements made will be used. At present missionary statistics are untrustworthy mainly because so few people use them, and consequently those who supply them do not feel the need of revising them carefully.

Furthermore, it is important to bear in mind that the field for estimate in statistics of the kind proposed is limited; it only embraces figures for which exact totals are unobtainable, for instance, area, population, and figures of societies which refuse to give statistics, etc., and in every case precision in these statistics is not of vital importance.

The main difference between our tables and those of others is that we make them very small and express in each a relation. The figures supplied by the societies in their reports are seldom related to anything; they are mere bundles of sticks; we suggest the introduction of a relation into every table which gives to each figure a significance which by itself it does not possess. In our tables every figure is set to work. Our idea of missionary statistics demands that they should be a basis for action. We think that it is waste of time to collect statistics from which no conclusion can be certainly drawn both by the compiler and the reader--a conclusion which ought to be suggestive when taken alone by itself, and, when considered in relation to the conclusions suggested by similar tables, compelling.

But it may be said that we are adding to the already overwhelming burden of accounts and reports over which missionaries toil to the great detriment of their proper work. The tables in this book are arranged apparently for the worker on the spot as well as for the intelligent supporter and director at home; why multiply tables and trouble the missionary with the sums of proportion? Why not ask the man there simply to give the necessary facts and then let the man at home work out for special purposes the various relations? The answer is simple: we ourselves have been asked to fill up long schedules of unrelated facts; and we know that the labour is intolerable. The supply of unrelated, meaningless facts dulls and wearies the brain. Few men can do the work with pleasure or profit, and consequently the schedules are often filled up, not indeed with deliberate carelessness, but with that heavy painfulness which, taking no interest in the work, often produces as pitiful a result as downright carelessness. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn" is a maxim which has a great application here. The man who provides the information should be the first to profit by it and to be interested in it. The first man to criticise these tables should be the missionary who fills them up on the spot; and his most valuable criticism might be a demonstration that the last column in a table was futile; that the table led him to no conclusions and suggested no remarks. That column of conclusions and remarks we hold to be the most precious of them all. We would have no man supply meaningless information. Only, we believe, when the information is of vital importance and interest to the man who supplies it will it be supplied carefully, correctly, willingly, and above all, intelligently. We venture to hope that our tables may be one step towards the day when the supply of statistical information by the missionary will cease to be mere drudgery.

Seeing that the missionary task is essentially world-wide, it is obvious that a world-wide work cannot be properly directed without a world-wide view. Now, missionary survey is in its infancy, and in most parts of the world it has yet to be begun. A full and complete missionary survey of the whole world would necessarily be a considerable undertaking, for many important facts could not be easily or quickly collected. There is then a strong tendency for men to argue that, since all the facts desirable cannot be known at once without much time and expense, it is futile and dangerous to collect those facts which can be collected speedily without great expense. A little knowledge, they say, is a dangerous thing ... let us remain ignorant.

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