Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions | Page 7

scheme which the missionary who is addressing us believes to
be the pressing need of the moment in his district.
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