Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions | Page 8

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.

CHAPTER II.
PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.
1. We need a survey of the missionary situation in the world which will express the facts in terms of the relationships between the different missionary activities and between them all