Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions | Page 9

in relation to a dominant idea or purpose. Such a survey is strictly scientific. All scientific survey is properly governed by the end or purpose for which it is made.
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 (i.e. the making of the survey). 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.
2. The survey here treated of is missionary survey, that is to say, it treats of missions and is governed by a missionary purpose. And it is a survey of Christian missions; therefore it is governed by the purpose of spreading the knowledge of Christ. This statement is of great importance and needs to be carefully conned before it is accepted, because by it missionary survey will be distinguished from all other survey. For instance, medical boards survey medical institutions. Their sole concern is whether those institutions are well found and efficient.[1] But when a missionary surveys a missionary hospital (if the principle which we propound is accepted), he surveys it not qua medical establishment but qua missionary utensil. The object is not to find out the medical efficiency of the hospital, but its missionary effectiveness. It may be answered that a medically inefficient hospital cannot be truly effective from a missionary point of view. That may be true; but it is not certainly true. Whether it is true or not, that does not alter the fact that an efficient medical establishment is not necessarily effective from a missionary point of view; it is not necessarily either missionary or Christian at all. Then to survey medical missions simply as medical institutions is to ignore their real significance. Missionary survey must relate the information asked for to the missionary purpose; and unless it is so related the survey is a medical survey, not a missionary survey. The same holds good of educational work, and of pastoral work.
[Footnote 1: We could produce surveys of medical and educational mission work which are essentially of this character, dealing solely with medical and educational efficiency.]
3. The survey here proposed is designed for all societies so far as the societies can be persuaded to supply the information. It would perhaps be more simple to provide statistical returns for one society of which the ecclesiastical organisation is known and the ecclesiastical terms used