24 DEDUCTIONS

Chapter 24

DEDUCTIONS

I HAVE completed these sketches of mission work, and I wish to summarize in this chapter some of the conclusions that I have been led to draw from the experiences of the last sixteen years, and then in a concluding chapter to point out what I think to be the most promising lines of advance.

It has too long been the habit to gauge the results of mission work by the number of converts or baptisms, but this is wrong both by omission and by commission : by omission, because it takes no count of what is the larger portion of mission work the gradual permeation of the country with the teachings and example of Christ ; by commission, because it encourages missionaries to baptize and register numbers, chiefly of the lower classes, who have no right to it, because they come from egregiously unworthy motives. Such converts not only are a dead weight on the mission to which they are attached, but too often utterly discredit Christianity in the eyes of the non-Christians around them by their greed and unworthy conduct. It is well that we should sometimes stop and think what it is that we are desirous of doing, and then face the question : " Are we really accomplishing that, or doing something altogether different ?" Are we desirous of planting in India a Christian Church on the lines which we see developed in England or America? If so, I sincerely hope that we shall never succeed. Are we desirous of binding on Eastern converts the same burden of dogmas which has disrupted and still distresses the Western Church ?Again, I sincerely hope not. Are we desirous of giving India the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of living Him before the people? There we have a worthy object to compass which no sacrifice is too great worthy of the best and most devoted of our men and women, and claiming the spiritual and material support of the whole Western Church.

Now, it is quite possible in fact, we have seen it enacted before our eyes that, having given India Christ and the Bible, India’s sons and sages may not interpret everything as we have done, but may do so in their own mystical and transcendental way. We may not always be able to admit such by baptism into the fold of the Christian Church they may not themselves desire it but are we to say that our mission has not been accomplished? Accomplished it assuredly has been, but perhaps not on the lines which we desired or imagined. If, again, after studying the life and words of Christ, and comparing them with the Christianity which they see practiced in the West, or in the Westerns who reside among them, they are not drawn to Western Christianity while yet having a devotion to Christ ; if they do not feel they can consistently join any of our Western Churches ; and if they form a Church of India, are we then to be disappointed and think we have failed of our mission ? A thousand times, no ! Let us rather praise God that, instead of a number of hothouse plants requiring careful watering and tending lest they sicken and wither, we have a harvest of indigenous growth nurtured on the native soil of India, and ripening to a fruitful maturity under its own sun, and fed by the natural showers of heaven without the aid of the missionaries of a foreign clime.

We see, therefore, that the gathering in of converts is not the first or most important work of the missionary. His work is rather, first, to live Christ before the people of the country ; secondly, to give them the teachings of Christ by giving them the Scriptures in their own tongue, and preaching and explaining the same to them. We often find in practice that when some Indian has been captivated by the Gospel, he is hurried on to baptism, and thereby cut off prematurely from his old stock and grafted on the new prematurely because he is often insufficiently grounded in the Christian faith to withstand the torrent of persecution which is his lot the moment he is baptized, and because the leavening influence which he would otherwise be exerting on a wide circle of his relations and acquaintances is at once destroyed.

Christians at home encourage the missionary to think that nothing has been accomplished till the inquirer is baptized, and that, once baptized and recorded in the church register and the mission report, the work, as far as that individual is concerned, is completed, and the missionary may leave him and turn his attention to someone else. Fatal mistake! Injurious to the convert because, left only half grounded in the faith, he falls into worldly and covetous habits, or may even apostatize outright; injurious to the unevangelized remainder because, instead of being attracted for a time longer to the study of Christianity by the influence of the inquirer, they are thrown into a position of violent antagonism by the secession of the convert, and are no longer willing to give the claims of Christ any hearing at all.

Herein lies the inestimable value of the much-maligned mission schools and colleges. They do not produce a great crop of immediate baptisms, and so are belittled by some as barren agencies ; but nothing else is more surely permeating the great mass of Muhammadan and Hindu thought with Christian thoughts, Christian ideals, and Christian aspirations.

We see all around us in present day India attempts to re-clothe Islam and Hinduism in Christian habiliments, or else ardent reformers, hopeless of that Augean task, creating new little sects and offshoots, in which Christian ideas are served up for Muhammadan and Hindu consumers thinly disguised in a dressing of their own religions. These sects sometimes affect a display of hostility to Christianity, lest those whom they wish to draw should mistake them for being only missionary ruses for catching them with guile ; but, all the same, they are steps, and I think inevitable steps, in the gradual permeation of the country with the religion of Christ. India has been surfeited with philosophies and dogmas and rites and ceremonies from the hoary Vedic ages down, but she is hungering and thirsting for a living power to draw her God-ward, and such a power is Christ. She cannot have too much of Him, whether this life be set forth in the devoted service of Christian men and women, in hospitals, and schools, and zenanas, and plague camps, and leper asylums, or in the daily preaching and teaching of Him in town and village, in the crowded bazaars, or in the hermitages of the sadhus and faqirs. This is not a work restricted to those who have been set apart as missionaries, but one which claims every professed Christian in the land. Every European Christian, be he in civil or military service, in trade or profession, or merely a temporary visitant for pleasure-seeking, can and should be doing this essentially Christian missionary work if he is living honestly and purely up to the tenets of his religion ; and many of the best converts in the land have been first drawn to Christ by watching the consistent private and public Christian life of some such unobtrusive Englishman or Englishwoman, who never was or tried to be a missionary in the usual sense of the term. On the other hand, the Christianizing of the country has been made all the more remote and difficult by those Englishmen who contemn or discredit the religion they profess, or live lives openly and flagrantly at variance with its ethics.

We do not gain anything from a missionary point of view, and we dishonor God, when we speak of everything in Islam or Hinduism as evil. The Mussulman has given a witness to the Unity of God and the folly of idolatry which has been unsurpassed in the religious history of the world, and he has qualities of devotion and self-abnegation which the Christian Church may well desire to enlist in her service rather than to ignore or decry. The Hindu has evolved philosophies on the enigmas of life, and sin, and pain, and death, which have for ages been the solace and guide of the myriad inhabitants of India, and he has attained heights of self-abnegation and austerity in the pursuit of his religious ideals which would have made the Christian ascetics of the early centuries of our era envious. Religion has been to them a pervading force which has colored the most commonplace acts of daily life. Here we have qualities which have prepared the soil for the implanting of the Christian faith, and which, when imbued and enlightened with the love of Christ, will reach a luxuriance of Christian energy worthy of the religious East, in which so many of the religions of the world have had their birth. India, indeed, wants Christ, but the future Christianity of India will not be that Occidental form which we have been accustomed to, but something that will have incorporated all the best God-given qualities and capacities and thoughts of the Muhammadans and Hindus.

It is a great pity that missionary energy is still largely destructive rather than constructive. In the earlier days of mission work it was popularly supposed that missionaries were to attack the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, which were considered to be the great obstacles to the acceptance of Christianity by the people of India, and it was thought that, those once overthrown, we should find a Christian country. Much more probably we should find an atheistic and materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and Worldliness had become the new gods. The real and most deadly enemies with which the missionary has to contend are infidelity and mammon worship. We may well try to enlist the religious spirit of all the Indian creeds in the struggle against these, the common enemies of all faiths, or we may find, when too late, that we have destroyed the fabric of faith, and set up nothing in its place. The old Islam, the old Hinduism, are already doomed, not by the efforts of the missionaries, but by the contact with the West, by the growth of commerce, by the spread of education, by the thirst for wealth and luxury which the West has implanted in the East. All the power of Christianity is required to give India a new and living and robust faith, which shall be able to withstand these disrupting forces.

Some of the Christian attacks on Eastern religions are painful to read, because one cannot help seeing that the same weapons have been used in the West, and often with success, against belief in the Christian Scriptures, and the missionaries are only preparing tools which will one day be used against themselves. They may for the moment win a Byrrhic victory against the forces of Islam and Hinduism, but they are at the same time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the unquestioning devotion, which have been the crown and glory of India for ages. Let it rather be their endeavor to present a real, living, pulsating Christianity, capable of enlisting all these divine forces in its own service without weakening or destroying one of them, and all that is best in Islam and Hinduism will be drawn into it. The product will be nearer to the mind of Christ than much that passes by the name of Christianity in the West, yet has lost the power of the living Christ. Do not destroy, but give something worthy of acceptance, and be careful of the type.

Converts will come right enough when we work on these lines, but they will not so often be the man-made converts which have been drawn by the outward attractions which missions sometimes offer. They will more often be those who have been drawn of the Spirit, and become converts in spite of us and our little faith. And they will inherit the blessing of Isaac as assuredly as the first class partake of the waywardness of Ishmael. The East has long possessed and developed in a myriad different ways the idea of sacrifice, while the more practical West has been tending more and more towards a philanthropic Christianity which makes a life of service its ideal. The best will be when we bring about a union of the religious devotion of the East with the altruism of the West. So far the asceticism and devotion of the Orient has been rendered nugatory and disappointing by its uselessness by, if we may use a paradoxical expression, its very selfishness for it was directed to the emancipation of the individual soul rather than to the salvation of the race. But when the sacrifice of the Orient and the service of the Occident join hands and go forth in the name of Christ to mitigate and remove the ills and sorrows of this sad, sad world, then indeed will the spirit of Christ be fulfilled in His Church. A recent writer, whose missionary enthusiasm had caught a spark from the mystic fires of the East, writes : " The thing which is lacking (in mission work) I believe to be the vision of the homeless, suffering, serving Jesus the Jesus who came to serve, and laid down His life for the sheep."" He then goes on to enunciate the need for Christian Friars, who may bring a knowledge of Christ to India in the only way to which her people have ever been accustomed. From time immemorial all the religions that have occupied the arena of the Indian stage, and compelled the adherence and devotion of her people, have been promulgated by peripatetic ascetics, who have shown by their devotion to their ideals the intensity of their convictions, and have not wearied of journeying from end to end of the land, through heat and through cold, through privations and hunger and nakedness, that they might make known to the people how they were to obtain salvation. The Friars suggested by the above writer would therefore be such as India is already familiar with, and would work on a prepared soil. He writes : " The part of the Friars is to live Christ so literally before the Church and the world, that both may become conscious of Him. The Church is lacking in ideal and devotion ; the Friars must, therefore, lead lives of such heroism and devoted service in the face of every danger that the Church may be fired by their example. ... If such a body of men were to act in this way, none would be so quick to cast themselves at the Master’s feet as the people of India, and the high castes would lead the way." But it must be clearly understood that these Friars are not to replace or render unnecessary any section of the existing missionary body. Every one of the various activities of the present mission work is wanted, urgently wanted. They will, however, fire their energies, enlarge their scope, and increase their usefulness. Two misconceptions require to be removed from the Indian mind. One is, that missionary activity is a political activity, a department of the Government artfully disguised. The other is, that the English are, after all, only lukewarm about their religion, and do not hesitate to disregard it if it clashes with their comfort or interest. To combat these ideas it is the lives of the missionaries that are of more importance than the organization, and the more Christ is lived and exemplified, the more spiritual and lasting will be the result.