8. The Relation of the Missionary to the People Among Whom He Lives.

Having entered upon his work and settled among the people of his choice, he must seek to realize the best possible relation to them. This relationship will be a varied one.

He must be a leader of the Christian community. In India, today, there is special need for missionaries who are born leaders. The people of that land are defective in the power of initiative; but they are most tractable and docile. They love to follow a bold and a wise leader of men. And the missionary, from the very necessity of his position, should be able to direct and guide the Christian community into ways of holiness and of Christian activity. He is to be a leader of leaders. He should marshal the mission agents connected with him in such a way as to lead the native Church into highest usefulness and most earnest endeavour for the salvation of souls.

He should be strong as an organizer and administrator. In missions the word organization is becoming the keyword of the situation. There is no danger of over-organization, so long as the organization is endowed with life and does not degenerate into machinery. The best organized activities of today are the most powerful and the most useful. And the missionary will find his highest powers for organization taxed to the utmost in his missionary work. And as an administrator there will be made many claims upon him daily. I know of few qualifications that are more essential to the highest success on the mission field than conspicuous ability to organize and wisdom to administer the affairs of a mission. [pg 225] Missionaries frequently fail at this point and need therefore to strengthen themselves in this particular.

A missionary should be as much the conserver of the good as a destroyer of the evil which he finds among the people. Much of that which he will see in India, for instance, will at first, and perhaps for a long time, seem strange and outlandish to him; but let him not decide that it is therefore evil. The life of the Orient is built on different lines from that of the Occident. Many things in common life, in domestic economy and in social customs will, and must, be different there from what they are here. Their civilization, though different from ours, has a consistency as a whole; and we cannot easily eliminate certain parts and substitute for them those of our own civilization without dislocating the whole. Therefore, it is often safer and better to conserve what seems to us the lesser good of their civilization than to introduce what seems the greater good of our own.

The missionary must be careful to distinguish between those things which are real, and those which are apparent, evils among the customs of the people. There are some customs, such as are connected with the degradation of woman and heathen ceremonies which are fundamentally wrong and must be opposed always. There are others which seem uncouth and unworthy, but which are devoid of moral or religious significance. Of two missionaries, the one who studies to utilize the existing good among the habits of the people will find greatest usefulness. Some waste their time, destroy their influence and minimize their usefulness by a destructive way of attacking [pg 226] everything that is not positively good and beating their head against every wall of custom.

The missionary should be a prophet to rebuke and to condemn evil. He will find numberless evils on all sides of him—in Church, in general society and in individual life among the people. He must not hesitate to use constantly his voice as a protest against all forms of evil. This duty is the more incumbent upon him as there are none among the people to protest and to denounce the most flagrant, demoralizing and universal evils of the land. One of the most discouraging things concerning the situation in India is, not the universality of certain evils, but the utter absence of those who dare to withstand them and denounce them as sins before all the people. Missionaries have done more in that land to rightly characterize certain gross evils and to call the attention of the people to them than have any other people in the land. And they have recognition for this. And this prophetic function of the missionary must be exercised with increasing faithfulness for the good of the land and for the purity of the Church of God.

In that country the missionary must also stand before the people as their exemplar. He must represent, not only Christianity at its best, but also the civilization of the West in its purest and most attractive garb. India has always greatly needed such human types of nobility of character to encourage and stimulate the people to a higher life. With all modesty and due humility the missionary is called upon just as much to live as he is to teach the best that is found in his religion and in the civilization of his mother country. In India, the life of the missionary [pg 227] has spoken more loudly than his words. There are millions in that land today, who, while they deny and reject the teaching of the missionary, give him unstinted praise both for what he is and for what he has done for the country.

The testimony of Sir William Mackworth Young, Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab is only one of many such;—“I take off my hat to the humblest missionary that walks a bazaar in India,” he said, in a recent public address, “because he is leading a higher and a grander life and doing a grander work than any other class of persons who are working in India. If the natives of India have any practical knowledge of what is meant by Christian charity, if they know anything of high, disinterested motives and self-sacrifice, it is mainly from the missionary that they learn it. The strength of our position in India depends more largely upon the good-will of the people than upon the strength and number of our garrisons, and for that good-will we are largely indebted to the kindly, self-sacrificing efforts of the Christian missionary. It is love which must pave the way for the regeneration of India as well as for the consolidation of England's power.”

The missionary must never lose this crown of glory in India. He must hold it most precious and strive to add to the glory which he thus reflects upon his Faith in that land.

[pg 228]