ns, there is a struggle for existence. In
that struggle we have to fight--for a religion to decline to fight is
for that religion to die. The missionary is not engaged in a work of
supererogation, something with which we at home have no concern. We
speak of him as in the forefront of the battle. We do not usually or
constantly realise that it is our battle he is fighting--that his
defeat, if he were defeated, would be the beginning of the end for us;
that on his success our fate depends. The metaphor of the missionary
as an {265} outpost sounds rather picturesque when heard in a
sermon,--or did so sound the first time it was used, I suppose,--but it
is not a mere picture; it is the barest truth. The extent to which we
push our outposts forward is the measure of our vitality, of how much
we have in us to do for the world. Six out of seven of Christendom's
missionaries come from the United States of America. Until I heard
that from the pulpit of Durham Cathedral, I had rather a horror of big
things and a certain apprehension about going to a land where bigness,
rather than the golden mean, seemed to be taken as the standard of
merit. But from that sermon I learnt something, viz. not only that
there are big things to be done in the world, but that America does
them, and that America does more of them than she talks about.

{267}

APPENDIX

Since the chapter on Magic was written, the publication of Wilhelm
Wundt's _Voelkerpsychologie_, Vol. II, Part II, has led me to believe
that I ought to have laid more stress on the power of the magician,
which I mention on pages 74, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, and less on the
savage's recognition of the principle that like produces like. In the
stage of human evolution known as Animism, every event which calls for
explanation is explained as the doing of some person or conscious
agent. When a savage falls ill, his sickness is regarded as the work
of some ill-disposed person, whose power cannot be doubted--for it is
manifest in the sickness it has caused--and whose power is as
mysterious as it is indubitable. That power is what a savage means by
magic; and the persons believed to possess it are magicians. It is the
business of the sick savage's friends to find out who is causing his
sickness. Their suspicion may fall on any one whose appearance or
behaviour is suspicious or mysterious; and the person {268} suspected
comes to be regarded as a witch or magician, from the ver