task,
and will soon be known to anyone who starts out conscientiously to
survey any district. But it is helpful and illuminating labour, and it
would be far better that the heads of two missions should survey the
whole of the same district separately than that neither should survey
any of it. If both feel that in any real sense that is "_their
district_," then they ought both to survey it all; for to call a
district _mine_ which I have not even surveyed and do not know even by
sight is absurd; but it would lighten their labour and help their mutual
understanding if they surveyed it together.

If a part of the district overlaps part of another mission district,
that part should be surveyed together if possible, or if that is not
possible, by each separately.

In this survey the work of no Christian society, however remote
ecclesiastically or theologically from the surveyor's point of view,
should be omitted. Ignorance of the work done by others is the worst
possible form of separation. There is a sense in which it is true that
the more remote the ecclesiastical position of another is from our own,
the more near we are to definite opposition, the more important it is
that we should know what his work is. We may find in it so much to
admire that our annoyance at what seem to us his ecclesiastical
absurdities may be softened. If we survey the district together we shall
perhaps find there is room for both, even if we each start with the
persuasion that there is no room for the other anywhere in the world.

On no account must we fail to consider another's work. In educational or
medical work we must recognise that a school or a hospital which exists,
by whomsoever created, in the district makes a difference to the
situation. To deal with the district as if that school or hospital did
not exist is to deal with an imaginary district, not with the real one;
and no one supposes that there is any advantage in dealing with things
that are what they are as if they were something else.

We have observed a certain tendency to recognise this truth in the
matter of education and medicine, and to introduce into survey proposals
a note, when the educational and medical tables were reached, to remind
the surveyor that the educational and medical work of some society of
which he is afraid, or from which he thinks himself widely separated, as
extreme Protestants from Roman Catholics, must not be ignored; but in
the evangelistic and Churc