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resented to us in that way, so long as any mission may serve any purpose, we cannot possibly take any intelligent share in foreign missions as a whole. We are lost. We cannot co-ordinate in thought the activities of the missions, as we see plainly that they are not co-ordinated in action in the field itself. And it is practically impossible for us to imagine that the missions are directed on any thought-out policy, because a policy seems to involve necessarily the sub-ordination of the aim deemed to be less important to another which is deemed to be more important, and the less or the more must depend, not upon personal predilections, but upon closeness of relation to some one dominant idea; and, therefore, the definition of the dominant idea is the first necessity for the establishment of a reasonable missionary policy. To some minds the idea of a policy in connection with missions seems to be abhorrent; but can a society with an income of something between half and a quarter of a million pounds, or even less, afford to aim at every type and form of missionary activity? Is it not necessary that it should know and express to itself, to its missionaries, and to its supporters what forms of activity it deems essential, what less important, what aims it will pursue with all its strength, and what it will refuse to pursue at all? It cannot afford to pursue every good or desirable object which it may meet in its course. It must have a dominant purpose which really controls its operations, and forces it to set aside some great and noble actions because they are not so closely related to the dominant purpose as some other. A society with the limited resources which most of us lament cannot do everything. In medicine it cannot afford to aim at a strictly evangelistic use of its medical missions and at a use which is not strictly evangelistic. We hear men talk sometimes as if it were the business of a missionary society to undertake the task of healing the physical afflictions of the people almost in the same sense as it is the business of a missionary society to seek to heal their souls. We hear them talk sometimes as if it was the duty of a missionary society to supplant the native medical practice by western medical science as surely as it is their business to supplant idolatry by the preaching of Christ. And the tolerance of these ideas has certainly influenced the direction of missions. The evangelistic value of medical
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