out
evangelistic missionaries? What decides the form of their work and the
method by which they pursue it? It is hard to guess, it is hard to
discover, it is hard to understand.

Now when our missions are presented to us and we are asked to support
them on all sorts of grounds, as though a society with its slight funds
could really successfully practise every kind of philanthropic work, we
begin to doubt whether it can really be wisely guided. Each mission
station, each institution, seems to be an isolated fragment. The
missionary in charge often appeals to us as an exceedingly good and able
man, and we support him, and we support the society which sends him and
others like him. And we call this the support of foreign missions; but
foreign missions as a unity we do not support because we can see no
unity. The directors of foreign missions appear not to have hitched
their wagon to a star, but rather to all the visible stars, and we
cannot tell whither they are going. So we fall back on the individual
missionary, or the isolated mission which at any rate for the moment
seems to have an intelligible objective.

Hence the common conception of missionary work as small. We look at the
parts, and the smallest parts, because our minds instinctively seek a
unity, and only in the parts do we find a unity, nor there often, unless
we concentrate our attention on one aspect of the work. But by thinking
of foreign missions in this small way and speaking of them in this small
way, we alienate men who are accustomed to think in large terms of large
undertakings designed on large policies.

What we need to-day is to understand foreign missions as a whole. We
want to take an intelligent part in them viewed as a unity. We want to
know what is the grand objective and how the parts are related to that
end. We do not want merely to support this mission because this
missionary appeals to us; we want to know what dominant purpose governs
the activities of the different societies, directs, and controls them,
deciding what work good and excellent in itself the mission cannot
afford to undertake, what it can and must do with the means at its
disposal in order to attain an end which it has deliberately adopted.

We need more, we need to know on what principles the missionaries are
sent here or there. We need to know what facts must be taken into
consideration before any mission, evangelistic, educational, or medical,
is planted in any place, w