e been led
to draw from the experiences of the last sixteen years, and then in a
concluding chapter to point out what I think to be the most promising
lines of advance.

It has too long been the habit to gauge the results of mission work
by the number of converts or baptisms, but this is wrong both by
omission and by commission: by omission, because it takes no count of
what is the larger portion of mission work--the gradual permeation of
the country with the teachings and example of Christ; by commission,
because it encourages missionaries to baptize and register numbers,
chiefly of the lower classes, who have no right to it, because they
come from egregiously unworthy motives. Such converts not only are a
dead weight on the mission to which they are attached, but too often
utterly discredit Christianity in the eyes of the non-Christians
around them by their greed and unworthy conduct. It is well that we
should sometimes stop and think what it is that we are desirous of
doing, and then face the question: "Are we really accomplishing that,
or doing something altogether different?"

Are we desirous of planting in India a Christian Church on the lines
which we see developed in England or America? If so, I sincerely hope
that we shall never succeed. Are we desirous of binding on Eastern
converts the same burden of dogmas which has disrupted and still
distresses the Western Church? Again, I sincerely hope not. Are we
desirous of giving India the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus
Christ, and of living Him before the people? There we have a worthy
object--to compass which no sacrifice is too great--worthy of the
best and most devoted of our men and women, and claiming the spiritual
and material support of the whole Western Church.

Now, it is quite possible--in fact, we have seen it enacted before
our eyes--that, having given India Christ and the Bible, India's sons
and sages may not interpret everything as we have done, but may do
so in their own mystical and transcendental way. We may not always
be able to admit such by baptism into the fold of the Christian
Church--they may not themselves desire it--but are we to say that
our mission has not been accomplished? Accomplished it assuredly has
been, but perhaps not on the lines which we desired or imagined. If,
again, after studying the life and words of Christ, and comparing
them with the Christianity which they see practised in the West,
or in the Westerns who reside a