mong them, they are not drawn to
Western Christianity while yet having a devotion to Christ; if they
do not feel they can consistently join any of our Western Churches;
and if they form a Church of India, are we then to be disappointed
and think we have failed of our mission? A thousand times, no! Let
us rather praise God that, instead of a number of hothouse plants
requiring careful watering and tending lest they sicken and wither,
we have a harvest of indigenous growth nurtured on the native soil of
India, and ripening to a fruitful maturity under its own sun, and fed
by the natural showers of heaven without the aid of the missionaries
of a foreign clime.

We see, therefore, that the gathering in of converts is not the first
or most important work of the missionary. His work is rather, first,
to live Christ before the people of the country; secondly, to give
them the teachings of Christ by giving them the Scriptures in their
own tongue, and preaching and explaining the same to them. We often
find in practice that when some Indian has been captivated by the
Gospel, he is hurried on to baptism, and thereby cut off prematurely
from his old stock and grafted on the new--prematurely because he is
often insufficiently grounded in the Christian faith to withstand the
torrent of persecution which is his lot the moment he is baptized, and
because the leavening influence which he would otherwise be exerting on
a wide circle of his relations and acquaintances is at once destroyed.

Christians at home encourage the missionary to think that nothing
has been accomplished till the inquirer is baptized, and that, once
baptized and recorded in the church register and the mission report,
the work, as far as that individual is concerned, is completed,
and the missionary may leave him and turn his attention to someone
else. Fatal mistake! Injurious to the convert because, left only half
grounded in the faith, he falls into worldly and covetous habits, or
may even apostatize outright; injurious to the unevangelized remainder
because, instead of being attracted for a time longer to the study of
Christianity by the influence of the inquirer, they are thrown into
a position of violent antagonism by the secession of the convert, and
are no longer willing to give the claims of Christ any hearing at all.

Herein lies the inestimable value of the much-maligned mission schools
and colleges. They do not produce a great crop of immediate baptisms