should conduct, to any extent, educational work apart from other indirect
aims and purposes. In other words, how far, if at all, should a mission
give itself to the work of education, _per se_, and not as a Christian
training or as an evangelizing agency.

Many at present maintain that education--_general_ education--is in itself a
good and a blessing which it is the business of a mission to impart,
independent of any direct religious instruction or spiritual training
which might be given through it. They maintain that mission funds should
thus be used for the intellectual advancement of the people apart from
their Christianization. The majority, however, would claim that a
mission's educational work should be conducted only so far as it can be
the medium of communicating religious truth, or only in so far as it can
be made a direct auxiliary to the Christianizing of the land. This class
would claim that no work should be undertaken by a mission which does not
contribute to the Christianizing of the people as a result distinct from
their progress in civilization. And it is here that these two classes of
missionaries take issue with each other. It is an important difference in
the conception of the Church's work in heathen lands. As I shall consider
this later I only call attention to it here.

Another matter, of no little consequence in this connection, is that of
the amount of educational privilege which a mission should furnish to its
people. President Stanley Hall has recently maintained that, even in this
country, many are educated who should not be. They should, he says, be
left to the hoe and shovel. He claims that not a few are, through
education, spoiled for usefulness in the lowest sphere of manual labour
for which they were by nature designed; while they are also disqualified
for the highest sphere of service and life. If this be true in America it
is doubly true in India. Many young men and women in that land have had
lavished upon them the blessings of education to an extent that was
unprofitable both to them and to the cause. They have received an
education and training which not only carried them away far outside the
social realm for which they were intended by nature; it also left them
incapable of doing the higher thing for which they were intended by the
mission.

There is adequate excuse for this in the early stages of mission progress.
The greatest need of a mission is a good, strong, native agency.