ing of
missionaries is really not to save peoples from being lost. That sort of
talk is almost vulgar now.

Mission work is really a sort of good-natured neighborliness. It is
benevolent humanitarianism in which we may all help, more or less (usually
less), regardless of our beliefs or lack of beliefs, our church-membership
or attendance. We should show these heathen our improved methods of
living. We have worked out better plans of housekeeping and schooling, of
teaching and doctoring, and farming and all the rest of it. And now we
want to help these poor deficient peoples across the seas.

We think we are a superior people in ourselves, as well as in our type of
civilization, decidedly so. And having taken good care of ourselves, and
laid up a good snug sum, we can easily afford to help these backward
far-away neighbors a bit. It is really the thing to do.

Such seems to be the general drift of much of the present-day talk about
foreign missions. The Church, and its members individually, have grown so
rich that we have forgotten that we were ever poor. The table is so loaded
with dainties that we are quite willing to be generous with the crumbs,
even cake crumbs.

<u>Great Incidental Blessings.</u>

Now, without doubt the sending of the missionaries has vastly improved
conditions of human life in the foreign-mission lands. The missionaries
have been the forerunners of great improvements. They have been the
pioneers blazing out the paths along which both trade and diplomacy have
gone with the newer and better civilization of the West. Civilization has
developed marvellously in the western half of the world. And the
missionaries have been its advance agents into the stagnant East, and the
savage wilds of the southern hemisphere.

Full, accurate knowledge of nature's resources and laws, and adaptation of
that knowledge to practical uses, have been among the most marked
conditions of the western world during the past century. And, as a result,
education, medical and hygienic and sanitary science, development of the
earth's soil, and resources above and below the soil, have gone forward by
immense strides. So far as is known, our progress in such matters exceeds
all previous achievements in the history of the race.

And some of all this has been seeping into the heathen world. It hasn't
gotten in far yet; only into the top soil, and about the edges, so far.
The progress in this regard has seemed both rapid and