----------------------------+-----+
Proportion of Scholars Confirmed | |
or Admitted Full Members in the Year. | |
+-------------------------------------------------------+-----+
Remarks and Conclusions. | |
+-------------------------------------------------------+-----+

CHAPTER V.

MEDICAL WORK IN THE STATION DISTRICT.

Thus far of the force in its general aspect. When we turn to closer
consideration of the medical and educational work we meet with a
difficulty. Medical and educational work, as we have already pointed
out, often, if not generally, have a definitely evangelistic character,
but each, nevertheless, appears to be designed to meet a special need of
the Church and people. There is a strong tendency in thought, and often
in speech, to emphasise this special need and to make it a distinct,
separate need. Herein lies a danger. Medical missions are sometimes
urged upon our attention as though they were founded to meet a medical
need of the people, as if it were the recognised and accepted duty of
missionary societies and of missionaries to supplant the native medical
practice by western scientific methods as certainly and fully as it is
their recognised and accepted duty to supplant native religion by the
faith of Christ. But that we for our part emphatically deny. The one may
be a philanthropic duty; the other certainly is a religious duty.
Consequently we deny that there is a medical need which it is the duty
of missionaries to supply in the sense in which we affirm that there is
a religious need which it is the duty of missionaries to supply. Medical
missions are, and ought to be, evangelistic in their aim, mere
handmaids[1] of evangelism. Similarly we deny a separate and distinct
educational need which it is the duty of missionary societies to supply.
The missionary societies ought not to take upon themselves the supply of
every need. We think the Christian Church is misled when it allows the
medical need of a country to be presented as a distinct need which it is
the duty of missionaries to meet, and when it allows the ignorance of a
country to be presented as a distinct need which it is the duty of
missionaries to meet. From such a presentation educational missions
become detached, medical missions become detached, each designed to meet
a distinct and separate need of the people.

[Footnote 1: If any reader exp