necessary_ for the religious life of the Christians, such as
missionaries' salaries, high schools, colleges, medical institutions,
and expensive buildings. Consequently to know the total expenditure in
the area is not to know the necessary expenditure. The native Church
might maintain its life and conquer the whole district without spending
in actual money a tithe of that which we spend on providing the people
with medicine and education and buildings and foreign missionaries.

Yet the question cannot be avoided. Missionaries all over the world
carefully count every penny which the converts subscribe, and search
diligently for some new method of doubling it, in order to lead their
converts towards the goal of self-support. What that goal is we do not
know. We cannot tell how far the Christians can supply their own needs,
if we do not know what the needs really are. And that we do not know. In
a certain very real sense Christians can always provide what is
necessary for their religious life. They could all always be
self-supporting, if we did not invent needs and insist upon them; and
what we insist upon depends entirely upon the school in which we were
brought up. The standard set, as we have already explained, is purely
arbitrary.

Under these circumstances how can we express the position of the native
Church with any approximation to truth? We can only suggest that these
arbitrary standards should be accepted, and ask that they should be
defined in every case. We should ask the missionaries, or the societies,
to estimate the amount required to supply that minimum upon which they
insist. If we did that, remembering always that the estimate made must
be doubtful and arbitrary, and that the native contribution, whilst
comparatively large funds are regularly supplied from a foreign source,
will never represent the power of the Christian community to supply its
own needs, we should at least have some standard by which we might
estimate the position of the Christian Church in the country, and its
progress. We suggest then that three items should be included in the
table: (1) the total expense of carrying on all the work in the station
district, whether the funds were provided from foreign or native
sources; (2) the amount estimated to cover the necessary expenses of the
native Christian Church; and (3) the amount subscribed by the native
Christian community. We think these three items taken together would
help us to unders