so far as it is known, or can be ascertained. We are well aware that
that easy phrase covers in many cases great practical difficulty. Here
is one of the places where estimates may be inevitable. If they are
inevitable, they should be estimates, not guesses, and a note should be
made of the process by which they were reached. The difference between
an estimate and a guess is that an estimate is the result of a definite
train of reasoned calculation and a guess is not. For an estimate
reasons can be given, for a guess none other than--it occurred to me.

II. The Mission which has no Defined District.

We believe that the vast majority of missions accept a territorial
district; but there are missions where the station district has not and
cannot be defined.

The idea of the mission is not territorial. The object proposed is not
to cover any area with mission stations, nor to establish in every town
and village a church or chapel, but to create at a centre a Church of
living sons trained and educated by many years, perhaps generations, of
care to become the centre of a movement which may cover the whole
country; or it may be to influence movements which arise in the
religious, political, or social life of the people, and to direct these
into Christian channels. In such cases a territorial foundation is
impossible. The mission exists in the midst of a people and influences
the people; it makes converts, it establishes them in the faith, it
cares for them in mind and body, it prepares them to set the moral and
religious standard for any Church of the future. It is not concerned
directly with the widest possible preaching of the Gospel. When the
native Christians whom it is painfully and slowly educating and training
come to maturity they will spread the Gospel throughout the length and
breadth of the land. It is not, we are told, the business of the Foreign
Mission to preach the Gospel in every village of a defined area nor to
make itself responsible for such preaching directly: it should give to
converts in every country the highest and best and fullest teaching of
Christian civilisation, in order that by so doing it may show to all the
people of the country an example, by which they may be attracted and
influenced. If we take the widest expression of such mission activity we
find that to estimate the true value of such work we should be compelled
to survey not only the mission and its activities but the social, moral,