resented to us in that way, so long as
any mission may serve any purpose, we cannot possibly take any
intelligent share in foreign missions as a whole. We are lost. We cannot
co-ordinate in thought the activities of the missions, as we see plainly
that they are not co-ordinated in action in the field itself. And it is
practically impossible for us to imagine that the missions are directed
on any thought-out policy, because a policy seems to involve necessarily
the sub-ordination of the aim deemed to be less important to another
which is deemed to be more important, and the less or the more must
depend, not upon personal predilections, but upon closeness of relation
to some one dominant idea; and, therefore, the definition of the
dominant idea is the first necessity for the establishment of a
reasonable missionary policy.

To some minds the idea of a policy in connection with missions seems to
be abhorrent; but can a society with an income of something between half
and a quarter of a million pounds, or even less, afford to aim at every
type and form of missionary activity? Is it not necessary that it
should know and express to itself, to its missionaries, and to its
supporters what forms of activity it deems essential, what less
important, what aims it will pursue with all its strength, and what it
will refuse to pursue at all? It cannot afford to pursue every good or
desirable object which it may meet in its course. It must have a
dominant purpose which really controls its operations, and forces it to
set aside some great and noble actions because they are not so closely
related to the dominant purpose as some other.

A society with the limited resources which most of us lament cannot do
everything. In medicine it cannot afford to aim at a strictly
evangelistic use of its medical missions and at a use which is not
strictly evangelistic. We hear men talk sometimes as if it were the
business of a missionary society to undertake the task of healing the
physical afflictions of the people almost in the same sense as it is the
business of a missionary society to seek to heal their souls. We hear
them talk sometimes as if it was the duty of a missionary society to
supplant the native medical practice by western medical science as
surely as it is their business to supplant idolatry by the preaching of
Christ. And the tolerance of these ideas has certainly influenced the
direction of missions. The evangelistic value of medical