home work out for
special purposes the various relations? The answer is simple: we
ourselves have been asked to fill up long schedules of unrelated facts;
and we know that the labour is intolerable. The supply of unrelated,
meaningless facts dulls and wearies the brain. Few men can do the work
with pleasure or profit, and consequently the schedules are often filled
up, not indeed with deliberate carelessness, but with that heavy
painfulness which, taking no interest in the work, often produces as
pitiful a result as downright carelessness. "Thou shalt not muzzle the
ox that treadeth out the corn" is a maxim which has a great application
here. The man who provides the information should be the first to profit
by it and to be interested in it. The first man to criticise these
tables should be the missionary who fills them up on the spot; and his
most valuable criticism might be a demonstration that the last column in
a table was futile; that the table led him to no conclusions and
suggested no remarks. That column of conclusions and remarks we hold to
be the most precious of them all. We would have no man supply
meaningless information. Only, we believe, when the information is of
vital importance and interest to the man who supplies it will it be
supplied carefully, correctly, willingly, and above all, intelligently.
We venture to hope that our tables may be one step towards the day when
the supply of statistical information by the missionary will cease to be
mere drudgery.

(iv) Seeing that the missionary task is essentially world-wide, it is
obvious that a world-wide work cannot be properly directed without a
world-wide view. Now, missionary survey is in its infancy, and in most
parts of the world it has yet to be begun. A full and complete
missionary survey of the whole world would necessarily be a considerable
undertaking, for many important facts could not be easily or quickly
collected. There is then a strong tendency for men to argue that, since
all the facts desirable cannot be known at once without much time and
expense, it is futile and dangerous to collect those facts which can be
collected speedily without great expense. A little knowledge, they say,
is a dangerous thing ... let us remain ignorant.

We would venture to suggest that a little knowledge is only dangerous
when it is mistaken for much knowledge; that it is far better to act on
knowledge which can be obtained than to act in total ignorance, blindl