f a new
religion. He must approach them as an exponent of the religion which
they already profess. However inadequate and confused their ideas about
Christian theology and practice may be, they expect to receive from a
Christian teacher instruction in their own religion, and that religion
is a religion common to him and to them. Consequently to omit them from
the Christian constituency is to do an injustice to them, and to
misrepresent the true facts of the case.

(4) In many areas two or more societies are at work and their conception
of the qualifications for the name of Christian differ. In a survey each
society is tempted to ignore the members of the other, and to reckon as
Christians only those who fulfil the conditions which are applied by the
one society. So certain Protestant societies ignore all Roman Catholics;
but that for the reasons already stated is most misleading, for when
persecution arises Protestants and Roman Catholics alike suffer for the
Name of Christ. Whatever the members of another society may be, they are
certainly not heathen; the heathen deny them. Consequently they cannot
properly be counted with the heathen by any surveyor who wishes to
present the facts.

For these reasons we have been compelled to adopt a very wide
expression, and the expression used by the China Continuation Committee
seemed to be sufficiently elastic to serve our purpose. Nevertheless, to
avoid error as far as possible, when we institute comparisons between
Christian and non-Christian population, we introduce side by side with
the total Christian Constituency the total Communicants (or Full
Members), which is a valuable check.

Take then an example. The figures here given are obviously not the
figures of a station area; they are figures for a province; but they
serve to illustrate the point. We cannot fill up the area table; we can
only supply figures for the population.

----------------------------------------
Population. : Total : Total Non-
: Christians. : Christians.
----------------------------------------
32,571,000 : 534,238 : 2,036,762
----------------------------------------

Now, here of the 534,238 Christians 500,655 are Roman Catholics, the
Protestants numbering 33,583. The Roman Catholics in this area began
work about 300 years earlier than the Protestants. Are we to eliminate
them?

Are all these 33,583 Protestants more worthy of the name of Christian
than some of the