Growth Of The Missionary Concept

Text extracted from opening pages of book: beltoereb t fK itit it:::, GROWTH 5V THE MISSIONARY CONCEPT BY JOHN F. GOUCHER NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GEAHAM CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE 5 I. THE IMPOSSIBLE 9 II. THE IMPROBABLE 45 HI. THE IMPERATIVE 81 IV. THE INDISPENSABLE 119 V. THE INEVITABLE 163 PEEFACE FEW men are as able and as qualified by travel and personal observation to discuss the mission fields of the world as Dr. Goucher, who delivered the last lectures of the Nathan Graves Founda tion at Syracuse University. His clear, lucid style and convincing logic, and his absorbing in terest in missions, invest these lectures with unusual interest and value to all who wish to study the subject of missions in its philosophical, its broadest, and its practical aspects. His discussion of China is at a time when that vast empire is awakening to Western thought and beginning earnestly to seek it, and also at a time when Western nations are commencing to appre ciate that remarkable people. No people have contributed so much to their awakening as the missionaries of our own and other churches. Fifty years of sowing is being rewarded with clearly apparent verdure and promise of abundant grain. Along with appeals of salvation have been in structions and examples in the best forms of our civilization. Schools and hospitals, with sanita tion and domestic purity and a new order of com munity life, have been the peculiar, as for many 5 6 PREFACE years they were the exclusive, offerings of the missionaries to a people that left all physical con ditions to blind fate and superstition. Young men and women are now seeking our schools by hundreds with an eagerness seldom seen in our owncountry. They surround you and anxiously inquire how they may reach America and have the benefits of our schools, and, returning, serve their own country. The leading men of China are recognizing the value of our mission work to Chinese citizenship. The influential classes are beginning to send their sons to our missionary schools. Their daughters are found in the schools of the Women's Society. The missionaries have opened the highways of commerce and are creating the demands for tho products of civilization. They have introduced elevating practices and uses of tho domestic arts their houses lighted with kerosene, thoir habits of reading and social intercourse, object lessons to Chinamen. Little kerosene lamps from our country are burning with bright flames in hun dreds of thousands of humble country and village homes where men and women sat in darkness and shuddered at their fears and gloomy thoughts, or were abandoned to vile and degrading habits. The missionaries have awakened in the minds of the young a desire for learning. Buddha no longer appeals with the old power of superstition PREFACE 7 to the intelligent young men and women who even come indirectly under the influence of Chris tian missions. They seek the truth in religion and the knowledge of the sciences and the arts. They are the equal in natural ability and apti tudes of our best young people; in stature of striking appearance. They impress you as of capacity that waits development by Christian learning into the foremost ability and achieve ments of the world. It has been a mighty work for our missionaries to counteract the perverting influences of much of godless commercialism in the persons of corrupt and profane menknown to the Chinese as Chris tians but known to the missionaries as more wicked than the Chinese; to withstand the in justice of governmental practices of Western na tions; to resist the inferences from the drunken ness and licentiousness of soldiers and sailors; to explain the backslidings of some of their own numbers, though happily of rare instances, and to make a positive and convincing advance into the dense ranks of superstition and capture by the forces of the kingdom of peace, and of purity, the strongholds of darkness and sin. What could not ha