It is the voice of God, at once tender and inspiring, that summons the soul to life and action, and gives it the mighty assurance of indwelling power.

The question stated.

It should be borne in mind, moreover, that the agencies above referred to, so far as we are familiar with their influence in Christendom, are already in coöperation with Christianity. They are in part infused with and inspired by its spirit. If the Christian element in these instrumentalities is to be included, then they are practically mission agencies. Education under the spell of Christian influence is one thing, and quite another thing when entirely out of touch with Christian ideals. When pervaded by the spirit of a true religious outlook, it gathers to itself a vital force, a purifying energy, a moral tone, a gracious temper, and a constructive aim which place it in the front rank of helpful social forces. The same may be said of civilization, patriotism, legislation, and the power of public opinion; if these are infused with Christian sentiments, they cannot be looked upon as acting independently of, but rather in coöperation with, Christianity. If the question is to be fairly put, therefore, it must be whether education and kindred forces, entirely separated from Christianity and independent of it, will avail to save society. Missions are not insensible of the value of these instrumentalities as those which yield themselves to moral aims and can thus be consecrated to human advancement. In fact, they are made in an indirect way the very channels of mission activity, and as such are useful and effective, but will they be fruitful in beneficial results without the Christian spirit? Are they in themselves morally vitalizing and reformatory? Upon what basis do they rest in inculcating moral accountability? Have they inherent virtue to renew and refashion the spiritual tone of society? We can safely claim that, tested by such searching criteria, they will be found to be lacking in power to accomplish deep and permanent results; nor have they a watchword, such as Christianity possesses, to stimulate and ennoble humanity. The remedy required must have in it a supernatural and divine efficacy, which never inheres in purely secular civilization. This supreme factor of supernatural energy must be mighty, pervasive, effectual, and universal. It must be able to work revolutionary changes in the realm of intellectual perception and moral impulse. Think for a moment what is required of it and what are the forces arrayed against it. It will necessarily be in 1 Cf. Seelye, "Christian Missions," Lecture II., pp. 31-58.

2 Cf. article on "Christian Supernaturalism," by Professor B. B. Warfield, D.D., LL.D., in The Presbyterian and Reformed Review, January, 1897.

conflict with debased public sentiment, immemorial social tendencies, dominant customs, hardened sensibilities, confirmed phases of character, much ignorant inertia, and a host of all-powerful superstitions.1

In view of these requirements, is there any remedial agency which is equal to the task, except, as we shall try to show later, the religion of Christ, which it is the function of missions to teach and establish? 2

I

Is the secret of social regeneration in education alone?

Education alone, apart from Christianity, will not accomplish it. It is not in itself a moral force. In fact, if it is out of touch entirely with Christianity, it often becomes a powerful weapon of evil, and may be subsidized in violent hostility to the higher welfare of society. Let us here guard carefully our meaning. We do not intend to assert that education under Christian auspices, pervaded by the spirit and aim of a Christian purpose, is not a useful and helpful stimulus to social progress. It should rather be counted a noble and legitimate missionary instrumentality. Our contention, then, is that mere education, either elementary or higher, apart from Christianity, with no promptings of Christian morality, no infusion of Christian truth, and no lessons in Christian living, is not in itself an effective instrument of social regeneration. We do not dispute that it is an intellectual stimulus, that it broadens the outlook, and breaks the fetters of superstition, is of benefit in its sphere and way as a ministry to the mental faculties, and that it may indeed be a scholastic preparation for a subsequent study and more appreciative apprehension of Christian truth and morality; yet, while it is in alliance with materialism, agnosticism, or a false and superstitious religious system, its power as a moral regenerator of society is at a minimum. Civilization is not derived from or based upon knowledge in the head so much as it is drawn from and prompted by a true religious and humane temper in the heart and life of man.

1 Cf. article on " Foreign Missions and Sociology in China," by the Rev. Arthur H. Smith, in The Missionary Review of the World, February, 1895.

2 "It must be recollected that the moral standard of individuals is fixed not alone, and sometimes not principally, by their personal convictions, but by the principles, the traditions, and the habits of the society in which they live, and below which it is a point of honour, as well as of duty, not to sink. A religious system is only, then, truly tested when it is set to reform and to train, on a territory of its own, great masses of mankind."-William E. Gladstone.

The evidence of this lack of regenerative power in mere education is not wanting. The ancient culture and the highest scholastic achievements of Oriental and classical paganism were developed side by side with the grossest moral degradation and the most colossal social wrongs. Classical philosophy in its most ideal development had nothing better to offer as a social system than Plato's dream of a perfect society as represented in his "Republic," and, as Dr. Fairbairn says, "That Republic could not have been realized without the ruin of humanity." The Renaissance was a revival of learning, but it was fruitless in moral energy until the Reformation introduced the spirit of a living religious faith into the quickened intellectual development of Europe in the sixteenth century. The deistical revival of the eighteenth century was an effort to alienate learning and religion, and its tendencies are recorded in the history of Western Europe in that century of social reaction and confusion.

Is the evidence from Japan, China, and India convincing?

Coming to more modern times, there are no nations in the world where education apart from Christianity has had such large opportunities as in Japan, China, and India. The advances of education in Japan have been phenomenal; yet competent observers are convinced that intellectual progress alone has not improved the morality of the country.2 In China, education is the hope and the goal of tens of thousands of toiling students, and the result is represented by the literati of the Celestial Empire, who form, perhaps, one of the most

1 The abortive character of Plato's ideal has been sketched by Dr. Fairbairn, who thus writes of it:

“Think where he [Plato] lived, in the fairest land of antiquity, under the brightest sun, amid the most cultivated people, pupil of the greatest teacher and philosopher of his race, associated with the wisest statesmen, heir to an heroic past, moved by a poetry that is still the joy of the scholar, and then conceive him turning in his maturest manhood to think out the model of a perfect republic. And what was it? It was a state where there was to be little freedom, for philosophers were to be kings—and a strange king the philosopher always makes, for he is a man resolute to fit men into his theory, and his best theory is, you may be well assured, a bad frame for the simplest man. And the state these philosophers were to rule was to be one where the home was destroyed, where women were to be held in common, where there was to be a community of goods, where life was to be regulated by rules and hard-fixed methods that would have allowed no elasticity, no play for glad and spontaneous energy. That Republic could not have been realized without the ruin of humanity, and was possible at its best only for the Greek, was conceived in derision of the barbarian, and afforded even to Greek nature only the poorest exercise."— Fairbairn, "Religion in History and in Modern Life," p. 163.

2 Bishop Evington, of Japan, in a speech in Exeter Hall, in the spring of 1894, gave as his emphatic testimony that education pure and simple has not influenced for

effective barriers to her social progress. The Chinese system of education, left to itself, would hold the empire in the grasp of an unprogressive and stereotyped social system, and provide no remedy for its stagnation and vacuity.

In India one of the ripest fruits of nonn-Christian education is the Brahman, and it is a demonstrated fact that even under the influence of modern education, unless touched by the illuminating and regenerating power of Christianity, he can remain a Brahman still, and will defend the social anomalies of the Brahmanical system, no matter to what degree of culture his education is carried. The system of caste survives practically intact in a purely educational atmosphere, and high-caste students who have received university education under the government system of non-religious influence have clung to the most puerile features of caste ceremonialism to an extent which even Hindus themselves acknowledge to be a disgrace to intelligent manhood.1 One of the most ignoble spectacles of the modern world is an educated Hindu of high caste, upon his return from a visit to European civilizathe better the morals of Japan. See The Church Missionary Intelligencer, April, 1894, p. 287.

One of the makers of the New Japan, the lamented Neesima, revealed his wise discernment when he said: "We seek to send out into the world not only men versed in literature and science, but young men of strong and noble character, who will use their learning for the good of their fellow-men. This, we are convinced, can never be accomplished by abstract speculative teaching, nor by strict and complicated rules, but only by Christian principles, and, therefore, we adopt these principles as the unchangeable foundation of our educational work, and devote our energies to their realization."

1 The Rev. M. A. Sherring, in his "Hindu Tribes and Castes," says of some of them: "With all their weight of learning, the possession of which enables them to carry off university degrees and honours, they are perfectly content to mingle among the most superstitious and ignorant Hindus, to do as they do, to obey their foolish dictum as law, and to have no other aim in life than to conform to the most rigid usages of their ancestors."-Quoted in "Papers on Indian Social Reform," section on "Caste," p. 49.

"It has been generally acknowledged that secular education alone will not permanently and satisfactorily develop or elevate moral character. It is only, as all missionary experience proves, when a man accepts Christ as his teacher, example, and Saviour that he ever rises above the vices and immoralities of a past heathen life. Education and so-called Christian civilization do work a certain amount of outward improvement, but it is only a whole-hearted acceptance of Christ that does or can produce an abiding and worthy moral character. Old habits and customs die hard, but it is only the men and women who become Christians who ever really rise above national weakness, superstition, and vice. So far as known, not one of our native Christians denied the Faith in the terrible days of the Indian Mutiny."-Rev. D. Hutton (L. M. S.), Mirzapur, North India.

tion, going through the ceremony of expiation in accordance with the requirements of his religion, which consists, among other things, of swallowing a pill composed of the five products of the cow. He is truly spoken of in The Hindu Patriot, a leading native paper, as “an imbecile swallower of penitential pills." The effect of Indian education apart from Christianity is simply to galvanize the social curses that Hinduism has introduced and perpetuated. In a paper presented to the Bombay Conference of 1893 (Report, p. 429), Dr. Mackichan, Principal of the Wilson College at Bombay, writes: "The testimony is borne in from all quarters of the land that secular education, apart from the inculcation of the principles of Christianity, has proved a very doubtful blessing so far as the religious condition of the people is concerned. The Government itself, which presides over this system, is profoundly conscious of its failure, and seems to shrink with some alarm from the consequences of its own action. It turns for help to all who can supply the influences which it must exclude from its own system. Surely this appeal is a testimony of authority and weight."1

1 Dr. Norman Macleod once expressed his judgment upon the problem of education in India as follows: "If the non-religious schools and colleges be left alone, they will eventually leave the bulk of the educated portion of the natives either without any faith in God or without any fear of God. If Christian colleges and schools flourish alongside the secular ones, a true and reverent faith will be seen to be compatible with the highest education."

At the recent annual prize distribution at the high school of the Church Missionary Society at Jabalpur, Sir Anthony P. MacDonnell, K.C.S.I., Civil Commissioner of the Central Provinces, presided, and in the course of his address, in which he referred to the difficulties which beset the Government in the attempt to convey moral training in State schools, remarked: "For my own part, I consider the difficulties so great that State schools offer me but little prospect of a satisfactory solu tion. The problem can alone be solved by such institutions as this, which are free to make religious and moral teaching part of the daily curriculum." He especially commended the school as one of those which aim at something higher than imparting mere secular instruction, and recognize the great principle that moral training is the only sound basis of education.”—Quoted in The Church Missionary Intelligencer, April, 1893, p. 292.

The late Sir C. U. Aitchison, K.C.S.I., in an able article on the Brahmo Somaj, spoke of materialism and agnosticism, which, as the outcome of a purely secular education, are throwing their baleful shade over the educated youth of India."— Ibid., March, 1893, p. 173.

A missionary in India writes: "There is one thing which education does not seem to bring to India, and that is moral stamina. The ability to accept and harbor the most debasing social customs of this land is found among Hindus almost as frequently, if not as fully, under the university cap and gown as under the unkempt hair and rags of the village plowman. This is a vast and ghastly factor in the great