reaching and crushing iniquity, and breadths of vast social evil, which Christendom, with all its perplexing problems, happily does not reveal. Christianity can never affiliate with these existing evils, nor can it condone them. It must work steadily and inexorably to supplant and abolish them. It must deal patiently with all phases of social defect. It must work with the power of sympathy and by the living energy of its principles to reform these great and brooding wrongs that oppress and dominate heathen society.1

We would not be understood for a moment, in giving prominence to the sociological scope of missions, to be casting the slightest discredit The evangelical spirit upon, or even detracting in any sense from, the honor and heavenly sacredness of the evangelical purpose. Individual regeneration, instruction, guidance, and salvation are indeed the first and most indispensable purpose of the Christian missionary evangel. It would be, moreover, a lamentable and fatal mistake to substitute any

and aim of missions must not be supplanted by the sociological method.

1 "With every year of missionary experience the conviction has grown that the Gospel of Christ is a Gospel for all life-here not less than hereafter-and for all departments of life, and that for missionary workers to make it relate solely to salvation after death is a mistake, and to a great extent a defeat of its own ends; that godliness, in its ever-to-be-sought perfection, disallows crudities, unloveliness, barbarities, and cruelties in conditions and customs of every-day life and relationship; that the Gospel of Christ aims quite as much at removing these as it points to the 'golden streets' and 'mansions' made ready; that the reformation of earthly life is indeed the preparation for the heavenly citizenship, and should be not the selfish saving of individual souls alive, but a work as broad and inclusive as is the Love that 'so loved the world'; so that no physical, social, governmental, or intellectual obstacle to man's truest and highest development is too secular for the spirit of Christ and His Gospel to strike at through its missionaries.

"It seems to me that the somewhat tardy progress of missions in the past has been largely due to a hyperspirituality—a separation of the soul from its God-given earthly conditions; a snatching of the brand, not a putting out of the fires for the benefit of brands at large; a jealous care for the individual, not supplemented by an equal care for society of which he is a member, rather a hopeless condemnation and fleeing as from the doomed Sodom.

"I believe that the spirit that is working in the churches at home towards a more practical and thoroughgoing Christianity is also beginning to work in our hearts here in foreign lands, and we are waking up to feel that both the individual and society are equal objects of Christ's saving power-the one not more than the other, nor without the other. When this spirit fully possesses the Church both at home and abroad, then we shall see the coming of the kingdom of God with no faltering footsteps. I believe that there is something in even the most darkened and degraded people that protests against fleeing Lot-like from Sodom, but responds whole-souledly to the hope of the redemption of society from the bottom up."-Dr. Grace N. Kimball (A. B. C. F. M.), Van, Turkey.

other aim or adopt any other method than that of personal instruction and appeal. The individual conscience is the only practical basis for conscious responsibility. We would not be understood as asserting the necessity or even propriety of any exclusively sociological programme for missions. The way to reach society is through the individual. The individual soul is in the first instance the receptacle of the leaven of Christianity; from thence it leavens all the lump. The spiritual regeneration of the individual involves a further and larger influence upon the collective life. Just as the social misery and degradation of our great communities within the bounds of civilization are simply the cumulative result of individual delinquency and demoralization, so the saving of society is to be secured only through the uplifting of individual character, which in its total accretion issues in the redemption of society as a whole.1 As Christianity advances from heart to heart in this and other lands, it advances from home to home, and involves almost unconsciously a large and generous new environment of influences which works for the reformation and gradual discrediting of the old stolid wrongs of society. It works in foreign communities a slow, almost unrecognized, yet steadily aggressive change in public opinion. It awakens new and militant questions about stagnant evils. It disturbs and proceeds to sift and disintegrate objectionable customs. It stimulates moral aspirations and quickens a wistful longing for a higher and better state of society. Christianity has been building better than it knew in establishing its missions in the heart of these ancient social systems. The sociological awakening in Christendom is not more impressive than the hitherto almost unnoticed achievements of missions abroad in the same general direction, in securing the enfranchisement of human rights, the introduction of new social ideals, and the overthrow of traditional evils.

The question may still suggest itself to some minds, whether this view of the sociological significance of Christian missions is justified

1 "We may talk as we please about the welfare of the social aggregate or of society as being the proper object and test of all human endeavor; but the welfare of a society is nothing except as it exists in the conscious experiences of the separate men and women who compose it. A society can have no happiness which is not the happiness of its separate members any more than an edition of Hamlet' can have any dramatic qualities which do not exist between the covers of each separate copy. In this respect social science presents an absolute contrast to physical. The physical unit is of interest to us only for the sake of the aggregate. The social aggregate is of interest to us only for the sake of the unit."-W. H. Mallock, "Physics and Sociology," The Contemporary Review, December, 1895, p. 890.

The social outcome of

missions a natural and unconscious revelation

of their power.

by facts. Can it be vindicated? Is there sufficient evidence to sanction this immense enlargement of the import of the enterprise? In answering this question we should consider carefully just what is meant by this larger scope of mission service. It must not be regarded as in any sense a criticism or reversal of accepted views of the scope and purpose of missions. It is rather an effort to group under some expressive formula those indirect and outlying results of Christian effort in foreign lands in its influence upon society. It points simply to the irresistible trend of Christian teaching, as it instinctively and necessarily disturbs and uproots the deep-seated evils that have been so long the unchallenged environment of the social status. Just as the living seed develops according to the law of its individual growth, and finds its consummation in a single matured plant after its kind, ready for the harvest, and thus discharges its essential and primary function as a seed, so the spiritual seed produces its legitimate result in a ripened individual character. But while the natural seed has ripened, and presents the harvest grain as its climax, yet in so doing it has, as it were, unconsciously produced other results, which, although they may be regarded as secondary and indirect, nevertheless challenge our admiration and fasten our attention. The matured flower, for example, colors the landscape, adds a fragrance to the air, and is full of a ministry of beauty. Vegetation which has attained its growth gives also a varied aspect to nature, or produces the useful forests. The waving grain of harvest becomes food for the world, and furnishes the seed of another sowing. These natural and inevitable results of the ripening of single seeds cannot be ranked as the essential and primary functions of individual growth, but they are none the less valuable, and in some cases they are of transcendent importance. They are worthy of grateful recognition, and should be ranked high upon the roll of beneficent ulterior purposes of the Creator of life, and in harmony with the larger design of His providence. In this same sense the ripening of individual Christianity produces a subtle change in the spirit and tone of social life, a sweet fragrance of sympathy, a robust growth of principle, a waving harvest of beneficent reforms which, although not the first-fruits of the growth of Christianity in the individual soul, may yet be regarded as the secondary results of Christian effort, representing what we have called the larger scope of Christian missions.

This extended scope of missions reveals itself at first as an almost unconscious product of Christian effort; it comes more as a surprise than as a result definitely planned for; but as time goes on the new