MISSIONARY AND NATIVE.

Press, Volume XLIX, Issue 14668, 17 May 1913, Page 16

MISSIONARY AND NATIVE.

THE SENSTC OF RACIAL SUPERIORITY.

"A Missionary on Holiday" is almost brutally frank, in the "International Review- of Missions,' on what he considers the greatest drawback to missionary success. This is tha inability of tho missionary to loso his senso of racial euporiority, and to concede to the race MBong whom ho is working that equality without which ho can nover put himsej on its level, and got into thoroughly sympathetic touch and undojst»nd.ng wilh it. What is needed is not any kind of partial or mutual recrimination—between Christians at home and missionaries in tho field— "but tho united facing by the organic Western Church of that* race pride which so subtly tinges our humanity.' , Jesus is adduced as One whceo "consciousness, of never interfered with His sense _of perfect brotherhood, and even the vividness of His sense of the sin of men was powerless to dissolve tbo connection." From a Commission Report of tho Edinburgh Conference a passage is quoted on how missionaries 'felt a strange antipathy, to colour, dirt, vermin, and dirty faces. Unintentionally they showed that antipathy in their manners. The alert-eyed natives saw it. Without at first saying •anything disrespectful, they qniet.y gave them outward obedience. lfut they never gave them respect and nover opened their hearts to them. The teachings of such missionaries fell flat." It is easy to realise how difficult tho feeling of race superiority and race prejudico must be to overcome. Tho "Missionary on Holiday" mants out also how any defects of temper or manners on the missionary's part are reflected back on to the Gospel which he preaches and teaches, whereas at home such defects may bo corrected by tho examples of other so-to-say standard Christians. The article should 'not lend stay-at-home Christinns to criticise missionaries who have failed to emancipato themselves from their own prejudices v but to sympathise with them and pray for thorn all the more earnestly. Tho article, while it does not raise, the question, forces home the conviction of the nbsoluto necessity of training natives to evangeliso natives.