MISSIONARY SITUATION.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3382, 11 July 1927, Page 8

MISSIONARY SITUATION.

Rapid changes in the atmosphere of China and the Near Bast are analysed in the two missionary quarterlies, “The International Review of Missions*’ and f‘The East and the West.” Professor Latourette, of Yale, an eminent Chinese scholar, contributes to the International Review” a comparison of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionary methods in China, with a view to discovering what Protestants may learn from Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholics rely more on direct evangelisation through native catechists and elementary schools. Protestants _ rely more on higher education and hospitals. Roman Catholics rely more on specific religious instruction and church life; Protestants attempt to embrace Chinese life at every point. They are working with an army of medical, sanitary, and industrial experts. Pour societies have co-operated to found the Pekin University, 17 to found the University of Shantung, and two to form the Canton Christian College. There is, says Professor Latourette, a danger of secularisation in this philanthropic work. Protestants would do well to intensify their emphasis on specific religious instruction that the Christian appeal may not be diluted. The native Roman Catholic'' clergy receive more intensive instruction than most of their Protestant brethren. On the other hand, the Protestant policy of higher education has given many eminent reformers to China. Both bodies have been striving to produce an indigenous Christian church. Each has its special difficulty in releasing the native church from Western control. The Roman Catholics are anxious that the native church shall be so solidly grounded in doctrine that there shall be no danger of schism. Protestants are maintaining great hospitals and educational institutions at a cost far beyond the present resources of the native church on funds raised in Europe, Australia, and the United States.

From Central Africa comes an article of interest to anthropologists on “The Educational Value of Initiatory Rites,” by Bishop Lucas, of Masasi, Northern Kenya. The bishop regards these as of great value as inculcating good manners, respect for community interests, and endurance; but says that at first missionaries, through ignorance of their immoral features, gave them too indiscriminate approval, and are now in danger of passing to too indiscriminate condemnation. In two tribes in his diocese attempts to retain and Christianise this three months ’ preparation for manhood and womanhood have been meeting with some success. Mr Morrison, of Cairo, analyses the changes in the Moslem world. There is much militant secularism in Turkey, accompanied by moral slackness; but there, as in Persia, reform movements are active. There is a “higher criticism” of the Koran, having as its aim the separation of its eternal truths from features which belong to the seventh century. The Baha’i reform movement, with its emphasis on goodwill to men, is friendly to Christianity, but there are other puritan and conservative reforming tendencies bitterly hostile. In Egypt the students of El Azar wish to retain their Moslem beliefs intact, and at the same time acquire Western knowledge—not any easy matter, as the rules of the Moslem faith grip tightly politics and daily life. The rigidity of the Moslem system is giving all types of reformer much trouble, and numerically the traditionalists still immensely predominate.