THE GREAT MISSIONARY FAILURE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXV, Issue 39, 28 January 1898, Page 3

THE GREAT MISSIONARY FAILURE.

There are few people so optimistic, at least on paper, as the average Protestant missionary. He is a Mark Tapley brought up to date. The first Napoleon said that the word '■ impossible "was to be found only in the dictionary of fools. The vocabulary of the average nonCatholic missionary's report contains no such words as '' error," " misconduct," or " failure." The people among whom he is set are ever either " hearing gladly "or being •' gathered into the fold." A rosecoloured glow pervades the atmosphere of the mission: " the sun shines always there." The only shadows in tho report are those cast by an occasional triumphant tilt at Rome, or the Ritualists, or the opium trailie, or the few unspeakable heathens who set their faces unsuccessfully against "the people of God." For Catholics, his proceedings mibt ever pos.-o-^s a melancholy interest, inasmuch as they throw a side-light on one of the chief difficulties which beset our missionaries in heathen lands.

Zimmerman i-ays that optimism arises cither '• from stagnation of intellect or insuperable indolence." In the present instance, it would app* ar to be the creature of external circumstance — partly a question of mere policy, partly a matter of supply and demand. The report of theEt-t.iblishid Church of Scotland Missionary Society for IMS complained th.it "missionaries are disc mraged by the notion that their friends crave for exciting and novel narrative ; that the plain record of daily duties, petty disappointments, and serious hindrances would be unacceptable." A Protestant clergyman, Rev. 11. Ilensley Henson, writing on the subject of foreign missions in the National I>< rit ie for last December, thus accounts for the roseate hue of the typical Protestant missionary's report : •' He (,the Protestant missionary) is ignorant almost always, and by necessary consequence he in prejudiced. lie is generally in a thoroughly false position — the reporter and judge of his own achievements. He works under thoroughly bad conditions, for his reports are the advcitiscments of a momy-raisirg society, and they arc addressed to constituents.- — the rank and file of the denominations — who arc as greedy of sensation as they are credulous of prodigies."

Here is the demand for pious fiction of a certain kind. It is duly supplied from over the sea. A Chinese proverb has it that " falsehood will travel over half the earth ■while truth is pulling on her shoes." Nevertheless, truth sometimes o\ertakes and trips up the heels of falsehood. Other versions of facts likewise come over the seas and stand in comparison with thc-e of tho missionary. '• The audience he can count on," says llev. 11. Hunsley Honson,

"is not so receptive as was once the case : nay, so far has the critical process now proceeded, that uncorroborated missionary's evidence is scarcely considered evidence at all. It would be an error to interpret this scepticism of missionary statements as an indication of anti-religious prejudice. It has its explanation in the discovered errors of the past and the suspected conditions of the present. Compared with the civil servant, with the independent traveller, with the army officer, even with the higher type of merchant, the average missionary does not command confidence." In one of his sermons in Westminster Abbey on Christian Missions in 1873, Dean Stanley spoke of "the necessity of a vigilant endeavour to repress the exaggeration, to denounce the fallacies and inaccuracies" of the reports. Dr. Cust — the * greatest living authority on the subject — cays in his Missionary Methods that "it requires great determination and a strong stomach" to get through them. Among the other serious imputations which he makes against them are " unreal exaggerated statements as to numerical success." One of the Church Missionary Society's reports, quoted by Cust in his Missionary Methods, has the following plaint : " How hard it is for the missionary to be patient, when his friends at home are so impatient, and how great is the temptation to embellish the account of his annual labours 1 I fear there are grave scandals connected with our missionary reports," which, says the same writer, are " positively grotesque in their optimism, [and] in which Scripture-texts jostle strangely with palpably exaggerated retrospects and forecasts."

" There can be no reasonable doubt," says the writ >r of the article on Protestant missions in the National Review, " that the results of missionary endeavour are inadequate 1o the exertions made." Dr. Cust states that "of the amounts collected from the supporters of missionary societies, a far too great percentage never gets beyond the shores of England." According to the 6ame authority, the Church Missionary Society retained in one year £35,000 for the cost of administration, etc, and the other societies in like proportion. Even the money that reaches the mission field is singularly barren of result. In the missions to the Jews in Palestine each •' convert " is said to cost the sociefes about £10,000, and it is whispered that some knowing Israelites have made a living by frequent changes of religion. According to Canon Taylor (in a letter to the Times in 1887), £48,000 was spent in North-West and Central India in one year. The result was somewhat meagre : 279 converts, some of them •• not altogether free from suspicion." According to Dr. Morrison — a Protestant traveller — 3127 converts — of a kind — were made in China in 1803 at a cost of £350,000. In a letter to the .l/v/;/.s'(s'ept(mber W, 18! C)). traversing this statement. Rev. E. G. Veal, on the strength of a very visionary rough calculation, was prepared to admit that sotre 6000 may have " found salvation " in that year of grace, at a cost of £2.">0,000. Even this could not be r garded as a conspicuous succesp. It must be classed as a dismal failure when we find Catholic missionaries, on the slenderest resources, ministe ing in the Flowery Land and Tonquin to a papula ion of clo eon two million co-reMgionists ; and in India, to 1,31.">.2<>3— 0r more than half of all the Christians in the country combined. A Protestant author, Mr Mitchie, in his Mix.\ioitarie* in (hunt (181)1) estimates the total number of Protestants in China proper at 37, i>7. Ava-t body of non-Catholic testimony as to the failure of the Protestant missions will be found in Marshall's Chvi tiaa Missions, in Cardinal Moran's Mission Field, and in various works of travel to which we may recur at some future peiiod.

Zeal for missionary work antes naturally and necessarily fiom one of the four marks of the True Church — its Catholicity. It waborn with her ; it grew up with her life ; and through her, ami through her alone, have whole heathen nations cone into the one fold. The enthusiasm of our non-Catholic friends in the missionary cause is, says Rev. H. 11. Henson, "of very recesit growth." It has undoubtedly drawn into the mission fit Id many earnest and pious men, such as "Wil iam Carey. The work must, however, ever labonr under the radical disadvantage of owing its origin, its motives, and its methods, to denominations that are purely human in their ori.'in. Referring in particular to English missionary societies, the Protestant writer just quoted says that their z 'al •• is bui the ec, lesiastical aspect of Impjrialisai."'

The hopeless divisions of the rival sects. Lv 1: of zea 1 . and th • marriage question ate tin human instruments which mu-t o\ei combine to render Protot.mt missionary work ei.mparatn el\ b .in n of substantial results. l> The unprejudiced enquirei,'" says It v II H. Henson, v is startlel to discover that no attempt 1- made to mitigate, in the face of the heathen, the monstrous anarchy of Christendom. The competition of Churches and se ts wuuld be ludicrous, were it not so deplorable. The scandal i-, »ro-> ; the stumbling block great. From the purely evangelistic point of \iew this over-lapping and mutual hostility- are serious matter.-. imolving

large waste of income, and much hindrance to wojk ; but, even from the civic standpoint, they are no trifles. The rival evangelists have been known to carry their polemical ardour to such lengths as to endanger the public peace. Thus, in Madras a few years ago, the Government found it necessary to issue regulations prohibiting rival preachers from coming within two hundred yards of each other." This war of creeds and interests has helped to make all Christianity ridiculous in the eyes of the pagan, and has thereby proved a clog even to Catholic missionary work. Here is one ground of melancholy interest for Catholics in the unseemly bickerings which the principle of private judgment has carried into missio.iary lands.

The Rev. Hensley Henson tells us, in the National licv'wic, that the average Englishman insists on viewing foreign missions " merely as a branch of the clerical profession, into which men enter on the normal professional motives, and in which they seek the normal professional success." The professional missionary makes his work

'■ a private venture," airl is '• truly a repulsive spectacle." The same writ jr, togt ther with Dr. Oust and a host of others, condemns the trad.ng instincts by which missionaries amassed vast wealth in the Pacific Islands, and (like ex-missionary Mr. Stokes) in West Africa. He contrasts the missionary with the soldier or the civil servant, and '"concludes that the balance of self-denial is against the missionary," and that, especially " in the crucial matter of matrimony, which, in the secular sphere, is the synonym of settled position the missionary cuts a very poor figure beside his lay contemporaries." Dr. Cust inveighs strongly against the early and " reckless marrying "' of the missionaries. It indicates, he maintains, a lack of '• selfdenial " and of '" self -consecration." He would " let no male missionary marry till he has had 10 years' service in the field," and he would " encourage Brotherhoods and Sisterhoods." Your married missionary could not, says the rev. writer in the National Review, " save in the rarest instances, be conceived in the heroic categoi'y. The true missionary is normally unmarried, unprofessional, heroic." " Nowhere," says the same Protestant writer, " does the Roman Church wear so noble and Christian an aspect as in the mission field. This is the reluctant admission of her foes, as well as the legitimate pride of her members."