surely it will be impotent in applying a palliative after the evil has been wrought.

(5) Because of the apologetic power of a religion that purifies the social order. The value of a religion is determined by its beneficent reaction upon the society in which it operates. The appeal of Christianity in the East is weakened in proportion to the failure of the Church to dominate the social problem in the home-land. In proportion to the scope of the great social revival at home, the Gospel we teach comes with increased authority in all lands. Success at home is the measure of success abroad. Said a speaker at the World Missionary Conference: "We are frank to concede that it is futile to talk about making Christ known to the world in this generation or any generation unless there be a great expansion of vitality in the members of the Churches of Christendom." Another is still more emphatic: "Something must happen to the Church at home if it is even to look at the work that has been put on it by this Conference." That something that "must happen to the Church at home" is the Christianizing of the social order in America. The Church must be delivered of complicity with sin, both personal and social, or it never will come with full apologetic power to the nations of the East. The missionary who does not share the social passion of the Church in America will be but poorly prepared to plant a church in the East competent to fulfil the ultimate purpose of Christ the Lord.

III. Methods of social work that will give the missionary of the future scientific and specific training in the solution of social problems.

(1) Social observation. The practice of seeing things in detail, interpreting their significance in terms of life, and laying plans in the midst of them for the attainment of the largest possibilities, is at the very foundation of the work of social reconstruction. The organization that does not know its own field of enterprise, that has no thorough and dependable body of evidence upon which its efforts are based, and that is not working in harmony with the principles upon which the ultimate social structure is founded, is a detriment rather than a help. It may even be destroying that which it seeks to build up. Every organization that seeks to make its best contribution to society desires to have its own field clearly marked and its relations to other organizations definitely declared, so that needless duplications and omissions may be avoided. This method persistently followed gives each agency its sufficient task, calls other agencies into existence to meet discovered needs, conserves the energy of workers, makes possible a thorough cultivation of a given field, and prevents jealousies. Every missionary should have careful training in conducting social surveys, for through this means alone can he arrive at a comprehensive knowledge of what his field

of labor is, what quality of life it fosters, and what outlook upon progress it makes possible. Returned missionaries often give us a mass of interesting and valuable information, but there are altogether too few who bring back a convincing body of evidence touching the facts and forces that make human life what it is. The Young Men's Christian Association of Peking has recently undertaken for the Churches a thorough survey of the home life, food, hours of labor, wage earnings, moral ideals, intellectual attainments, and social relationships of the jinrikisha coolies of the city. This is an example of the social observation we have in mind.

(2) Specific welfare work. It would be difficult to mention any definite form of useful service at home that would not give valuable training for the social service of missionaries abroad. But, as missionaries deal so largely with children, we deem it necessary to specify: (a) Work for children: Such as the kindergarten in all its features; the playground movement and recreational facilities of cities and towns; industrial training; night schools and half-day schools, and the care of dependent, delinquent, and neglected children; (b) Charity Organization: Missionaries can not complete their task in the foreign land without definite knowledge of the best methods of relief for the poor, and without acquaintance of the ideals looking to the elimination of poverty and professional beggary, and problems growing out of organized industry; (c) Housing reform: The necessities of the situation demand that missionaries be leaders in the movement for good housing, good sanitation, pure water-supply, and the conservation of physical health; (d) Community Extension: They should know how to organize and conduct social-service deputations, good-citizenship meetings, community athletics, social photography, how to arrange stereopticon lectures, how to conduct personal-worker groups, Bible-study classes, groups for the study of national and world-problems, and classes in the study of the theory and practice of social work. These matters are as important as learning the language of the people, and have the advantage that they can be best learned by actual service at home. before the foreign land is reached.

(3) Social Legislation. A highly important avenue of service is involved in the framing and enactment of laws bearing upon social conduct and governmental control. As progress is achieved, new laws will be in constant demand, and the conscience of the people must be solidified in ordinances. A vital part of the social worker's mission in society is thus to bring the sentiment of the people up to the point where certain measures can be given over to governmental regulation, from which the worker may then proceed to educate sentiment upon other and neglected issues. In the East a situation is rising that demands a thorough study and mastery of laws relating to the housing of the poor, sanitation, public health, the labor of women and children in industry, hours and wages of labor, bank

ing and currency, commercial privileges, insurance, the abolition of social vice and intemperance, the suppression of crime, and the treatment of prisoners. Standardizing the ordinances on these questions, and their enforcement in Eastern lands, will not be accomplished without the active coöperation of future missionaries. Upon them will fall a large part of the responsibility both to enact such laws and to keep them active. Without the preparation that comes from participation in these measures at home, and without an adequate mastery of the principles involved, the new social order of the East is doomed to repeat the stupid blunders and the ruinous delay that have marked the course of social legislation in Europe and America.

(4) Leadership in Church Activities. Perhaps the most important of all matters to be considered in the preparation of missionaries is the question of leadership. The missionary who is not a leader is only a half missionary. Facing the Church in the East is the stupendous problem of adaptation to changing conditions, of racial integrity and nationalism, of finance, of the unification of all classes and conditions of men in a Christian brotherhood, of holding student men and women to the Church, and of training the future leaders of the Oriental Churches in the various lands. Leadership is the test of missionary efficiency, and the test of the missionary's qualifications may be had without years of probation and expense upon the foreign field. In the Sunday-schools, Young People's societies, missic:ary societies, organized Bible-classes, and social-service groups in the Church; in the missionary training-schools, and the various departments of Young Men's Christian Association and Young Women's Christian Association work, in boys' clubs and girls' clubs, in social settlements, in charity organization societies, and in various other neighborhood societies of the home-land, the missionary has abundant opportunity to prepare himself for the service which will inevitably be made of him in the future. It is possible-perhaps in a larger sense than many of us ever have thought -that by an adequate preparation, scientific and specific, the missionary can go among a foreign people with the consciousness the prophet brought to his work: "The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord hath anointed me."

BIBLE-STUDY ESSENTIAL IN MISSIONARY

PREPARATION

PRESIDENT WILBERT W. WHITE, PH.D., NEW YORK

THREE quotations will lead us into the midst of our subject. The first is that great line from Browning, "Who keeps one end in view, makes all things serve."

The second is one of those striking short sayings of the late Dr. Arthur T. Pierson: "Nothing save holiness commands such homage as a thorough mastery of facts."

The third is the last sentence from Arnold Bennett's essay on "Mental Efficiency": "An accurate knowledge of any subject coupled with a carefully matured sense of the relativity of that subject to other subjects implies enormous self-development."

Following these quotations, consider three questions.

First: What missionary, whoever he may be, and whatever his method-be it educational, social, medical, or evangelistic-can accomplish the one end in view, and make all things serve that end, who does not know in a manner worthy to be regarded as measurably special, the Book which contains the evangel? Might we not as well think of a doctor, be he Allopathic, Homeopathic, Osteopathic, or Heteropathic, not knowing anatomy and physiology?

Second: What combination, thinkable, is bound to command more homage and to produce more abiding fruit unto eternal life, than holiness in one who possesses conspicuous acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures?

Third: If an accurate knowledge of any subject, such as butterflies, or mosses, or stars, or slugs, or street signs, or Shakespeare, together with a carefully matured sense of the relativity of that subject to other subjects, implies enormous self-development, what have we to say when that subject is the Bible?

Theoretically we all agree about the supreme importance of Bible-study in the preparation of the missionary. Too often, practically, however, Bible-study is sadly lacking. In the training of Christian leaders the Bible is altogether too inconspicuous. If I mistake not, one of the chief perils in the present movement in the direction of more and better preparation of missionaries, is that we shall, considering the limited amount of time given to preparation, make the curriculum so inclusive as practically to exclude properly

specialized Bible-study. Dr. Jowett recently referred to our religion as democratic rather than autocratic. By this he explained that it is so often made one of many things instead of the supreme thing. He referred in this connection to the woman who had God on her calling list! In many schools for training Christian workers the Bible is too much like this in the proportion of time given it in the curriculum.

I am aware that by some I may be regarded as over-urgent on this point. There are times when I myself am tempted to relax in the fear of being over-zealous. But if I say I will not make mention of it, nor speak any more of it, then there is "in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with forbearing, and I cannot contain."

Recently my attention has been called to an address of the Bishop of Manchester, in which he spoke of the nemesis which dogs the steps of non-Biblical education in India, in the following language:

After the Indian Mutiny, when we established universities in India, the Government saw fit not to encourage the students to read the Bible, for fear of creating religious troubles. Now we are staggered to find that the system has undermined the faith of a large number of people of India, not only in their own religion, but in all religions.

Commenting on this address, an editor said: "On this account, the work of the Christian missionary in the present generation is harder than it need have been, albeit on that account more necessary."

I add, on that account it is more necessary that the missionary go to this generation with the proper Biblical training.

Lord William Cecil writes of the danger of China evolving a civilization which shall adopt the Western efficiency without the Western ethic. It must be borne in mind that the Western ethic has its roots only in the Western religious feeling, of which even Mr. Huxley says he is seriously perplexed to know how it is to be kept up without the use of the Bible.

There is striking evidence in the mission field to-day of the too great absence of Biblical training of missionaries already there. Dr. Arnold Foster, a well known and influential missionary of China, in a letter recently received, wrote as follows:

I am entirely with you in your view of the place that the Bible must hold in the Church and in the Christian life. Some sort of shallow Christian Deism may exist on a large scale with but little knowledge of the Christian Scriptures, and this is what I have feared as a probable outcome of the hasty and superficial "evangelization" on which some missionaries seem so well content to expend their energies; but the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ, in which alone is life eternal, requires knowledge of the Divine ordering of the history of Israel, and of the record of His revelation in His Son.

Dr. Francis D. Gamewell, of Peking, head of the educational work of the Methodist Episcopal Church in China, at the Conference