In this Chapter I relate briefly how I came to my present position, and state broadly the danger which I see, and the remedy. I then Explain a difficulty in writing the book and set out in a few words its plan and purpose.

 

Many years ago my experience in China taught me that if our object was to establish in that country a Church which might spread over the six provinces which then formed the diocese of North China, that object could only be attained if the first Christians who were converted by our labours, understood clearly that they could by themselves, without any further assistance from us, not only convert their neighbours, but establish Churches. That meant that the very first groups of converts must be so fully equipped with all spiritual authority that they could multiply themselves without any necessary reference to us: that, though, while we were there, they might regard us as helpful advisers, yet our removal should not at all mutilate the completeness of the Church, or deprive it of anything necessary for its unlimited expansion. Only in such a way did it seem to me to be possible for Churches to grow rapidly and securely over wide areas; for I saw that a single foreign Bishop could not establish the Church throughout the Six Provinces over which he was nominally set, by founding mission stations governed by superintending missionaries, even if he had an unlimited supply of men and money at his command. The restraint of ordination to a few natives specially trained by us, and dependent for their own maintenance and the maintenance of their families upon salaries provided either by us or by the small native Christian community, and the absolute denial of any native episcopate at the beginning, seemed to me to render any wide expansion of the Church impossible, and to suggest at the very beginning that there was something essentially foreign about the Church which demanded the direction of a foreign governor.

The years that have passed since that early experience, and an examination of our missionary work in other lands have tended more and more to confirm that impression. I find that many of our missionaries are inclining to take the same view, and that the enunciation of it is often welcomed. Many are beginning to perceive that we cannot establish a foreign Church governed and directed by foreigners, and then at some moment say: "Let us make it indigenous or native by process of devolution." If the Church is to be indigenous it must spring up in the soil from the very first seeds planted. One or two little groups of Christians organized as Churches, with their Bishops and priests, could spread all over an empire. They would be obviously and without question Native Churches. But if we establish Missions rather than Churches, two evil consequences, which we now see in greater or less degree everywhere, sterility and antagonism, inevitably arise.

If the first groups of native Christians are not fully equipped to multiply themselves without the assistance of a foreign Bishop, they must wait upon him, and progress will depend upon his power to open new stations, or to provide superintending missionaries. That way lies sterility. If the first groups of native Christians are not fully organized Churches which can multiply themselves, but must wait upon a foreign Bishop to move, they are in bondage. For years, perhaps for generations, they must accept this bondage; indeed neither they nor their foreign leaders may feel it; but sooner or later they must awake and then I do not see how they can fail to feel resentment. If I were an Indian, or a Chinese, or an African, I should resent most bitterly the attempt to establish the Faith in my country by men who took it for granted that they must control and direct our spiritual life and progress. I should resent most bitterly the domination of foreign Bishops and superintending missionaries. I should say, "They taught us that orders are essential to the Church, they taught us that Bishops are necessary for the administration of orders, but they insisted that a Bishop must be a dignitary with a large stipend, and they insisted that we were not sufficiently educated to be Bishops. At rare intervals they ordained some of us, but they never put us into a position to consecrate our own Bishops. Thus they kept all spiritual authority in their own hands. Why should all spiritual authority be vested in them? They cannot claim that they are following the Apostles in this: they cannot claim that they are obeying a command of Christ. They are simply in bondage to their own traditions; for they must know that we cannot advance without Bishops of our own." However noble they were in character, however considerate in action, however gentle in manner, I should still feel this. No Church Councils would satisfy me; nothing but a native Episcopate, nothing but spiritual authority for unlimited advance would satisfy me. Consequently I am not surprised when I hear that nearly everywhere in our missions there is springing up a feeling of discontent at our domination; for I myself, who am neither an Indian, nor a Chinese, nor an African, feel it to be wrong.

The equipment of small native congregations of Christians with full power and authority as local Churches would remove most, if not all, of the present causes of trouble. We should cease to talk of a native church as something to be attained after long years, or generations of probation. There would be native Churches at once which all men would recognize as native. There would be ample opportunity for the ablest and strongest native minds to exercise all their powers in the direction and advancement of the churches. Without further words we should have proved to all men that we do not preach Christ in order to extend our dominion as our enemies assert: we should have proved that we really mean the words which we now too often use without any demonstration that we really know their meaning--that we desire to be helpers, not lords over other men's souls.

 

II

 

It is scarcely possible to make any statement about our Missions which someone will not be found to contradict. Statements of fact are constantly made, and repeated again and again in our missionary magazines, without any question being raised, so long as the conclusion implied or expressed is that men should subscribe more liberally to meet present urgent needs in the familiar way; but if they are used to raise a question concerning the wisdom of our missionary policy or practice, they are disputed. Consequently it has been a question of some difficulty to decide how far it is necessary to support my statements of fact by references or quotations. To have added references and quotations in support of every statement made would have been tedious and absurdly lengthy. I have taken the proverbially risky middle course, and quoted at what may appear to some unnecessary length on points which seemed to me of great importance, as for instance in my treatment of the subject of the training of a native Ministry, whilst for matters of less importance in my eyes, or on points which critical and observant readers can find scattered freely in missionary magazines, I have contented myself with a single reference or with none at all.

There is another difficulty which besets anyone who would write of missionary methods in general terms: it is not easy for him to find any expressions which are universally true, or any rules which have no exception. The result is that the moment he makes any statement some individual arises to cry out that that statement is not true, because in his experience it is not true in his district; and thus an impression is produced that the statement in question is a gross exaggeration and that the author is a careless manufacturer of hasty generalizations. Sometimes this charge is made in ignorance of the facts even in that particular district. I remember a man of wide experience telling me that he discussed with a certain missionary the sense of grievance at their subordinate position felt by native mission workers, and that the missionary, answered him, "Thank God we have not that difficulty here," yet the first native whom he met when he left the missionary's house began at once to pour forth that complaint. I think that in regard to my earlier books I have been fortunate in that I have suffered much less than I expected from this sort of criticism, but I have not escaped, and could not possibly have escaped from it wholly, and I cannot hope to escape from it now. I can only ask my readers to believe that I have not written anything carelessly; I can only ask them to remember that the district with which they are familiar is not the only district in the world; I can only ask them to pay heed rather to the essential principles than to the particular details; remembering that a crop of fruit does not all ripen on one day, and that if they did not see the ripe fruit in their district it may be because it has not yet come to its hour. The seed which produces the fruit may be there, and it is into the character of the seed which they are sowing that I ask men to inquire, that they may not be taken by surprise when the fruit appears. A very able and distinguished missionary who kindly read this book in manuscript, objected that I talked too much of "tendencies." He said: "You are always saying that something tends to produce something else." That is exactly what l mean. I try to point out that certain seed must produce certain fruit, and I illustrate by saying that the fruit from that seed has appeared in this place or in that. That surely is what I ought to do, if it is my object, as it is, to persuade, as far as I can, my readers to avoid planting one kind of seed and to plant another in its stead.

 

III

 

I ought perhaps to say one word on the plan of this book. I begin by trying to set forth the nature of the force which issues in spontaneous expansion and the dangers of checking it. Then I point to some hesitating attempts in modern days to recognize and give place to it. Then I set out the difficulties which hinder us from giving place to it, the terrible fears which beset us, fears for our doctrine, our moral standards, our ideas of civilized Christianity, our organization. In doing this I argue that such fears are real and natural but wicked, that the standards which we so highly prize are not our Gospel, and that the attempt to maintain them by our control is a false method. Spontaneous expansion must be free: it cannot be under our control; and consequently it is utterly vain to say, as I constantly hear men say, that we desire to see spontaneous expansion, and yet must maintain our control. If we want to see spontaneous expansion we must establish native Churches free from our control. I would ask my reader to keep ever in mind this fundamental truth, and to remember that when I speak of Churches I am not thinking of pseudo-national Churches, national only in name, but of local Churches, like those founded by St. Paul, Churches fully established with their proper ministers. If my reader does not bear this in mind, I fear that he will utterly misinterpret all those chapters which deal with doctrine and morals and organization and read them as though I was dealing with these questions in themselves. It is only in relation to the spontaneous expansion of the Church that they have any place in my argument. Finally I attempt to suggest a way of escape from our present position.

 

CHAPTER II

 

THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF SPONTANEOUS EXPRESSION

 

In this Chapter I argue that spontaneous expression on the part both of individuals and of Churches is the key to expansion, and that the restriction of it, from fear of its uncontrollable character, though natural, is disastrous.

 

When we turn from the restless entreaties and exhortations which fill the pages of our modern missionary magazines to the pages of the New Testament, we are astonished at the change in the atmosphere. St. Paul does not repeatedly exhort his Churches to subscribe money for the propagation of the Faith, he is far more concerned to explain to them what the Faith is, and how they ought to practise it and to keep it. The same is true of St. Peter and St. John, and of all the apostolic writers. They do not seem to feel any necessity to repeat the great Commission, and to urge that it is the duty of their converts to make disciples of all the nations. What we read in the New Testament is no anxious appeal to Christians to spread the Gospel, but a note here and there which suggests how the Gospel was being spread abroad: "the Churches were established in the Faith, and increased in number daily," "in every place your faith to Godward is spread abroad so that we need not to speak anything"; or as a result of a persecution: "They that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the Word."

This was not a peculiar note of the apostolic age, a sign of the amazing inspiration and power of apostolic preaching and example: for centuries the Christian Church continued to expand by its own inherent grace, and threw up an unceasing supply of missionaries without any direct exhortation.

Nor was the result of the preaching of these unknown missionaries the creation of a multitude of detached groups of believers in cities and villages all over the Empire. All these groups were fully equipped Churches. The first knowledge that we have of the existence of Christians in multitudes of places is the name of their Bishop in the list of those attending some council. There was order in the expansion: the moment converts were made in any place ministers were appointed from among themselves, presbyter Bishops, or Bishops, who in turn could organize and bring into the unity of the visible Church any new group of Christians in their neighbourhood.

Thus it came to pass that "Seventy years after the foundation of the very first Gentile Christian Church in Syrian Antioch, Pliny wrote in the strongest terms about the spread of Christianity throughout remote Bithynia, a spread which in his view already threatened the stability of other cults throughout the province. Seventy years later still, the Paschal Controversy reveals the existence of a Christian federation of Churches, stretching from Lyons to Edessa, with its head-quarters situated in Rome. Seventy years later again, the emperor Decius declared that he would sooner have a rival emperor in Rome than a Christian Bishop. And ere another seventy years had passed the cross was sewn upon the Roman colours."

This then is what I mean by spontaneous expansion. I mean the expansion which follows the unexhorted and unorganized activity of individual members of the Church explaining to others the Gospel which they have found for themselves; I mean the expansion which follows the irresistible attraction of the Christian Church for men who see its ordered life, and are drawn to it by desire to discover the secret of a life which they instinctively desire to share; I mean also the expansion of the Church by the addition of new Churches.

I know not how it may appear to others, but to me this unexhorted, unorganized, spontaneous expansion has a charm far beyond that of our modern highly organized missions. I delight to think that a Christian travelling on his business, or fleeing from persecution, could preach Christ, and a Church spring up as the result of his preaching, without his work being advertised through the streets of Antioch or Alexandria as the heading of an appeal to Christian men to subscribe funds to establish a school, or as the text of an exhortation to the Church of his native city to send a Mission, without which new converts deprived of guidance must inevitably lapse. I suspect, however, that I am not alone in this strange preference, and that many others read their Bibles and find there with relief a welcome escape from our material appeals for funds, and from our methods of moving heaven and earth to make a proselyte.

But men say that such relief can only be for dreamers, that the age of that simple expansion has gone by, that we must live in our own age, and that in our age such spontaneous expansion is not to be expected; that an elaborate and highly organized society must employ elaborate and highly organized methods, and that it is vain now to sigh for a simplicity which while it existed had many faults and infirmities, and, however attractive, can never be ours. I must, of course, admit that, if that saying is true, if it is really better that paid missionaries should be sent out by an elaborately organized office, and be supported by a department, and directed by a head-quarters staff, if it is really true that our elaborate machinery is a great improvement on ancient practice, and that to carry the knowledge of Christ throughout the world it is in fact far more efficient than the simpler methods of the apostolic age, then indeed I must acknowledge that to sigh after an inefficient simplicity is vain, and worse than vain. But if we, toiling under the burden of our organizations, sigh for that spontaneous freedom of expanding life it is because we see in it something divine, something in its very nature profoundly efficient, something which we would gladly recover, something which the elaboration of our modern machinery obscures and deadens and kills.

We must not exaggerate the efficiency of our modern highly organized Missions. In the year I924-25 when a force of 1,233 foreign missionaries, aided by 15,183 paid native helpers, and supported by 603,169 Baptized Christians was under the direction of the most highly organized of our Missionary Societies (the C. M. S.), the number of adults baptized in the year amounted to 31,329; that is 1.9 to each paid worker, on the assumption that the 603,000 baptized Christians did nothing at all to spread the Gospel. That is no doubt efficient as we count efficient work; but it surely leaves something to be desired.

In Madagascar for twenty-five years all missionaries were driven from the island and a severe persecution of the Christians was instituted. "Yet," we are told, "at the close of a quarter of a century of persecution the followers of Christ had multiplied ten-fold." Later the missionaries were allowed to return. Mr Hawkins describes the period (1870-95) as a period of great development. "The staff of all the missions at work in the island was greatly increased, churches were erected all over the central province of Imerina, the work was extended to other parts of the island, hundreds of schools were established, and a theological college founded for the training of the native ministry. Handsome memorial Churches were erected in Tananarive on the sites where the Christian martyrs had yielded up their lives. A normal school and high schools for boys and girls were started, a medical mission was established, the organization of the native church perfected," etc., etc., But did the followers of Christ multiply ten-fold in these twenty-five years or in the twenty-five years which followed this organization? That we are not told.

 

II

 

If we seek for the cause which produces rapid expansion when a new faith seizes hold of men who feel able and free to propagate it spontaneously of their own initiative, we find its roots in a certain natural instinct. This instinct is admirably expressed in a saying of Archytas of Tarentum quoted by Cicero, "If a man ascended to Heaven and saw the beautiful nature of the world and of the stars his feeling of wonder, in itself most delightful, would lose its sweetness if he had not someone to whom he could tell it." This is the instinctive force which drives men even at the risk of life itself to impart to others a new-found joy: that is why it is proverbially difficult to keep a secret. It is not surprising then that when Christians are scattered and feel solitary this craving for fellowship should demand an outlet, especially when the hope of the Gospel and the experience of its power is something new and wonderful. But in Christians there is more than this natural instinct. The Spirit of Christ is a Spirit who longs for, and strives after, the salvation of the souls of men, and that spirit dwells in them. That Spirit converts the natural instinct into a longing for the conversion of others which is indeed divine in its source and character.

 

III

 

Where this instinct for expression, this divine desire for the salvation of others has free course, there it exercises a most extraordinary power. That power is vividly suggested by M. Taine in his History of English Literature. Speaking of the causes which led to the Reformation in England, he describes the way in which knowledge of "Salvation" spread through the country: (French quotation).

Spontaneous expansion begins with the individual effort of the individual Christian to assist his fellow, when common experience, common difficulties, common toil have first brought the two together. It is this equality and community of experience which makes the one deliver his message in terms which the other can understand, and makes the hearer approach the subject with sympathy and confidence--with sympathy because the common experience makes approach easy and natural, with confidence, because the one is accustomed to understand what the other says and expects to understand him now.

What carries conviction is the manifest disinterestedness of the speaker. He speaks from his heart because he is too eager to be able to refrain from speaking. His subject has gripped him. He speaks of what he knows, and knows by experience. The truth which he imparts is his own truth. He knows its force. He is speaking almost as much to relieve his own mind as to convert his hearer, and yet he is as eager to convert his hearer as to relieve his own mind; for his mind can only be relieved by sharing his new truth, and his truth is not shared until another has received it. This his hearer realizes. Inevitably he is moved by it. Before he has experienced the truth himself he has shared the speaker's experience.

To all this is added the mysterious power of a secret. Christian experience is always a secret; and the man who speaks of it to another always pays him a subtle compliment, when he entrusts him with his secret of life. But when, as is often the case in the Mission Field, that secret is a dangerous secret; when careless speech may lead to punishment, disgrace, or persecution when the speaker entrusts his hearer with the safety of his life, or his liberty, or his property; such confidence, such trust, compel attention.

Upon the speaker, too, the effort to express his truth exercises a profound effect. The expression of his experience intensifies it; it renews it; it repeats it; it enlightens it. In speaking of it he goes through it again; in setting it before another he sets it before himself in a new light. He gets a deeper sense of its reality and power and meaning. In speaking of it he pledges himself to the conduct and life which it involves. He proclaims himself bound by it, and every time that his speech produces an effect upon another, that effect reacts upon himself, making his hold upon his truth surer and stronger.

But this only if his speech is voluntary and spontaneous. If he is a paid agent both speaker and hearer are affected by that fact. The speaker knows, and knows that the other knows, that he is employed by a mission to speak. He is not delivering his own message because he cannot help it. He is not speaking of Christ, because Christ alone impels him. Do men not ask our paid agents, How much are you paid for this work? And must they not answer? And does not the answer destroy the effect of which we have been thinking?

One of the great virtues of spontaneous voluntary expression is that in the effort to express to another a truth which the speaker has found he not only renews the past, but, especially in the early stages, he finds out his own ignorance of many aspects of his truth, and he is generally eager to learn, and to inquire further for himself. He searches diligently for answers to difficulties which arise. He is not an authorized and licensed preacher; he has no professional omniscience to maintain; he can and will confess ignorance and seek help. He is forced to think over and over again what are the implications of his truth; he has few ready-made stereotyped answers. As he goes on, no doubt, these tend to multiply, but they cannot multiply at first without much real experience. Thus the voluntary spontaneous expression of truth experienced strengthens and advances the speaker.

 

IV

 

Nevertheless, we instinctively distrust it. "You know," says M. Taine, addressing his readers, "you know the effect of such speech as that." We do know it; but most of us know it rather by an effort of the imagination than by experience. If M. Taine had appealed to us and said--"You know the results," would not most of us have answered with no less confidence, "We do," and would not our minds have turned at once to the rise of those curious and dangerous Anabaptist and Antinomian sects whose wild vagaries exercised the wisdom and patience of sober, sensible men in their own day, and our own curiosity and wonder. When M. Taine says: "You know the effect," we think of men like John Bunyan; If he had said: "You know the result," we might have thought of that widespread knowledge of the Bible, of that sober, serious temper, of that grave and orderly conduct, which put an indelible stamp for good on the character of our nation; but we instinctively thought first of heresies, schisms, party railings and disputings, the wild licence of individual interpretation. If that is true, it is but an illustration of our modern attitude towards spontaneous expansion. It raises at once the question whether it is in its very nature desirable; and the instinctive thought in our minds has condemned it beforehand as an irrational method of religious progress. It is clear that while it possesses all those advantages of which I have spoken, it also opens the door for the unbalanced manifestations of a wild enthusiasm; and we, to-day, certainly incline to dwell upon the latter rather than the former. That fact by itself alone, is sufficient to explain its comparative absence in our Missions.

We fear it because we feel that it is something that we cannot control. And that is true. We can neither induce nor control spontaneous expansion whether we look on it as the work of the individual or of the Church, simply because it is spontaneous. "The wind bloweth where it listeth," said Christ, and spontaneous activity is a movement of the Spirit in the individual and in the Church, and we cannot control the Spirit.

Given spontaneous zeal we can direct it by instruction. Aquila could teach Apollos the way of God more perfectly. But teaching is not control. Teaching can be refused; control cannot be refused, if it is control; teaching leads to enlargement, control to restriction. To attempt to control spontaneous zeal is therefore to attempt to restrict it; and he who restricts a thing is glad of a little but does not welcome much. Thus, many of our missionaries welcome spontaneous zeal, provided there is not too much of it for their restrictions, just as an engineer laying out the course of a river is glad of some water to fill his channels, but does not want a flood which may sweep away his embankments. Such missionaries pray for the wind of the Spirit but not for a rushing mighty wind. I am writing because I believe in a rushing mighty wind, and desire its presence at all costs to our restrictions. But if that is what we are talking about, it is futile to imagine that we can control it. Let us begin by acknowledging that we cannot. If we do that, we may escape from the confusion created by those who say that they have spontaneous expansion in their missions and welcome it and rejoice in it; and yet say also that they are sent to control and must control.

By spontaneous expansion I mean something which we cannot control. And if we cannot control it, we ought, as I think, to rejoice that we cannot control it. For if we cannot control it, it is because it is too great not because it is too small for us. The great things of God are beyond our control. Therein lies a vast hope. Spontaneous expansion could fill the continents with the knowledge of Christ: our control cannot reach as far as that. We constantly bewail our limitations: open doors unentered; doors closed to us as foreign missionaries; fields white to the harvest which we cannot reap. Spontaneous expansion could enter open doors, force closed ones, and reap those white fields. Our control cannot: it can only appeal pitifully for more men to maintain control.

There is always something terrifying in the feeling that we are letting loose a force which we cannot control; and when we think of spontaneous expansion in this way, instinctively we begin to be afraid. Whether we consider our doctrine, or our civilization, or our morals, or our organization, in relation to a spontaneous expansion of the Church, we are seized with terror, terror lest spontaneous expansion should lead to disorder. We are quite ready to talk of self-supporting, self-extending and self-governing Churches in the abstract as ideals; but the moment that we think of ourselves as establishing self-supporting, self-governing Churches in the Biblical sense we are met by this fear, a terrible, deadly fear. Suppose they really were self-supporting, and depended no longer on our support, where should we be? Suppose self-extension were really self-extension, and we could not control it, what would happen? Suppose they were really self-governing, how would they govern? We instinctively think of something which we cannot control as tending to disorder.

 

V

 

That we in our missions see comparatively few signs of a force so mighty and so universal is in itself a sufficient proof that there must be in our method of work some strong restraining influence. That we so often ascribe absence of missionary zeal to the incapacity of our converts rather than to that restraining influence is a sufficient proof of our blindness. That we at once pray for manifestations of zeal on the part of our converts, and instinctively shrink from steps which may tend to realize it is rather sad than surprising. The force is indeed so strong as to be alarming.

This instinct which makes for spontaneous expression is so powerful as to be alarming, but it is not in its nature opposed to order. It is essentially a social instinct. Islam, we are told, spread in Africa mainly through the spontaneous activity of its converts; but that expansion is not disorderly, in the sense that it is opposed to Islamic order. It does not break the Muslims into innumerable sects; it does not cast away the orthodox Islamic teaching, it does not prefer disorder and disunion.

If the natural instinct is not opposed to order, still less is the Divine Spirit opposed to order. Yet both may be driven into opposition to established order. When the desire to express that natural instinct, that God-given grace, finds itself confined by the order of a superior authority, or by the conditions set up by authority, it is so strong that it can with difficulty be restrained. If men feel that they are acting in any sense against the will, implied, or expressed, of authority, they burst all bounds, and then there is danger of the wildest excesses; for they begin by breaking down the only order which they know, and in bursting away from that which would restrain them they express themselves in violent hostility. Yet they desire order. How little the spirit which creates spontaneous expansion is naturally opposed to order may be seen in the history of the Reformation in England. Then men received a doctrine of "Salvation" which gave them new hope, and they could not refrain from propagating it; but they were opposed by the religious authority of their day. Then at the risk of life they persisted in expressing this instinct to share a joy, this grace which seeks the salvation of others. They broke away from all the order which they knew, and wild excesses were the immediate result. Yet even so, though the movement was in opposition to the ordered religious life of the country, the wildest excesses were confined to comparatively few, and the great majority desired order, and in a remarkably short space of time created order, even in schism.

But perhaps it may be said that what we fear is not the free expression of this natural instinct, still less of this divine grace; what we fear is the expression of human self-will and self-assertion. These are the real sources of disorder; and unhappily men are not moved solely by the pure zeal of the Gospel. We cannot possibly open the door to an unrestricted freedom for the expression of the natural instinct and the spiritual grace without opening it also to the expression of self-will; and that we dare not do.

That is quite true; but unhappily it is also true that we cannot check the licence of self-will without checking at the same time the zeal which springs from the natural instinct and the grace of the Gospel. We cannot distinguish the activity of the one from the activity of the other. The motives which influence the action of human beings are very mixed. Any one who has tried to analyse his motives for any single action must be conscious of it. Those who exercise authority are not free from mixed motives any more than those who submit to, or resist, the authority. We cannot, then, root up the tares without rooting up the wheat with them. The same action which represses an exhibition of self-will represses also an exhibition of godly zeal. Indeed godly zeal can generally be restrained with a far lighter curb than self-assertion. An exercise of authority sufficiently strong to hold self-will within bounds is often sufficiently strong to suppress zeal altogether.

If new converts once receive the impression that they should express the natural instinct to impart a new-found joy, the divine desire for the salvation of others only under direction they are in bonds, cramped and shackled. The zeal dies away, and the Church is robbed of the inspiration which comes from the sense that men are being converted and the Church enlarged no one knows quite how or by whom. The Church is robbed, not knowing how it is robbed; but slowly there grows up a dim sense that all is not well with it, that there has been some restraining influence, and sooner or later the Christians turn upon their directors and accuse them of having in some way held them back. They do not know what is wrong. Zeal for the conversion of their neighbours is not in their hearts or in their thoughts. But it is the suppression of that first zeal which was never expressed which is the real cause of their trouble.

 

VII

 

The same truth applies to Churches. Spontaneous expansion begins with individual expression, it proceeds to corporate expression, and if the corporate expression is checked there is again a danger of disorder. The denial of a native Episcopate, the denial of self-government, seems at the moment to be a great security for order, and for the moment it is; but it represses the instinct for self-propagation and mars the fullness of life. For the instinct must then be stifled. That it should be stifled is a grievous loss to the whole body, for it means stagnation, and the stagnation of a part is a source of poison to the whole. The momentary security is thus gained at a serious cost, and it can only be momentary. The instinct for expression is so strong that it cannot long be restrained. Then must be repeated on a larger scale the struggle which we saw in the case of the individual. The time which this process may take to come to a head is perhaps longer than in the former case, but the longer the time the more serious is the upheaval. Here, too, it is not the desire for expression which produces the disorder, it is the desire breaking out against order because it cannot express itself within the order which it knows. That, too, is grievous; it means the rending of the body; and that is a sore evil and a source of evil to the whole body. The only alternative is that it should have free course within the order of the whole.

Neither the natural instinct, nor the grace of the Gospel, nor the self-will of man can be permanently eradicated by any external authority. Self-will is the natural enemy of order; godly zeal is its natural ally. Restraint forces godly zeal into opposition to order: sooner or later it must break forth and, if it breaks forth in opposition to order, self-will and self-assertion appear as its allies and flaunt themselves in the guise of the deliverers of godly zeal. It is dangerous to restrain what cannot be permanently crushed: Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret. We are in far greater danger of serious disorder when, in fear of the expression of self-will, we restrain a God-given instinct, than when we accept the risks involved in giving it free play. Yet because we can for the moment by an exercise of authority, or by our influence, or by the influence of the conditions which we create, or by an insistence upon Law, avoid the obvious present dangers of freedom, we naturally tend to think this the safer course.

 

VIII

 

It is said that when God announced to the Angels His purpose to create man in His own image Lucifer, who was not yet fallen from heaven, cried, "Surely He will not give them power to disobey Him." And the Son answered him "Power to fall is power to rise." Lucifer knew neither power to rise, nor power to fall, but that word "power to fall" sunk deep into his heart, and he began to desire to know that power, and he plotted from that day forward the fall of man. He fell himself, and he taught man to know his power and to use his power to fall. When in the fullness of time he saw the Redemption wrought by Christ, he began dimly to understand that power to fall is power to rise; but he understood it crookedly. Hence, as Christ's disciples began to multiply, and his own kingdom to be minished, his mind turned instinctively again to this power to fall. If he could check, or hinder, the power to fall, he might also, he thought, check the power to rise. He began by trying to induce the Apostles to bind all the Gentile converts within the hedge of the Mosaic law, and he was foiled by the boldness of the faith of the great Apostle of the Gentiles. But ever since he has sought to attain his end, striving to induce the servants of Christ to deprive new converts of the power to fall, by hedging them round with laws of one kind or another, in the hope that so he might deprive them of the power to rise: and men, knowing the terrors of falling, and dreading the power to fall for new converts, are only too ready to listen to him; for he plays upon their fears.

 

 

CHAPTER III

 

MODERN MOVEMENTS TOWARDS LIBERTY

 

In this chapter I compare two theories of missions; and, rejecting the theory which aims at the establishment of a Church by the process of devolution, examine recent efforts to follow a practice more in harmony with the practice of the Apostolic age, and show where it has fallen short.

 

It is, I suppose, now almost universally admitted that we cannot hope, by multiplication of missionaries, to reach the vast populations of China, India and Africa, not to mention the rest of the world, nor to cover the whole of these great areas with mission stations, still less to provide mission schools and hospitals sufficient to supply their needs. The demands made upon us by our present missions for money and support tend rather to increase than to diminish from year to year. Dr. Arthur Judson Brown has pointed the moral for us. Speaking generally of the work of societies, European and American, he says "Some of the most expensive Missions in the world to-day are those which have the largest native Churches. Surely there must be an end to this process some time. If we are to admit that the more successful the work of establishing a church the greater is the obligation of the home church to sustain its various needs, it is not difficult to foresee disaster."

Mr G. Hibbert Ware, speaking from the point of view of the missionary in charge is not less emphatic. "If the Mission," he says, "is to be expected, not only to gather and train the new congregations, but to keep hold of them, and to control their organization and finance, and to raise up and supervise their clergy, and all this for an undefined period which may run (as it has already in some cases) into fifty years, then one may well ask how long this process can go on; how long the Mission will be able to support the growing burden of its congregations."

The limits which bound this method of propagating the Gospel must be comparatively narrow. Thoughtful men have now for some years been urging that we are rapidly coming to the end of our tether, and that we cannot hope to multiply our stations much further. If we attempt to satisfy a demand for new missionaries and new stations which increases with every new station which we establish; and if the stations which we at present hold are, as they notoriously are, inadequately staffed; and if we find it difficult, as we undoubtedly do find it difficult, to secure sufficient men and money to maintain our present stations, schools and hospitals; and if we attempt, as we must attempt, to carry the Gospel to the whole world; is it not apparent that the size of the work and the method do not agree? Yet in practice we are still acting as if we could go on multiplying Mission Stations indefinitely.

Even if the supply of men and funds from Western sources was unlimited and we could cover the whole globe with an army of millions of foreign missionaries and establish stations thickly all over the world, the method would speedily reveal its weakness, as it is already beginning to reveal it. The mere fact that Christianity was propagated by such an army established in foreign stations all over the world, would inevitably alienate the native populations, who would see in it the growth of the domination of a foreign people. They would see themselves robbed of their religious independence, and would more and more fear the loss of their social independence. Foreigners can never successfully direct the propagation of any faith throughout a whole country. If the faith does not become naturalized and expand among the people by its own vital power, it exercises an alarming and hateful influence, and men fear and shun it as something alien. It is then obvious that no sound missionary policy can be based upon multiplication of missionaries and Mission Stations. A thousand thousand would not suffice; a dozen might be too many.

Many have realized this, and have argued until it has become an axiom, repeated, if not clearly understood, by all our leaders, that our missionaries must aim at laying such a foundation that India may be evangelized by Indians, China by Chinese, Africa by Africans, each country by its own Christians. That certainly must mean that our missions ought to prepare the way for the evangelization of the country by the free spontaneous activity of our converts, and that their success must be measured not so much by the number of foreign missionaries employed, or by the number of converts, as by the growth of a Native Church in the power to expand. But when we ask how the way is to be prepared for that free spontaneous activity, we find divergent opinions and no settled policy consistently followed by our missionary societies. Many seem to act as if they still believed that it is our duty to carry the Gospel to all the inhabitants of the globe ourselves; many simply employ as many native agents as possible, and call that the evangelization of the country by the natives; most attempt, at the same moment, to follow different and opposite methods, hoping to reap some benefit from each, and utterly unable to make up their minds to pursue any consistent policy. Among those who think seriously about the preparation of converts to evangelize their own countries, two conflicting theories, involving two conflicting methods of missionary work, are widely held, and these demand our careful consideration.

 

I

 

On the one hand, there are those who hold that it is our prime duty to establish in each country a Church, not necessarily very widespread, nor very numerous, but highly educated, and equipped with all the help that science and art and organization can supply; that we ought to concentrate upon the few even within the Church, educate them in the arts of healing and teaching and Church government, establish them in our doctrine and ethics, and so prepare them to direct the Church in its great missionary work when the time is fully ripe and the Church so founded has advanced to such strength that it is not only able to take over all the work which we have begun, but to carry it forward into all the corners of the land.

Those who hold this view, and they are very many, are apt to appeal to the authority of Christ Himself in support of their theory. They say that Christ concentrated on the few, and trained Apostles who should afterwards guide and direct His Church in the great missionary enterprise which He set before them; and they urge that, if we would follow His example, we should make it our chief business to train leaders, and to build up the Church which they may lead.

Now we cannot but observe that there is a great gulf between the training of leaders by Christ and the training of leaders in the hands of these men. Christ trained His leaders in two or three years; these men have been training leaders for more than two or three generations. Christ trained His leaders by taking them with Him as He went about teaching and healing, doing the work which they, as missionaries, would do; we train in institutions. He trained a very few with whom He was in the closest personal relation; we train many who simply pass through our schools with a view to an examination and an appointment. Christ trained His leaders in the midst of their own people, so that the intimacy of their relation to their own people was not marred and they could move freely among them as one of themselves; we train our leaders in a hothouse, and their intimacy with their own people is so marred that they can never thereafter live as one of them, or share their thought. I have heard of students in theological colleges so ignorant of the religion of their own people that they had to be given lectures on it by their foreign teachers. Thus, whether we consider the length of time devoted to the training, or the number of the leaders trained, or the character of the training, or its manner, or its method, we perceive at once that the training of leaders of which we speak is something utterly different from that which we set up as the example, and to which we appeal as the authority for our practice.

If the end which we have in view is the evangelization of the country, and it is to do that work that we establish the Church and train its leaders, then our training should be training in evangelization. But in the theory which I am now examining there is a distinction between the training and the evangelization. The Church is to be founded, educated, equipped, established in the doctrine and ethics and organization first; then it is to expand. The insertion of this term between the first evangelization by foreigners and the second evangelization by the native Church, introduces a grave danger. In putting the advancement of the Church first, we teach the converts and the leaders whom we train, so soon as they arrive at consciousness of the direction in which they are being led, to look upon their own progress as of the first importance, to concentrate upon themselves. But that is not training for the evangelization of the country. Great advance in this direction is compatible with a complete absence of any zeal for the conversion of others; and, indeed, is at times definitely opposed to expansion. For instance, I was told the other day that there was a considerable feeling amongst the younger and more highly trained Christian students in India against the admission into the Church of large numbers of illiterate converts from among the outcastes, on the ground that such admission tended to lower the prestige of the Christian Church in India which had, through many years, built up a reputation as a highly educated community.

We need not be surprised at this, for we are quite familiar with the unhappy fact that it is possible for Christian Churches to be highly organized and equipped and yet to fail utterly to understand the necessity for carrying the Gospel to the people around them. History is full of examples and warnings. Some utterly perished, some survived, persecuted and tormented, and some degenerated in faith and morals. "He that saveth his life shall lose it." That danger hangs close on the heels of a practice which puts the elevation of a young Church in the foreground and treats the work of evangelization and expansion as something which must follow.

But it may be said that those missionaries who believe in and practise this theory do not neglect to keep ever in view the evangelization of the whole country as their ultimate object, nor do they neglect to train the native Church for that work. They establish missionary societies and boards of missions as part of the organization of the Church, and already these societies and boards have sent out missions into other parts of the country.

To this it must be replied, first, that these societies and boards, being fashioned in a Western model, have been established, and can be established, only after a long period of preparation, during which the native Church is being educated; so that, in fact, the term between the first evangelization by the foreign missions and their agents and the second evangelization by the native Church remains; and it is in the introduction of that term that the danger to which I have pointed lies. Again, missions thus made a department of Church organization hold the same relation to the great mass of the Christians which our foreign missions hold to the great mass of Christians at home: they are foreign missions supported by funds to which the Christians may or may not subscribe. They are one department of Church organization among many others designed for the equipment of a well constituted Church; and they are the one department which could be weakened, or neglected, or abolished without any immediate and uncomfortable consequences for those who neglected them. If any other department, the medical, or the educational, or the Church sustentation department, for instance, were neglected all would speedily feel the consequences. Thus, this objection that expansion has its place in the education of the native Church as a department of Church organization, even where it is really made a department, does not at all invalidate my argument that the introduction of a period in which the Church concentrates upon its own advancement opens the door for all those dangers which beset the self-seeking.

When new converts are trained to look forward to a day when the Church of which they are members will attain to such strength that it will be able to carry on all the work which its foreign teachers began; when their leaders are trained to do precisely the same kind of institutional and organizing work which the foreign teachers have done, there arises a serious danger of conflict; and when, as at the present day, there is a strong tide of national feeling opposed to foreign domination, this conflict, which would, in any case be inevitable, is quickened and exacerbated. Missionaries often say that the resentment expressed by the more highly trained and intellectual of our converts against the domination of the foreign missionary is only a part of the universal national feeling which has been so marked a feature of the last few years. That is not an adequate explanation. The form of expression is moulded often by the common national unrest; but the conflict between the missionaries and the leaders whom they have trained was inevitable, and would not have failed to appear even if there had been no national movements; for this conflict arises out of the very nature of the case.

We are constantly being told that the very object and meaning of the training of leaders for the Church is that they may lead the Church and carry on all those works which the foreigners inaugurated, so that the foreigners may be able to retire and enter upon fields as yet untouched. All have been told again and again that such is the missionary's design. Young men are then trained to lead, and, as generation after generation passes by, impatience inevitably grows, and would grow, if there were no national movement to excite it. The longer he stays and the more elaborate his institutional work becomes, the less does the foreign missionary seem prepared to retire to give place to the native leaders whom he has trained. The native students have been trained to lead and they have been trained to express their powers by doing precisely those things which the foreign missionary does; but when they have been trained they find that the foreign missionary cannot trust them to do that work sufficiently well to relinquish it to them, and that only subordinate posts are open to them. It is easy for the foreign missionary to say that only generations of training will produce the character and capacity to direct such great and important undertakings; but these young men see their fellow countrymen taking the lead in great commercial and political and social movements, and they, not unnaturally, say, If the foreign missionary trains us to lead he ought to entrust us with the position of leaders.

Hence arises an inevitable struggle for the control of church policy and administration in the church councils and for the higher posts in the church and in mission institutions between the missionaries and those whom they have trained; for they have trained them not for a work in which there is unlimited opportunity, but for the tenure of positions of which there is only a limited number. But that the history of the advance of a Church should be the history of a struggle between the foreign missionaries and their converts for the dominant position in the Church is deplorable. The immediate result is that missionaries find it more and more difficult to attract the more intelligent and capable young men to prepare in our institutions for Church work. From all sides we hear the complaint that the ablest men hesitate to put themselves or their children under our training for this purpose. From all sides we hear that, where we have had training institutions longest, there the zeal of the Church for the propagation of the Gospel is weakest, there the complaints that we do not give the natives sufficient authority are bitterest, and there the tendency for the Church to become self-centred is most marked.

Thus this method must inevitably lead to disaster. In some parts of the world able young men, trained in the way which I have described, are already agitating. In India and in South Africa there are loud threats of revolt, and our leaders already begin to fear schisms of a most serious character. When these mutterings and threatenings become violent, then our missionary statesmen begin to talk of devolution and of nice adjustments of claims, measuring carefully how much they must resign, how much they can still afford to retain in their own hands; but they do not consider that everywhere, where now there is apparently perfect calm and their sway is still undisputed, they are pursuing a method of training which must inevitably lead to the same trouble in years to come, and that they are preparing for their successors difficulties compared with which in magnitude the present difficulties appear like the small dust in the balance. Whilst these missionary statesmen are busy about the nice calculation of more and less, they fail to see that their compromises can never bring peace, and that everywhere they are taking a course of action which can only end in a struggle for power. They imagine fondly that they are quite ready to retire when the leaders whom they train are ready to take their place and that the moment when the native leaders are ready will be so obvious that they will all agree that it has come, and that then there will be no difficulty in handing over authority. The moment is never clear. Those who are seeking to gain authority never agree to wait until those who hold it think that they are sufficiently prepared. The moment arrives only when those who are seeking to gain authority are strong enough to drive those who hold it into concession, by threats of revolt. The inevitable result of this method is discontent and strife.

 

II

 

On the other hand there are those who think that as a work should end so it should begin. If the propagation of the Gospel is to be at any time the spontaneous work of native Christians, it should be so from the very beginning. Every moment of delay is a moment of loss, loss for them, loss for their country.

There has certainly been of late years a steady movement in the direction of encouraging, recognizing, and, above all, expecting, great advance to be made in this way. Perhaps because the leaders of Missionary Societies are more and more inclining to lay stress on concentration and institutional work, and consequently are little by little withdrawing from evangelistic work and starving it, the small force of evangelistic missionaries, seeing their numbers decreasing and their power waning in proportion to that of the workers in institutions, are becoming more and more inclined to look upon the growth of the Church in numbers by the spontaneous activity of their converts as the only hope of future evangelistic work; and are being forced by the withdrawal of supplies of men and money from home to look to the supplies of men and money on the spot with new eagerness and understanding. Whatever the cause, a movement in that direction is clear.

Before, however, we consider this movement it is essential that we should examine a formula in which Bishop Tucker of Uganda, following Mr Venn, summed up the object of our missions, as the foundation of self-extending, self-supporting and self-governing Churches; because it has exercised a very great influence over the thought of those who are moving in the direction of the establishment of indigenous Churches. This formula, popularized by Bishop Tucker, was itself a symptom and a cause of this movement; for Bishop Tucker himself proclaimed it in days when the rapid growth of the Church in his diocese lent a peculiar force to his teaching. His formula passed almost into an axiom, so that it is to-day repeated on all hands as an axiom; whilst yet on two important points its meaning has never been made clear either by him or by his followers. The first of these is the relation of the three terms in his formula to one another: the second is the meaning of the word "Churches."

 

(I). We constantly hear men use these three terms, self-support, self-extension and self-government, as if they were distinct and separate things, and we find that men have aimed at one or another of them more or less by itself, as if it could be detached from its fellows. Now I believe that a moment's thought will reveal the fact that they cannot rightly be so treated.

Self-support is universally considered a mere matter of finance. No more striking example of the extraordinary materialism of our missionary outlook can be found than this, that we can only with definite and painful effort think of self-support in any other terms than that of money. The moment that we hear the word self-support we think at once of money and of money only. But any true self-support is more than financial. However wealthy a Church might be, it would not be self-supporting, unless it supplied its own clergy as well as its own Church buildings. However poor it might be, it would yet be self-supporting if it did produce its own clergy and carry on its own services, though its ministers might receive no salaries, and its services be held under a tree. But the ministry is certainly the key of self-government. Bishops and priests imply government. A Church which could and did supply its own ministry must be to a large extent self-governing, or at any rate could be self-governing, for it would have within itself the keys of government and authority. Thus self-support and self-government are closely knit. And as for self-extension, it is surely plain that a Church which could neither support itself nor govern itself could not multiply itself. Individuals in it might make converts from outside; but those converts would either be dependent upon the Church to which their instructors belonged, or would be without any government at all, mere isolated Churchless Christians. If the Churches of our foundation are to be self-extending in the sense of self-propagating, they must necessarily possess the power to create their like, and unless they are self-governing and self-supporting they cannot possibly propagate themselves. How can a Church with no government of its own create a self-governing Church? The formula demands that we should establish self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending Churches, and obviously, if it applies at all to us, it applies likewise to the Churches which we establish. If we are to establish self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending Churches, so certainly must they. If the rule applies to the parents of the first generation of Churches it applies to the parents of the second generation, and to the third, and so on. Thus self-extension is bound up with self-support and self-government: the three are intimately united.

Whether Bishop Tucker perceived this, or not, is not clear, but it is quite clear that his followers all over the world who quote his formula have not perceived it; for they attempt to seek each of the three terms of the formula separately, at different times, and by different means, and this as we shall see has led to weakness.

 

(2) Bishop Tucker did not make clear what he meant by Churches in his formula.

What are the "Churches" which are to be self-governing, self-supporting, and self-extending? In the New Testament I find such Churches: the Church at Antioch, the Church of the Thessalonians, the Church which is at Corinth, the Church in somebody's house. I read of the Churches of Galatia, the Churches of Asia, the Churches of Judea. These "Churches" were local groups of Christians fully equipped with ministers and Sacraments and were exactly what Bishop Tucker desired the Churches of our foundation to be, self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending. But I do not know whether he was thinking of Churches like these; for in our day we more often speak of Churches of our foundation in a very different sense. We speak of the Church of Japan (the Nippon Sei Ko Kwai), the Church of China (the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui), the Church of Uganda, the Church of South Africa, the Indian Church, and so forth. These are Churches very different from the Apostolic Churches, and their self-support and self-government and self-extension are very different from the self-support, self-government and self-extension of the Churches of St. Paul's foundation. They are in character national Churches, like the Church of England, and if they ever establish other self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending Churches like themselves they must do so in some other country than their own; for in their own country they can only extend by increase in the number of their members and subdivision of dioceses, that is by the lowest form of propagation, propagation by fissure, whilst the Churches of St. Paul established new self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending Churches like themselves in the nearest towns or villages, not by fissure but by spiritual procreation.

They differ also from the Apostolic Churches in another more important particular. In those Churches ministers and sacraments were provided for every little group of Christians: in these of our foundation they are the peculiar property of a few favoured centres, whilst the great majority of the Christians are compelled to live without any resident ministers, and thus their priests are not local and resident officers but mere occasional visitors, and the administration of the sacraments becomes an occasional and rare, instead of the normal and the constant, element in their religious life. So far as the majority of the Christians are concerned their familiar and everyday guides and leaders are young lay catechists and school teachers. These Churches then are utterly different in character from the apostolic Churches.

Finally they differ from the Churches of the Apostolic foundation in that they are largely supported and directed by foreigners. If such Churches can be called Churches at all it is only by identifying the foreign bishops and missionaries with them; whereas the Apostles were never the local pastors and teachers and directors of any of the Churches which they founded. They were members of them in virtue of their common membership in the unity of the Church which was composed of all the Churches; but they were not members of the local churches viewed as local churches, and did not control the details of their social and religious life as local churches. They had nothing to do with their local finance or Church building, or anything of the sort. Those Churches were never dependent in any sense upon ministers or money derived from some outside source. Consequently if we make any distinction in our minds (and we can hardly avoid making the distinction) between the native Christians and the foreign missionaries supported by foreign funds and employing foreign funds in their administrative work, we see at once that the native Christians cannot be a self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending Church apart from the foreign missionary Bishops and their missionary assistants, until they are capable of assuming control of all the manifold and complicated machinery of a great national institution; for though they may be very small in numbers in the midst of a vast heathen population, yet their machinery is designed for great national Churches. Consequently, until they can carry it, the missionaries who imported that machinery must bear its expense and burden.

It is true that many missionaries like to do this, but whether it is wise to load a small body of Christians in a heathen country with the cumbrous machinery of a great national Church, and whether it is wise to subvert the whole Apostolic conception of the Church in order to do this, is perhaps open to question, and I venture to question its wisdom.

If anyone says that the word "Churches" in the formula refers to the little groups of Christians in the towns and villages, and that Bishop Tucker habitually spoke, as his successors do, of these as "Churches"; then all I can say is that St. Paul certainly did not found Churches without local ministers and sacraments. If the local congregations are in our eyes Churches, then we must acknowledge that, since these Churches have neither ministers nor Sacraments, we are creating a new type of Church which has no Biblical authority whatsoever, and is not in harmony with our own Prayer Book, which, following the Bible, takes it for granted that local Churches have local ministers and sacraments. The Prayer Book certainly does not contemplate Churches ministered to by lay catechists and teachers, still less does it contemplate half-a-dozen or a dozen such in the care of a lay catechist; yet that is a common thing in the Mission Field. In the Telugu Country "a catechist has charge of at least ten or a dozen congregations in as many villages." In February, 1924, Bishop Lasbrey told us that there was "only one clergyman for over a hundred Churches" in the Isoko Country on the Niger. In the C.M.S. Report for 1923-4 we are told that in Nigeria "The Rev. C. W. F. Jebb who is in charge of the Owo district, is responsible for no less than 250 Churches, including several in the outlying region of Kabba." And that in Uganda "One native clergyman is responsible for 185 Churches! Another is responsible for 205 Churches! There are young teachers responsible for forty, fifty, and sixty churches, and to superintend this great work there are just two European clerical missionaries." It is impossible for us to call such congregations "Churches" in the Biblical sense of the word, unless we are prepared to maintain that the Pauline Churches were mere collections of Christians in towns and villages without local presbyters and local observance of the Lord's Supper as their regular common service.

I am persuaded that this is wrong and that our attempts to found national Churches without the substructure of the local Church is a mistake. Those little groups of Christians which are sometimes called "Churches" but are not, ought as I think to be Churches in the Biblical sense and ought to be instituted and equipped as the Pauline Churches were instituted and equipped, and then the unity of these would represent, and might one day become commonly recognized as, the national Church of the country; but to begin with the national Church and to build that on a foundation of local groups of Christians which are not Churches seems to me a fatal inversion. I believe that we ought to return to the Apostolic practice and found Churches in every place where we make converts, Churches equipped with all the divine grace and authority of Christian Churches.

It would appear as if Bishop Tucker had formulated the truth by a kind of inspiration; but that he failed to bring it to the birth because he did not attempt to reconcile the idea of the "Churches" of which he spoke with the idea of the "Churches" from which he borrowed his inspiration. He allowed that word to escape from him unquestioned and undefined, and consequently the Church over which he was set as Bishop in Uganda boasts that it is self-supporting whilst it depends (depends in a very real sense) upon large grants from England; boasts that it is self-extending whilst it cannot propagate itself; for though it can multiply Christians it cannot beget Churches; boasts that it is self-governing whilst its foreign Bishop and his assistants proclaim that it must have the guidance of Bishops and superintending missionaries from England for long years to come. If Bishop Tucker had accepted the Apostolic idea of "Churches" and had followed the Apostolic practice, there might, and would, have been in Uganda hundreds of self-supporting, self-governing and self-extending Churches to-day; whereas now we receive the same kind of appeal from Uganda that we receive from other dioceses abroad which make no boast of being self-supporting or self-governing.

Now we shall find when we examine the modern movement towards spontaneous expansion that this confusion exercises a very disturbing influence. Men constantly use the word "Church" both of the Church of the country, and also of any one of these little groups of Christians which have neither local presbyters nor Sacraments as though each was a Church in the Apostolic sense of the word; whereas, in fact, neither is such.

Confusion here must inevitably lead astray men who desire to see the propagation of the Gospel in any country the spontaneous work of native Christians from the very beginning. So long as we continue to think of the Churches which we are to establish, as great national Churches composed of huge dioceses governed and directed almost exactly as our Churches are governed in England, but composed largely of congregations, which are called Churches and are not, it is almost impossible to conceive the spontaneous activity of native Christians resulting in the creation of new Churches; but the moment that we think of Churches in the Apostolic sense of the word, we see at once that the spontaneous activity of the individual members of such Churches might very speedily result in the multiplication of Churches all over the country.

 

III

 

We can now consider what movement has been made of late years in this direction.

(I) There is certainly to-day amongst many of our missionaries a tendency to encourage their converts to teach others from the moment of their conversion. That may seem a very strange thing to say, and it would be a very strange thing to say unless it were still somewhat rare, and was not even now checked and hindered, often by those who desire it most sincerely.

 

(a) It is hindered by a very widespread conviction amongst our missionaries that new converts, so far from evangelizing others, need to be nursed themselves if they are not to fall away. We often hear some such expression as this: "Even after baptism the new life in Christ must be carefully tended or inevitably the first fervour will cool and the early enthusiasm will be quenched by the deadly heathenism all round." That is a voice with which we are very familiar, which teaches that the way to retain the consciousness of a gift received is not by handing it on to others, but by learning to depend more and more on teachers; and that it is our wisdom to expect nothing from our converts, but to watch over them and nurse them and feed them. It is a voice which appeals more and more insistently for paid and trained workers to guard and to protect a life which must otherwise inevitably be quenched.

 

(b) It is hindered by a very widespread conviction that we cannot trust untrained men to propagate the Faith. That is openly said by many; by many more it is believed, or half-believed. Even those who encourage their converts to propagate the Faith have doubts in their minds, and hasten to supply teachers to take charge of any work which they find to have been started by the spontaneous zeal of native converts, and they do this even when they know and confess that the teachers whom they send are very inadequately trained, and certainly have not the initial zeal of those whom they are sent to supplant.

That such action must check the spontaneous activity in the future of those who are so treated is obvious. When men are allowed to think that when they have begun to learn, and to practise what they have learned, the way of advance is to surrender their activity, they speedily learn the fatal lesson of inactivity; more cautious or timid people, who might have been inspired by their success to imitate their example, are checked, and wait for the trained and paid teacher; whilst inquirers and heathen onlookers learn from their own observation that in the eyes of the missionaries the teaching which the untrained zealous convert gives spontaneously and freely is to be lightly esteemed in comparison with the teaching of the paid native agent.

They all learn this lesson the more readily when they find that it is the proper thing for converts to pay the salary of a Mission agent; because the payment gives his teaching still more importance in their eyes.

 

(c) It is hindered also by an action of ours which is designed to support it. When converts are taught from the very beginning that they receive to hand on, and when they practise this with the inevitable consequence that there is a great advance made, and when this is reported at home, it often results in our being stirred to send them men and money to establish institutions for their intellectual advancement and to supply them with "better trained" teachers. Now this action, which is designed to encourage them and to help them, seems often to hinder them. They learn to receive, they learn to rely on paid and trained men. The more teachers they have, the less they feel the need for exerting themselves to teach others. That is perhaps quite natural, but it is disastrous.

More serious, however, than any of these is the fact that this personal evangelism can never come to fruition in the establishment of new Churches except in that form of "church" guided by lay catechists or teachers under the supervision of a superintending missionary, which we have already rejected as unapostolic. In early days one of the most powerful causes of the expansion of the Church was the presence of the Apostolic Churches with their ordered life and spiritual rites in the midst of the surrounding heathenism. That influence is not indeed destroyed, but it is weakened very seriously by the fact that the "Churches" which result from efforts of spontaneous evangelists to-day are not really native, but dependent upon the care of foreign superintending missionaries. Any graces which the new Christian community shows can be ascribed to the influence of the foreigner and to his direction: they do not spring plainly and unmistakably from some new spirit brought into the life of men who in all respects live exactly as their heathen neighbours except that they use strange religious rites and are somehow subtly different from other men, and do the same things as other men in a different spirit. That witness of the corporate body cannot be clear so long as the government of white men and the control of an imported teacher stand in the foreground. Self-extension by the mere existence of a purely native Church is hampered and rendered difficult, because men cannot see it apart from the influence of the foreigners. The evangelistic efforts of the spontaneous evangelist are clear; but he is followed by the paid teacher and the paid cleric and behind all is the white superintendent and the white bishop. They are never forgotten and where they appear the witness of the life of the native Church becomes misty and blurred. All progress can be ascribed to their influence, their teaching, their schools, their control. There the spontaneous effort of the native evangelist is marred and the witness of the Christian community which he gathers together is marred. Only when the non-Christian population is face to face with a change in their neighbours, and an ordered Church life of their neighbours which can be ascribed to no white influence are they compelled to face the fact that they are in the presence of a spiritual force which is strange to them, in the presence of the Holy Ghost.

Nevertheless there has been in the last few years very considerable advance, advance so great and in so many different parts of the world that it is making a serious impression upon our minds. If it is true, as it is true, that outcastes in India, and labourers in Nigeria, and Uganda, and China and Corea, are capable, not only of being led and directed to do this work; but of doing it spontaneously of their own initiative, not in one or two rare cases only, but in many, we cannot but be impressed. The same results seem to follow the same teaching all the world over. The conviction that new converts can beget new converts leads them from strength to strength: the conviction that they will fall if they are not nursed leads them from weakness to weakness. The difference lies not in the nature or in the environment of the converts; but in the faith of the missionaries.

 

(2) Self-support in a strictly financial sense is now one of the popular cries in the missionary world. For a long time men thought it impossible: they declared that the poverty of their converts was so profound that to expect them to provide the material for their common religious life was absurd, and many of our missionaries still say the same thing to-day. But that self-support from the very beginning is possible has been abundantly proved, not only in rare sporadic instances, but by the wider experience of those missionaries who set themselves to encourage the evangelization of the country by their converts from the very beginning, and that in spite of the fact that they laid upon them a very heavy and wholly unnecessary burden, by insisting that they must support paid teachers and catechists, and sometimes also clergy, paid at a rate which approved itself to the foreign authorities. In Uganda, when the rapid expansion of the Faith began, the leaders of the movement saw the necessity for ensuring that the new converts should supply what was necessary for their Church life, as they understood it, and they made it their boast that in Uganda all native buildings and all native teachers were supported by native funds. And what was proved to be possible in Uganda has been proved to be equally possible in all the other areas where converts have been encouraged to propagate the Faith from the very beginning. This is indeed far from being the same thing as the complete material and spiritual self-support which was without doubt the rule in the church expansion of the early centuries; but it is unquestionably a movement in that direction. And with very beneficent consequences. In Corea "the self-support method succeeds. Where this principle has been conscientiously followed--there the Churches are many and large .... Where churches are helped most, there they are weak, lifeless and helpless. This may be easily verified, go where you will throughout Corea."

This is what we should naturally expect. Nothing is so weakening as the habit of depending upon others for those things which we ought to supply for ourselves. Nothing more undermines the spirit which should express itself in spontaneous activity. How can a man propagate a religion which he cannot support, and which he cannot expect those whom he addresses to be able to support? We ourselves can only propagate a religion which we do not expect our converts to be able to support, because we think that we can supply those necessaries which they are unable to supply. Even we ourselves are beginning to see, as I pointed out earlier in this chapter, that this puts a very strait limit to the extent of our work. Had it been only in consideration of this limit, those who desire to encourage a wide extension of the Church would have been compelled very soon to strive to the uttermost to induce their converts to give as much as possible towards the maintenance of their Churches. And this is what we actually see in the case of great numbers of missions which practise a kind of bastard self-support, which is little more than an ill-disguised attempt to wring from the converts as much financial help as possible. The stipendiary system which we have treated almost as if it were divine in its origin makes this inevitable and it issues in sad appeals. "Since I922 I persevere to declare about self-support to every station, to every church, that they ought to offer sixpence everybody, but they cannot do anything. And I fail now; I cannot do anything. I hope my Lord Bishop he will decide this case about self-support."

Nevertheless, though our steps are hesitating and slow, we are learning a lesson which will one day open the door to true spontaneous expansion. We already begin to see that the Christian Faith is not a way of salvation only for the well-to-do; and that no people are so poor that they cannot maintain all that is necessary to their salvation.

 

(3) In the matter of self-government we have made the least advance. If missionaries have hesitated to believe in the power of the Spirit of Christ to inspire their converts to preach the Faith which they have found; if they have hesitated to believe that poor native converts could supply the material necessary for their corporate religious life, they have hesitated still more to believe that converts could direct their own religious organization. Even those who have proved by experience that new converts can, and will, from the very beginning propagate the Faith, supply their own Church buildings, and even support financially their teachers, hesitate to believe that they can, and ought to, direct their church organization from the very beginning.

Take a case like this. "A few days ago I had a letter from the African pastor who was in charge of a part of the district during the absence of the superintendent. While making a tour in the Akoko Country, a deputation from a village that I had never heard of came to beg him to pay them a visit, saying that their membership was now about 600. 'I went there,' he says, 'and found their statement true.' They had been gathered in by a number of young fellows who had gone down the country to work, and had come in touch with C. M. S. workers, had been converted and baptized, and then returned to found a Church in their own village, and to teach all that they had learned. What splendid zeal! What a glorious opportunity! The pastor has appointed as a teacher a young fellow who had lived with me and learned something with a view to becoming a teacher. He is a convert himself, very young, and poorly equipped; we have set him a hard task. The arrangement is not ideal, but is the best we can do."

Now here it will be at once observed that the little group had organized itself and could maintain itself. Its members met for mutual comfort and support; they combined to provide themselves with such things as were necessary: they were directing all their own organized religious life, until the day that they invited the visit of that foreign trained pastor. Here was self-government from the very beginning. If only that self-government had not been destroyed by the foreign missionary, but had been regularized by the Bishop, if their leaders had been ordained, there is no reason in the nature of the case why they should not have continued as they had begun. Then we should have seen true spontaneous expansion issuing in the creation of a new Church, self-supporting, self-governing, and, in all probability, self-extending; for this treatment of the first pioneers would certainly have encouraged their converts to follow their example.

But what did the superintending missionary and his African Pastor do when they met a case like that? They immediately sent as a teacher to those people a man who is described as "very young and poorly equipped." Now why did the missionary superintendent hasten to send a very young and poorly equipped teacher to a place where most zealous teachers had taught with such success that they had gathered a congregation of six hundred souls? It was not because there were no other openings for him; because in the very same article the missionary told us that "enquirers in most promising cases, turn away from us because of continual disappointment, as the teacher they had waited and begged for never came, and they had no one to guide and support them. Then a Mohammedan came along . . . and drew them to the faith of the false prophet. . . and those who might have been pillars of the village churches have been taught to become the bitterest enemies of the Cross of Christ." If the man were fit to be employed at all, he might have been sent to one of these. It was not because the new teacher was likely to be better than the old; for though he may have had a little more knowledge of the missionaries' doctrine, he had not the zeal which converted six hundred men. It was not because by sending him the missionary established the church. He did indeed bind that group to the mission, but he did not establish the church. Were they any better off when another layman was set over them? They were in worse case than they were before.

But their leaders needed help, and felt the need of help, and therefore they invited the Pastor to visit them. Well, of course, they needed help and felt the need of help; but were they helped? I venture to doubt it. To have taught those men a little more, that they might have imparted it to the rest, would have been help: to send a very young and poorly equipped teacher to supplant them was not a help but a hindrance. We ought never to send a Mission agent to do what men on the spot are already doing spontaneously. If they cry to us for help, as they often do, we should give them help, but help which would support their position and assist their zeal, not supersede them and kill their zeal; help that should strengthen them as leaders, not make them subordinates. To supersede them is disastrous. I remember once asking a missionary from Western Africa, whether he had ever known natives set out on their own initiative to teach others what they had themselves learnt of Christ and he told me how a missionary on a journey found in a village a number of men who met together to hear the Bible read and to pray, and that their leader was a native Christian who had learned something at the Mission Station. I asked him what the missionaries did when they made this discovery. "They immediately sent a teacher," he said. Then I asked him what became of the man who had first begun the work. And he answered that he heard no more of him. That is the natural consequence. If the moment that we find anyone doing anything spontaneously we send a paid man to do it for him, we stop his work and we check others from following his example. All men see and learn the lesson that to join the white man's church it is necessary to induce the white men to send one of his trained teachers. They see and learn the lesson that the spontaneous zeal of native Christians is deficient in some way. It obviously does not satisfy the white man and his paid native pastors: they do not trust it: they do not encourage it. It is better to get a paid teacher however young and poorly equipped than to have the most zealous unpaid volunteer, for the moment that the white man finds out what is going on he will certainly insist on sending one of his paid teachers. The result is that we kill voluntary spontaneous activity on the part of our converts, that all men believe that the presence of a paid teacher is essential for their admission into the Christian Church and that the progress of the Gospel is limited by the number of paid teachers available. Expansion ceases with the failure of the supply of natives trained by us. If the natives are converted to any other religion than the religion of Christ they can direct their own religious life. The Moslem, for instance, does not nurse his converts nor send them paid teachers. Converts to Islam seek teaching for themselves that they may lead their fellows: they travel sometimes from Nigeria to Cairo to learn. Christian converts are taught to cry feebly for teachers to be sent to them.

But why do we do this? That question I shall attempt to answer in the following chapters. Here all that I need to do is to beg those missionaries who say that they are anxious to see the Church expanding by the spontaneous activity of their converts from the very beginning, to consider what is the inevitable consequence of action like this. The story which I have quoted is not a rare and exceptional one. There is scarcely a country in the world from which we have not heard the like. Everywhere by robbing new converts of that liberty of directing their own religious life which they enjoyed before the Mission teacher was sent to them, we produce the impression that, for some reason, their religious life ought to be directed by the white missionaries and their paid agents. But if men believe that the Christian religious organization is one which they cannot direct for themselves, how can they continue to propagate the religion? Their own experience shows them that the spontaneous zeal of men untrained by the foreigners is inadequate; that some half-trained, paid, man can do what spontaneous zeal cannot do, that is, consolidate and establish the Church in its relation to the Church of the white missionaries.

If the growth of the Church depends upon the supervision of foreigners and of natives trained by them, the extent to which it can grow is severely limited. It depends upon the area which the foreign missionaries can cover, and the number of men whom they can train. The moment that limit is reached expansion must cease. And long before that, the sense that men are propagating a system of religion which is so unsuited to those to whom it is preached that they cannot receive it and practise it, for themselves exercises a very severe restraint. We feel it ourselves. Its influence is most baneful. All our missionaries run with their faces turned backward. The moment that any door of opportunity opens before them, they look behind for support. They continually bemoan the fact that their greatest difficulty, their most serious anxiety, their most bitter disappointment, arises from the lack of support from home. They cry for recruits and the recruits fail to appear, and they see the door of opportunity closing. And the whole body of converts learns this lesson that expansion depends upon the supply of trained mission agents; that the religion which they have adopted is one which natives cannot maintain for themselves; that they must have a foreign overseer or a man sent by a foreigner to minister to them. How can spontaneous expansion flourish in an atmosphere like that?

Until we learn that not only self-support in a financial sense, but self-support in a spiritual sense, a sense that implies self-government, must begin from the very beginning, we cannot hope to see that wide propagation of the Gospel which alone could penetrate a continent like Africa, or reach the vast populations of India and China, or cover those wide, sparsely-populated areas where communications are difficult, or find an entrance into those countries or districts where the Government is definitely opposed to Christian propaganda, places into which no white missionary can penetrate and where no Mission Stations can be founded. For such work the Church must be free--free with a freedom of which we now scarcely dare to dream. Spontaneous zeal leads Christian men to teach others, often in secret, often at the risk of their lives and property; and they must be able, not only to convert, but to organize their converts. They must be certain that no white missionaries, no paid agents of foreign societies, are necessary for the establishment of the Church. They must know where to turn for Holy Orders, and they must be sure that Holy Orders will be conferred. Church must beget Church, as individual begets individual. Is not that the only way? Or is our way of looking hopelessly into the world and saying, "This is closed to us," "That is unreachable," "We have not enough paid workers," "We cannot afford to open a new station," a better way? Could we once persuade ourselves that self-extension, self-support and self-government go hand in hand, and are all equally the rights of converts from the very beginning, we might see such an expansion of Christianity throughout the world as now we little dream of.

The refusal to recognize that self-government is necessary for new converts is threatening to produce most serious consequences. There is that in the Gospel which demands expression and is never satisfied without propagating itself. We have seen again and again in the history of the Church that a Christianity which does not propagate itself languishes, if it does not perish. And this is as true of new Churches as of old ones. Wherever the spirit of Christ is, there is the Spirit which desires the conversion of the world to Christ. And when men do not find adequate opportunity for its expression, a spirit of discontent and strife enters in.

At the present moment we hear on all sides mutterings of a coming storm. In India, in Africa, in China there are movements which call themselves Christian, movements which certainly could not have existed if our missions had not been there before them, which are definitely anti-European and anti-missionary. Within the circle of those whom we call our members there is grave discontent. If we continue much longer in our present way, it seems to me to be inevitable that, as our converts all over the world advance in education, so this discontent will grow. The result will be a schism of the most profound and far-reaching character.

We must remember that the vast majority of our converts have been, and are being, educated in dependence, and that the vast majority of our missionaries have not advanced even to the point of believing in the desirability of spontaneous expansion from the very beginning. Even those who believe in its desirability are commonly under the impression that they are labouring with all their might to stimulate it, whilst they are practising those very things which hinder it.

I hope that I shall succeed in the following chapters in persuading my readers that the methods which we have generally followed hitherto have sprung into existence as the almost inevitable consequence of our own attitude and training, and that in employing them we have unconsciously, and often unwillingly, created an atmosphere in which spontaneous expansion is almost impossible. It is high time that we should definitely face the question whether we will not in the future return to the Biblical Apostolic practice and by establishing Apostolic Churches open the doors for that expansion and make it the foundation of our missionary policy; for we are at a turning point in our missionary history, and what is to be the future course of that history will depend upon the attitude which we take up on this question.

 

 

CHAPTER IV

 

FEAR FOR THE DOCTRINE

 

In this chapter I begin the examination of the fears which hinder us from the Apostolic practice, and examine the fear that we might not be able to maintain our standard of doctrine. I argue that our conception of the standard of doctrine is a false one, and that our method of maintaining it is a false method, and I point out how our fear puts a serious barrier in the way of expansion and progress.

 

One of the most serious difficulties in the way of any spontaneous expansion and of the establishment of Apostolic Churches arises from our fear for our doctrine. I once heard a missionary from Africa say that, if we allowed our converts to teach as the Moslems allow their converts to teach, the doctrine might spread like wildfire. "But," he added, "we could not possibly permit that."

Such a saying might naturally surprise us. We might have expected that a man who went to Africa to propagate the doctrine would welcome with joy the prospect of its spreading like wildfire through the country. And he would assuredly do so unless he was restrained by some powerful influence. Nor is there any doubt what the restraining influence is. It is fear for the doctrine. He is afraid that the doctrine may be misrepresented by the unguided zeal of native Christians to teach others what they have learned. I do not think he is afraid that his converts would wilfully and deliberately misrepresent it: I think that he rather doubts their knowledge of it, and their ability to express it as he thinks that it ought to be expressed.

This fear compels him to say that we cannot possibly permit native Christians to express their spontaneous zeal in teaching others what they have learned, and in so saying he proclaims that we can generally restrain it, and do so. He proclaims also that, if we did not restrain it, spontaneous zeal would in fact spread the knowledge of the doctrine far and wide. He recognises the presence and the power of such spontaneous zeal. He says that "we do not allow," "we could not permit" it to have free course.

 

I

 

Now this saying represents the thought of a very large number of our missionaries abroad, and of our people at home. We often hear it said that we must maintain at all costs our standard of doctrine. We cannot possibly allow untrained and uncontrolled natives to propagate Christianity. It is this attitude that the believer in spontaneous expansion must meet, and it is, therefore, necessary to examine carefully its character.

But before I do that I would beg all those missionaries who protest that they do all in their power to encourage spontaneous activity on the part of their converts, to consider well whether this saying does not in fact represent their real thought, whether they do not in spirit accept the position that we must maintain our standard of doctrine, and that we cannot permit our converts to teach as the Moslems allow their converts to teach. For it is surely obvious that if we hold this theory spontaneous expansion is impossible. We may welcome spontaneous expansion, or we may refuse to permit it; but we cannot do both at once.

 

(1) The attitude which "cannot allow," and "cannot permit," is obviously the attitude of a governor: it is an imperial attitude. We must maintain, we say, we cannot permit. We, then, are the guardians of the standard, and we must maintain it not only for ourselves but for all who learn to believe on Christ through our preaching. In accepting our message they accept our direction. They are in our charge and we accept the responsibility for them. Unlike St. Paul, we are far from disclaiming lordship over their Faith. The standard is ours, and we must maintain it.

 

(2) The standard to be so maintained must be a fixed standard; but if we were asked where this standard of doctrine is to be found, what should we say? Should we say, In the Catholic Creeds? That is not what we really mean when we talk about maintaining our standard of doctrine. If we are members of the Bible Churchman's Missionary Society we mean a certain doctrine of inspiration: if we are members of the Anglo-Catholic party we mean what they mean when they speak of Full Catholic Teaching. It is not the Apostle's Creed that we think of when we speak of maintaining our standard of doctrine, but of some interpretation of it, or of some addition to it. And where that standard is to be found we do not know, for we are not all agreed as to the terms of it.

 

II

 

On what do we rely for the maintenance of this standard? When we talk of maintaining it we are obviously not relying on its own inherent truth: it is we who are proposing to maintain it, and we are depending clearly upon some power which we possess to maintain it. There is clearly a great difference between "contending earnestly for the Faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints," and this maintaining of a standard by authority. When we contend earnestly for a Faith, the emphasis is upon the inherent truth of that for which we contend: when we maintain a standard, the emphasis rests upon the exercise of authority.

On what then do we rely for the exercise of this authority? Without doubt we rely upon our prestige; and in no small degree upon our wealth, and our ability to give to the converts all those material advantages which only money can supply, salaries and buildings and education and hospitals and such-like. This is a fact with which every student of missions at home and every man of experience in the mission field is familiar. "Cherchez la bourse will almost always lead one to the seat of real power in mission administration. Even societies which have been most emphatic in the assertion of the theory of the independence of native churches have found in the power of the purse a sure device by which to guard infant churches from lapses or novel experiment." We often attempt to disguise it, but it is appallingly true. "It is far from the thought of missionaries and boards to make their money a means of retaining control, but it is as futile in Asia as it is everywhere else to imagine that real independence is compatible with financial dependence."

When we say we must maintain our standard, we certainly mean that it is our standard and not their standard; that for some reason they have not so accepted it that they will maintain it themselves. If we ask how it comes to pass that they have not so accepted it, the answer generally given is that it has taken us ages to grow up to our present standard, and that it will take our converts generations to grow up to it, and that meanwhile they cannot maintain it for themselves. That answer simply confirms what I said above, that our standard which we maintain is something of our own age and race. It cannot be the Catholic doctrine in the sense that it is the doctrine of all the ages, of the primitive Christians as well as of us who live in this last age.

It is a question which we might well consider whether new Christians must necessarily begin at that point of development at which we happen to stand at the moment when we go to them. It is a question of still more serious importance whether a standard of doctrine can be really maintained by an external authority as a code of laws can be enforced by a conquering government upon a subject people; or whether a standard of doctrine must not essentially be something internal, maintained by people who really do understand and believe it. It does not seem to me that any maintenance of doctrine which does not spring voluntarily from internal convictions can properly be called a maintenance of doctrine at all. If that is so, for us to maintain a standard of doctrine is a kind of contradiction in terms.

How do we attempt to maintain it? First we make the preparation for Baptism long and difficult by insisting upon each convert learning what is for very many of them difficult verbal lessons. Multitudes of our converts are totally unfamiliar with the kind of abstract language which the teaching of our doctrine involves, and consequently what seems to us very simple is for them very hard. When they have learned enough to satisfy their teacher that they are ready for Holy Baptism, they may be baptized, but we do not consider that they are therefore qualified to teach others what they have learned. And very often, if not generally, they do not themselves feel able to teach others; for they instinctively recognize that that kind of teaching is difficult, and that they themselves have not grasped it. Consequently they are not expected, and hardly themselves expect, to do more than listen to the teachers.

Then we train the teachers. We take children quite young and give them special training in elementary schools and high schools and theological colleges, so that they can understand our use of abstract terms and can learn at least verbally our doctrinal expressions; and these men we set over the little congregations, knowing well that in the great majority of cases they do not know enough to do more than repeat exactly what they have been taught.

From amongst these teachers we select the men who repeat best and teach best from our point of view, and to these we give further teaching and then ordain them with great confidence that they will teach nothing but what they have learned from us. And these men we put into positions of greater authority, under superintending missionaries, and I have heard them complain, "We do what we are told; but we do not understand what we are doing."

In this way we certainly have succeeded in maintaining a standard of doctrine in the sense that in our Missions heresy on any considerable scale is practically unknown. But what has been the result of this method of maintaining our standard?

 

(I) First a terrible sterility. Our converts have not gone astray from the Fold; but they have produced nothing. We have taught them to depend upon us, rather than upon Christ, and dependence upon man produces sterility, dependence upon Christ produces spiritual and intellectual fecundity.

 

(2) We have convinced the heathen as well as our converts that to become a Christian it is necessary to learn the lessons imparted by one of the trained teachers, or better still to receive the instruction of a foreign missionary himself. This obviously tends to restrict advance to the number of paid and trained teachers, and when there is any widespread movement the missionaries are unable to meet the demand. Then, instead of blaming their method, they lay the blame upon their supporters at home, as if they ought to supply teachers for every village in the world.

Listen to this: "The pressure on the missionary of masses of these outcasts clamouring for teachers and for baptism at times passes all endurance. Several deputations are on your verandah before dawn, waiting to press their claims."

"Sahib, we want you to send teachers to our village."

"I am sorry, but I have none to send."

"But, Sahib, we want to learn all about Christianity."

"I know, but it is impossible."

"But, Sahib, we want to become Christians."

"I am very sorry, but you cannot."

"Sahib, cannot we become Christians?"

"No, go away, go away."

And the missionary drives them from his verandah, angry, indignant with the apathy of the Church that has placed him in such an impossible position.

 

(3) The Doctrine has been maintained by external authority, but it has hampered the thought of the people, and as the Christians advance and grow in understanding they begin to feel this dimly and to resent it. The result is that in places where our missions have been long established and where the converts have made great progress in intellectual education, as for instance, in India, there arises an instinctive, unreasoning, revolt.

When I was in India some years ago I was told repeatedly that young educated Indians were saying, "We will not have your Western Creeds," but that they very seldom had any reasoned objection to them. As far as I could, I made enquiries for myself, and I found this to be true. Young educated Indians said to me, "We will not have your Western Creeds." But when I inquired which particular articles in the Creed offended them, the only answer that I got was, "You have forced them upon us."

Thus the maintenance of our standard of doctrine by external compulsion seems to proceed through sterility to revolt.

 

III

 

(I) In the early Church we find a very different state of affairs. When the Christian Church was first spreading throughout the Roman Empire she certainly maintained a standard of doctrine, and that standard was not imperiled by the spontaneous activity of a multitude of Christians who were certainly not trained theologians. These unknown missionaries taught the doctrine which they had learned, and that teaching was so far adequate that the Bishops of the Church did not hesitate to consecrate new converts as Bishops for the new Churches without giving them any long or special training in theological colleges.

The great heresies in the early Church arose not from the rapid expansion resulting from the work of these unknown teachers; but in those Churches which were longest established, and where the Christians were not so busily engaged in converting the heathen round them. The Church of that day was apparently quite fearless of any danger that the influx of large numbers of what we should call illiterate converts might lower the standard of Church doctrine. She held the tradition handed down by the Apostles, and expected the new converts to grow up into it, to maintain it and to propagate it. And so in fact they did. The danger to the doctrine lay not in these illiterate converts on the outskirts; but at home, in places like Ephesus and Alexandria, amongst the more highly educated and philosophically minded Christians. It was against them that she had to maintain the doctrine.

Now all this suggests quite a different atmosphere from that with which we are familiar. The Church of those ages was afraid of the human speculation of learned men: we are afraid of the ignorance of illiterate men. The Church then maintained the doctrine against men who were consciously innovating: we maintain the doctrine against men who may unconsciously misrepresent the Truth that they have learnt. The Church then maintained the doctrine by her faith in it: we maintain our doctrine by distrusting our converts' capacity to receive it. The Church then maintained her doctrine by thinking it so clear that any one could understand it: we maintain our doctrine by treating it as so complicated that only theologians can understand it. Consequently, the Church then was quite prepared that any man who believed in Christ should teach others what he knew of Him: we are only prepared to allow men whom we have specially trained to teach it. When others whom we have not specially trained of their own spontaneous motion do teach others we hasten to send a trained teacher to take their place. That is, of course, exactly what the early Church did not do, yet it maintained its standard of doctrine.

 

(2) And here I would recall the fact that in all those sporadic cases of spontaneous teaching with which we are familiar in our own day we never hear of any deliberate corruption of Christian doctrine. When our missionaries discover these cases, they nearly always find that the teaching given is, so far as it goes, true, and is very often surprisingly true and deep. These converts seem to have learned by themselves much that we think can only be taught by us. And what they have learned is very fundamental. And they seem also invariably to show a great readiness to learn more. Now that is not the spirit which breeds heresy. The spirit which breeds heresy is a spirit of pride which is puffed up with an undue sense of its own knowledge and is unwilling to be taught.

 

IV

 

The reason why the spontaneous zeal of new converts does not breed that spirit is not hard to find. Such converts are almost invariably men who have had some real religious experience. They have heard something of Christ; they have received some teaching about Him; they have generally learned to repeat the Creed and to read the Bible; they have called upon Christ and been heard; and this has wrought a change in their whole outlook upon life, such a change that they are eager that others should share their experience. Hence they begin to teach others, and to share their experience with others.

Now all religious experience demands doctrine for its proper statement and explanation. If then these men are not well instructed in the Christian doctrine, when they attempt to share their experience with others they feel that there is much in it which they cannot understand. Consequently instruction in Christian doctrine comes to them with an enlightenment and a power which is a joy, and therefore they gladly receive it, because it supplies a felt need of their spiritual experience. In such an atmosphere Christian doctrine is in little danger, for though false or inadequate teaching, if they received such, might prevail for a time, yet the true teaching when it comes must inevitably drive out the false. For the experience is a true experience, and a true experience demands a true doctrine.

It is as the complement of experience that Christian Doctrine first took shape. It is notorious that the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity, for instance, was formulated through the attempts of the disciples of Christ to explain their experience. Christ appeared, and the Apostles experienced His power: the Holy Ghost descended, and the Apostles and their immediate followers knew His indwelling; the Christian doctrine of the Trinity arose out of attempts to express that experience.

It is, as the complement of experience that the doctrine continues to have reality and meaning. We can remember how Cyprian wrote to Donatus. "As I, myself, was held in bonds by the innumerable errors of my previous life, from which I did not believe that I could by possibility be delivered, so I was disposed to acquiesce in my clinging vices; and became I despaired of better things, I used to indulge my sins as if they were actually parts of me, and indigenous to me. But after that, by the help of the water of new birth, the stain of former years had been washed away, and a light from above, serene and pure, had been infused into my reconciled heart--after that, by the agency of the Spirit breathed from heaven, a second birth had restored me to a new man; then, in a wondrous manner, doubtful things at once began to assure themselves to me, hidden things to be revealed, dark things to be enlightened, what before had seemed difficult began to suggest a means of accomplishment, what had been thought impossible, to be capable of being achieved." Now here is expressed a doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration, but it is the complement of experience, and as the complement of experience it is expressed with power, and has all the vigour of a new discovery. And so it is always.

As the complement of experience, doctrine renews its youth from age to age; but divorced from experience it is nothing more than the statement of an intellectual theory, and to rest in something which an intellectual process has created is to rest in that which an intellectual process can destroy.

Doctrine, accepted either as an intellectual satisfaction, or as an authoritative pronouncement, divorced from experience, has no power in itself. In the seventeenth century Richard Baxter, and all his readers alike, believed in the doctrine of a fiery hell, a doctrine delivered with all the weight of authority. Listen to his appeal to men to care for the souls of others, "What if the man die and drop into hell while you are purposing to prevent it!" What doctrine is there conceivable more calculated to stir those who believed it? Yet Baxter complains, "Alas, how few Christians are there to be found that set themselves with all their might to save souls!" They believed the doctrine, they assented to it, they accepted it, yet they were not moved by it.

It is vain to say that the doctrine was false or falsely stated, and therefore it failed. It failed not because it was false or falsely stated, but because it was mere doctrine divorced from experience. Experience of the power of Christ to deliver from sin and from fear of the punishment due to sin, did then, and does now, induce zeal; and the preaching of that power of Christ is Gospel; but the other by itself is mere doctrine, and, like all doctrine, in itself lifeless.

We see the same thing to-day. High Sacramental doctrine should make men eager, if any doctrine could make men eager, to provide the Sacraments for Christians, and to remove all hindrances which prevent men, anywhere, from using them; but we see those who most glorify the Sacraments, glorifying them by external adornment and standing most stoutly for those very things which make the administration of them to Christians in out of the way corners of the world impossible.

In the light, then, of the history of the early Church, and of our own experience of sporadic cases of spontaneous teaching, I venture to suggest that the method by which the early Church maintained its standard of doctrine is superior to ours, and that we should be wise to rely upon the free expression by any convert, however illiterate, of his spiritual experience, and to teach our doctrine as the complement of that experience. But that is nothing else than to open wide the door to that spontaneous expansion which the man I quoted at the beginning of this chapter deprecated, saying that we could not permit it.

Nevertheless the fear haunts us that if we allowed our converts, though they might be illiterate men, to teach freely what they had learned, the doctrine might spread like wildfire, and the country might be covered with multitudes of groups of men calling themselves Christians, but really ignorant of the first principles of Christ; and that thus the Church and her doctrine might be swamped, as it were, with a flood of ignorance. That is the fear which causes young educated Indians to protest against the admission of large numbers of outcastes into the Christian Church; that is the fear which causes some of our missionaries to say that we have no right to receive more illiterate converts than we can really teach.

Here we must observe that so far as these young educated Christians are concerned their fear is much more fear for the prestige of the Church which has established through many years a reputation for having the highest standard of literacy of any religious body in the country than for the purity of her doctrine. And as far as the missionaries are concerned they are thinking entirely in terms of a theory and method of Missions which limits teaching to a comparatively small body of missionaries and their trained native helpers, and of doctrine almost entirely in terms of intellectual education.

Now I have already trie