3. This principle of adaptation is the basis of all effective missionary work. It is not so long ago that the idea which people attached to missionary work was that Christian people went out to speak to heathen people ; and they grouped under the phrase " heathen " all sorts of races, nationalities and religions. In point of fact we coloured the world, or the map of the world, in various colours, and the great bulk of it was coloured black. But the black covered various races, various nationalities, various creeds and differences, and it is one of the mistakes of those indefatigable and earnest men, that they did not learn to dis- criminate between the religious differences and the racial differences, between one nationality, race and creed, and another.
(1) It is at this point that we shall find the clue to the slow progress which the Christian religion has too often made among alien races in spite of the sturdiest missionary effort. The
1 Mrs. Oliphant, The Life of Edward Irving, i. 110.
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advocates of Christianity have not always possessed the tolerance of their great Master. They have said, " This is the only way. Walk in this way or go to destruction." They have declared, " Here is the supreme and absolute truth. Believe it or perish in the darkness and misery of unbelief." The pagan peoples to whom they have gone with their patent panacea for the ills of life have made reply, "Our own sages have shown us another way, and we have found that a safer way to walk in. They have given us a different doctrine. They were good men and true, and we have not found their teachings repugnant to reason."
H Do not think you will ever get harm by striving to enter into the faith of others, and to sympathize, in imagination, with the guiding principles of their lives. So only can you justly love them, or pity them, or praise.1
Tf On the Day of Pentecost part of the charm was that every man heard the Gospel in his own language, and that is why our missionaries have to learn foreign languages, that they may preach the Gospel to men in the tongue to which they were born. But if they are to be of much use they must learn far more than the language of the people ; they must learn their manners and customs, their history, their beliefs, their ideals, even their prejudices. Let no young missionary going forth doubt that there are elements of Divine truth in the faith and the practice of the heathen. And these are not to be despised or neglected, but are to be used as stepping-stones by which to lead them to something higher and better. I have always been profoundly moved by what an Indian woman said when she first heard the Gospel of Grace proclaimed — " That is what I have been expect- ing to hear all my life." 2
TJ I once heard a distinguished missionary, who had spent his whole life among Indians upon the frontier, tell the story of a chieftain, who, just as he was about to go upon the war-path against the whites, lost a little child to whom he was devotedly attached. He sat down in his tepee a day and a night beside the body of the babe, gloomy and terrible. Then the white man came with a little coffin and placed it on the ground before him. The Indian sat an hour or more in silence. Then he rose and, after placing the babe in the coffin, washed away the paint and laid aside the feathers, which were the symbols of war, and dis- missed his followers in peace.8
1 Ruskin, The Ethics of the Dust ( Works, xviii. 356). • Professor J. Stalker. • E. H. Capen.
i CORINTHIANS ix. 22 255
TJ Those who heard Dollinger speak from the pulpit or in the lecture-room, from his seat in the chamber or in the Council, of course carried away with them the impression of a man of letters and distinction ; but to see him out of doors, in the freedom of God's beautiful creations, was to learn his disposition and feel his geniality. There he was gladdened by tree and meadow, air and water, sunshine and the songs of birds. The air might be both raw and damp, but he always found something to praise in it, so that I was involuntarily reminded of a legend told me by Dollinger himself. " In one of the streets of Galilee there lay rotting the body of a dead dog. All who saw it exclaimed, ' How unsightly ! How horrible ! What a stench ! ' But Christ, who passed that way, said gently, ' Yet he has beautiful teeth.' " l
(2) It is said that those who try to plant Western corn in India have found that it was absolutely necessary before that Western corn could yield an adequate harvest that it should be naturalized by some years of sowing in Indian soil. Is not that a parable that the want of the East is the rising up of the Eastern to speak Christianity to the Eastern people, and that it is needful that our religious teaching should, as it were, be naturalized in the soil as it was naturalized in every soil in the history of the past, in order that it might gain power of full expression to the hearts of those who need it ?