Number of converts not a reliable estimate of mission work—Spurious converts versus Indigenous Christianity—Latitude should be allowed to the Indian Church—We should introduce Christ to India rather than Occidental Christianity—Christianizing sects among Hindus and Muhammadans—Missionary work not restricted to missionaries—Influence of the best of Hindu and Muhammadan thought should be welcomed—The conversion of the nation requires our attention more than that of the individual—Christian Friars adapted to modern missions—A true representation of Christ to India—Misconceptions that must be removed.
I have completed these sketches of mission work, and I wish to summarize in this chapter some of the conclusions that I have been led to draw from the experiences of the last sixteen years, and then in a concluding chapter to point out what I think to be the most promising lines of advance.
It has too long been the habit to gauge the results of mission work by the number of converts or baptisms, but this is wrong both by omission and by commission: by omission, because it takes no count of what is the larger portion of mission work—the gradual permeation of the country with the teachings and example of Christ; by commission, because it encourages missionaries to baptize and register numbers, chiefly of the lower classes, who have no right to it, because they come from egregiously unworthy motives. Such converts not only are a dead weight on the mission to which they are attached, but too often utterly discredit Christianity in the eyes of the non-Christians around them by their greed and unworthy conduct. It is well that we should sometimes stop and think what it is that we are desirous of doing, and then face the question: “Are we really accomplishing that, or doing something altogether different?”
Are we desirous of planting in India a Christian Church on the lines which we see developed in England or America? If so, I sincerely hope that we shall never succeed. Are we desirous of binding on Eastern converts the same burden of dogmas which has disrupted and still distresses the Western Church? Again, I sincerely hope not. Are we desirous of giving India the life and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of living Him before the people? There we have a worthy object—to compass which no sacrifice is too great—worthy of the best and most devoted of our men and women, and claiming the spiritual and material support of the whole Western Church.
Now, it is quite possible—in fact, we have seen it enacted before our eyes—that, having given India Christ and the Bible, India’s sons and sages may not interpret everything as we have done, but may do so in their own mystical and transcendental way. We may not always be able to admit such by baptism into the fold of the Christian Church—they may not themselves desire it—but are we to say that our mission has not been accomplished? Accomplished it assuredly has been, but perhaps not on the lines which we desired or imagined. If, again, after studying the life and words of Christ, and comparing them with the Christianity which they see practised in the West, or in the Westerns who reside among them, they are not drawn to Western Christianity while yet having a devotion to Christ; if they do not feel they can consistently join any of our Western Churches; and if they form a Church of India, are we then to be disappointed and think we have failed of our mission? A thousand times, no! Let us rather praise God that, instead of a number of hothouse plants requiring careful watering and tending lest they sicken and wither, we have a harvest of indigenous growth nurtured on the native soil of India, and ripening to a fruitful maturity under its own sun, and fed by the natural showers of heaven without the aid of the missionaries of a foreign clime.
We see, therefore, that the gathering in of converts is not the first or most important work of the missionary. His work is rather, first, to live Christ before the people of the country; secondly, to give them the teachings of Christ by giving them the Scriptures in their own tongue, and preaching and explaining the same to them. We often find in practice that when some Indian has been captivated by the Gospel, he is hurried on to baptism, and thereby cut off prematurely from his old stock and grafted on the new—prematurely because he is often insufficiently grounded in the Christian faith to withstand the torrent of persecution which is his lot the moment he is baptized, and because the leavening influence which he would otherwise be exerting on a wide circle of his relations and acquaintances is at once destroyed.
Christians at home encourage the missionary to think that nothing has been accomplished till the inquirer is baptized, and that, once baptized and recorded in the church register and the mission report, the work, as far as that individual is concerned, is completed, and the missionary may leave him and turn his attention to someone else. Fatal mistake! Injurious to the convert because, left only half grounded in the faith, he falls into worldly and covetous habits, or may even apostatize outright; injurious to the unevangelized remainder because, instead of being attracted for a time longer to the study of Christianity by the influence of the inquirer, they are thrown into a position of violent antagonism by the secession of the convert, and are no longer willing to give the claims of Christ any hearing at all.
Herein lies the inestimable value of the much-maligned mission schools and colleges. They do not produce a great crop of immediate baptisms, and so are belittled by some as barren agencies; but nothing else is more surely permeating the great mass of Muhammadan and Hindu thought with Christian thoughts, Christian ideals, and Christian aspirations.
We see all around us in present-day India attempts to reclothe Islam and Hinduism in Christian habiliments, or else ardent reformers, hopeless of that Augean task, creating new little sects and offshoots, in which Christian ideas are served up for Muhammadan and Hindu consumers thinly disguised in a dressing of their own religions. These sects sometimes affect a display of hostility to Christianity, lest those whom they wish to draw should mistake them for being only missionary ruses for catching them with guile; but, all the same, they are steps, and I think inevitable steps, in the gradual permeation of the country with the religion of Christ. India has been surfeited with philosophies and dogmas and rites and ceremonies from the hoary Vedic ages down, but she is hungering and thirsting for a living power to draw her God-ward, and such a power is Christ. She cannot have too much of Him, whether this life be set forth in the devoted service of Christian men and women, in hospitals, and schools, and zenanas, and plague camps, and leper asylums, or in the daily preaching and teaching of Him in town and village, in the crowded bazaars, or in the hermitages of the sadhus and faqirs.
This is not a work restricted to those who have been set apart as missionaries, but one which claims every professed Christian in the land. Every European Christian, be he in civil or military service, in trade or profession, or merely a temporary visitant for pleasure-seeking, can and should be doing this essentially Christian missionary work if he is living honestly and purely up to the tenets of his religion; and many of the best converts in the land have been first drawn to Christ by watching the consistent private and public Christian life of some such unobtrusive Englishman or Englishwoman, who never was or tried to be a missionary in the usual sense of the term.
On the other hand, the Christianizing of the country has been made all the more remote and difficult by those Englishmen who contemn or discredit the religion they profess, or live lives openly and flagrantly at variance with its ethics.
We do not gain anything from a missionary point of view, and we dishonour God, when we speak of everything in Islam or Hinduism as evil. The Mussulman has given a witness to the Unity of God and the folly of idolatry which has been unsurpassed in the religious history of the world, and he has qualities of devotion and self-abnegation which the Christian Church may well desire to enlist in her service rather than to ignore or decry. The Hindu has evolved philosophies on the enigmas of life, and sin, and pain, and death, which have for ages been the solace and guide of the myriad inhabitants of India, and he has attained heights of self-abnegation and austerity in the pursuit of his religious ideals which would have made the Christian ascetics of the early centuries of our era envious. Religion has been to them a pervading force which has coloured the most commonplace acts of daily life. Here we have qualities which have prepared the soil for the implanting of the Christian faith, and which, when imbued and enlightened with the love of Christ, will reach a luxuriance of Christian energy worthy of the religious East, in which so many of the religions of the world have had their birth. India, indeed, wants Christ, but the future Christianity of India will not be that Occidental form which we have been accustomed to, but something that will have incorporated all the best God-given qualities and capacities and thoughts of the Muhammadans and Hindus.
It is a great pity that missionary energy is still largely destructive rather than constructive. In the earlier days of mission work it was popularly supposed that missionaries were to attack the citadels of Islam and Hinduism, which were considered to be the great obstacles to the acceptance of Christianity by the people of India, and it was thought that, those once overthrown, we should find a Christian country. Much more probably we should find an atheistic and materialistic India, in which Mammon, Wealth, Industrial Success, and Worldliness had become the new gods. The real and most deadly enemies with which the missionary has to contend are infidelity and mammon worship. We may well try to enlist the religious spirit of all the Indian creeds in the struggle against these, the common enemies of all faiths, or we may find, when too late, that we have destroyed the fabric of faith, and set up nothing in its place. The old Islam, the old Hinduism, are already doomed, not by the efforts of the missionaries, but by the contact with the West, by the growth of commerce, by the spread of education, by the thirst for wealth and luxury which the West has implanted in the East. All the power of Christianity is required to give India a new and living and robust faith, which shall be able to withstand these disrupting forces.
Some of the Christian attacks on Eastern religions are painful to read, because one cannot help seeing that the same weapons have been used in the West, and often with success, against belief in the Christian Scriptures, and the missionaries are only preparing tools which will one day be used against themselves. They may for the moment win a Pyrrhic victory against the forces of Islam and Hinduism, but they are at the same time undermining the religious spirit, the ardent faith, the unquestioning devotion, which have been the crown and glory of India for ages. Let it rather be their endeavour to present a real, living, pulsating Christianity, capable of enlisting all these divine forces in its own service without weakening or destroying one of them, and all that is best in Islam and Hinduism will be drawn into it. The product will be nearer to the mind of Christ than much that passes by the name of Christianity in the West, yet has lost the power of the living Christ. Do not destroy, but give something worthy of acceptance, and be careful of the type.
Converts will come right enough when we work on these lines, but they will not so often be the man-made converts which have been drawn by the outward attractions which missions sometimes offer. They will more often be those who have been drawn of the Spirit, and become converts in spite of us and our little faith. And they will inherit the blessing of Isaac as assuredly as the first class partake of the waywardness of Ishmael.
The East has long possessed and developed in a myriad different ways the idea of sacrifice, while the more practical West has been tending more and more towards a philanthropic Christianity which makes a life of service its ideal. The best will be when we bring about a union of the religious devotion of the East with the altruism of the West.
So far the asceticism and devotion of the Orient has been rendered nugatory and disappointing by its uselessness—by, if we may use a paradoxical expression, its very selfishness—for it was directed to the emancipation of the individual soul rather than to the salvation of the race. But when the sacrifice of the Orient and the service of the Occident join hands and go forth in the name of Christ to mitigate and remove the ills and sorrows of this sad, sad world, then indeed will the spirit of Christ be fulfilled in His Church.
A recent writer, whose missionary enthusiasm had caught a spark from the mystic fires of the East, writes: “The thing which is lacking (in mission work) I believe to be the vision of the homeless, suffering, serving Jesus—the Jesus who came to serve, and laid down His life for the sheep.”1 He then goes on to enunciate the need for Christian Friars, who may bring a knowledge of Christ to India in the only way to which her people have ever been accustomed. From time immemorial all the religions that have occupied the arena of the Indian stage, and compelled the adherence and devotion of her people, have been promulgated by peripatetic ascetics, who have shown by their devotion to their ideals the intensity of their convictions, and have not wearied of journeying from end to end of the land, through heat and through cold, through privations and hunger and nakedness, that they might make known to the people how they were to obtain salvation.
The Friars suggested by the above writer would therefore be such as India is already familiar with, and would work on a prepared soil. He writes: “The part of the Friars is to live Christ so literally before the Church and the world, that both may become conscious of Him. The Church is lacking in ideal and devotion; the Friars must, therefore, lead lives of such heroism and devoted service in the face of every danger that the Church may be fired by their example.... If such a body of men were to act in this way, none would be so quick to cast themselves at the Master’s feet as the people of India, and the high castes would lead the way.”
But it must be clearly understood that these Friars are not to replace or render unnecessary any section of the existing missionary body. Every one of the various activities of the present mission work is wanted, urgently wanted. They will, however, fire their energies, enlarge their scope, and increase their usefulness. Two misconceptions require to be removed from the Indian mind. One is, that missionary activity is a political activity, a department of the Government artfully disguised. The other is, that the English are, after all, only lukewarm about their religion, and do not hesitate to disregard it if it clashes with their comfort or interest. To combat these ideas it is the lives of the missionaries that are of more importance than the organization, and the more Christ is lived and exemplified, the more spiritual and lasting will be the result.
1 S. E. Stokes in The East and the West for April, 1908.
Frontier medical missions—Their value as outposts—Ancient Christianity in Central Asia—Kafiristan: a lost opportunity of the Christian Church—Forcible conversion to Islam—Fields for missionary enterprise beyond the North-West Frontier—The first missionaries should be medical men—An example of the power of a medical mission to overcome opposition—The need for branch dispensaries—Scheme of advance—Needs.
Down the North-West Frontier is the long line of mission outposts: Srinagar, Mardan, Peshawur, Karak, and Thal, in the Kohat district; Bannu, Tank, Dera Ismaïl Khan, Dera Ghazi Khan, Quetta. All of these comprise medical mission work as part of their activities. Several have educational work as well. Yet we regard them as something more than outposts: they are bases. The strength of the British military stations on that frontier is far in excess of the requirements of their immediate surroundings, because under conceivable conditions they have to act as the bases of an army acting beyond them, or they might have to stem the advance of an invading force. In a precisely similar way we must regard our frontier missions, not merely in relation to their environments, but as the means whereby we shall be able to go forward and evangelize the yet unoccupied lands to the west and the north. They should be sufficiently well equipped in both personnel and material, so that when need arises they might be able to supply the men and means for occupying mission stations farther on.
The countries of Central Asia to the west and north of India are a challenge and a reproach to the Christian Church—a reproach because in the early centuries of the Christian era the zeal of the first missionaries carried the Gospel right across Turkestan and Tibet to China, and Christian Churches flourished from Asia Minor to Mongolia. Dr. Stein, in his recent work, “Buried Cities of Khotan,” tells us how in those days there were fair towns and running streams and orchards, where now is only a sandy, waterless waste. The rains ceased, the water channels dried up, the people had to leave their towns and villages, and the sand was blown in and covered houses and trees and everything deep in its drifting dunes, where they have been unvisited and forgotten till the present traveller unearthed them. A similar spiritual drought seems to have fallen on the Armenian and Nestorian Churches of those parts, and, deadened and retrograde, they were unable to withstand the great Muhammadan invasions of the sixth and succeeding centuries, which swept like tornadoes right across Asia into China.
In again proclaiming the Gospel in Turkestan the Christian Church will only be reoccupying her lost territories, where at one time Christian congregations gathered in their churches, but for centuries only the Muhammadan call to prayer has been permitted to be heard.
It is a reproach, again, because on our North-West Frontier, only separated from Chitral by a range of mountains, is the interesting land known as Kafiristan. There is reason to believe that the inhabitants of this land, known as the Kafirs, are the descendants of some of the Greeks whom Alexander of Macedon brought over in his train three hundred years before Christ. Two stories are current among the Kafirs regarding their origin, but both point to their arrival about the third century before Christ. One is that a number of Greeks, expelled from the lowlands by the advance of surrounding and more powerful tribes, took refuge in these mountain fastnesses; and the other is that they are the descendants of wounded soldiers left by Alexander the Great in the neighbouring region of Bajour. They still practised till a few years ago pagan idolatrous rites, which had probably changed little for two thousand years, and they resisted the inroads of the Muhammadans, who were obliged to recoil before their inaccessible mountain fastnesses. They welcomed some Christian missionaries who visited their valleys at different times in the last century, and there is every reason to believe that, had the Christian Church accepted the task, the whole of that nation would have adopted the Christian religion. But though these travellers urged on the Church her opportunity and her responsibility, no step was taken.
Colonel Wingate, a retired frontier officer, writes:1 “I had gone for a stroll one day in the summer of 1895 with another officer for a short distance outside the military camp. Though we were wearing the uniform of officers, we were without arms, when suddenly we saw a party of natives approaching. They were travelling at a rapid rate, and as they drew near we observed that they were armed with bows and arrows and spears, each carrying a coloured blanket in a roll over the shoulder, their food of dried meat and rice tied on to their girdles. The whole party were warriors, as indicated by the rows of shells sewn on to the kilts worn round their waists. They proved to be an influential deputation from Kafiristan to the headquarters camp to obtain the assurance of the British nation that they would still enjoy their protection. From time to time, commencing with the mission of Major Biddulph, interviews between headmen of the Kafiri tribes and officers of the British Government had taken place, resulting in the belief that the independence of Kafiristan would be preserved. But the unexpected and ominous answer came over the field telegraph wires: ‘Tell them they are now the subjects of the Amir.’ While waiting for the answer I had some conversation with them. They were wonderfully bright and generous-hearted, and fond of a joke. When I asked them if they were ready to embrace the Christian religion, they replied: ‘We do not want to change the religion of our fathers; but if we must change, then we would far rather become Christians than Muhammadans, because we should still be Kafirs,’ alluding to the common application of this word by Muhammadans to all unbelievers.... The unsparing proselytism of Muhammadan conquest has done its worst. Hearths and homes in their mountain fastnesses, which had been preserved inviolate for one thousand years against the hated Mussulman foe, have been ruthlessly invaded and spoiled. The bravest of their defenders have been forcibly made into Muhammadans, and the fairest of their daughters have been torn from the arms of their natural protectors and carried off as new supplies for the harims of their conquerors.” Another lost opportunity to add to the account of the Christian Church!
But there are lands now in that historic region “where three empires meet” which may yet be occupied by the messengers of “peace and goodwill towards men.” Is the Church going to rise to the present opportunities or let them, too, slip by?
Swat, Chitral, Baltistan, Hunza, Astor, Chilas, are each of them the home of a nation. Then the great historic cities of Bukhara, Samarcand, Tashkend, Merv, Kokan, Kashgar, have some of them been in their time the capitals of great kingdoms.
In some of these places there are already missionaries at work, most of them belonging to Swedish and German societies; but how utterly inadequate these few scattered workers are to the great problem which they have to face! What is needed at the present are medical missions. A medical man would be welcomed by the people in all these places. The time for the preacher has yet to come. It would not be wise, even were it possible, to send up clerical missionaries and evangelists into these parts at present. But the doctor will find his sphere everywhere, and will find his hands full of work as soon as he arrives. He will be able to overcome suspicion and prejudice, and his timely aid and sympathetic treatment will disarm opposition, and his life will be a better setting forth of Christianity than his words. There is a door everywhere that can be opened by love and sympathy and practical service, and no one is more in a position to have a key for every door than the doctor.
I have already said much to show how powerful an agency medical work is for overcoming prejudice, but I will cite one instance more, where the doctor was the son of a convert of the very place where he was working, and had succeeded by his loving and skilful attentions in overcoming the opposition and much of the prejudice of the people. The first branch dispensary in connection with the Bannu Medical Mission was opened at Shekh Mahmud in 1895. This is a large village near the Tahsil town of Isa Khel, on the right bank of the Indus River. About thirty-five years ago a landowner of this place was converted to Christianity, and, together with his family, received into the Christian Church. At first he passed through great vicissitudes: his house was burnt over his head by his fellow-villagers, and he and his family barely escaped with their lives. His enemies then tried to expatriate him by erasing his name from the village registers, and swearing in court that he was a stranger to the district. Eventually, however, their perjury was found out, and the court restored him his lands and had a new house built for him in the place of the one that had been burnt down. This man passed to his rest trusting in our Lord Jesus Christ, leaving three sons, who were all following in their father’s footsteps, and have been privileged to see many of their former enemies brought to Christ themselves. The eldest son has also died, but leaving two sons, of whom the elder has obtained the Government qualification of doctor, and is destined to take charge of the branch dispensary which we are about to open at Thal. The second and third sons have received a medical training in the mission hospital, and are both engaged in medical mission work—the second at the Bannu Headquarters Hospital, and the youngest is in charge of a branch dispensary built on the very land that his Muhammadan countrymen tried to wrest from his father. On the last occasion of my visiting this branch, just before leaving India for my visit to England in 1908, this young doctor—Fazl Khan by name—had made a dinner for the poor of the village, and nearly two hundred must have come to partake of his hospitality. This custom of feeding the poor is often done in India by those undertaking a long journey or some other enterprise, so that the prayers of the poor may be a blessing on the work.
Well, after all the guests had partaken, the Christian doctor offered prayers for my safe journey to England, and for the medical mission work at Bannu and at Sheikh Mahmud, and after each petition all present raised the cry of “Allah,” being their way of saying “Amen.” Now, these were the sons and relatives of the very men who had burnt the house of the Christian doctor’s father, and tried to oust him from his lands. This is an example of what may be accomplished in a fanatical frontier district through the agency of medical mission work carried on by an Indian Christian.
I am constantly getting requests from maliks (chiefs) of these trans-frontier tribes to visit them in their mountain homes, and when I have accepted I have received a cordial welcome, and been well treated, while I have had abundant opportunities of medical mission work. There is great scope for the itinerant medical missionary among them, but he requires a base to which he can send cases requiring severe operations or ward treatment. Small branch dispensaries in charge of Indian hospital assistants are of the greatest value, and there are many suitable places for such along our Indian frontier. The advantages of such dispensaries I believe to be as follows; (1) They exert an extraordinary Christianizing, civilizing, and pacifying influence on the tribes in their immediate vicinity. (2) They form subsidiary bases for the medical missionary, not only enabling him to work up that particular district, but relieving the pressure on the headquarters hospital. The assistant-in-charge sifts the cases that come to him, tells some that their disease is irremediable, thereby saving them the expense and weariness of a long journey, and recommending others to go up to headquarters for operations. (3) They form training-schools for our Indian helpers, whereby they are prepared for taking posts of even greater responsibility. This matter of efficient training of our Indian helpers is, I believe, a matter of paramount importance.
My hope is, then, in the near future to see a number of new centres of medical mission work opened in these hitherto almost untouched lands of Central Asia, and, associated with these centres, a number of village dispensaries for the more remote tracks. The central missions would have a staff of at least two European medical men, and the branches would be in the charge of Indian assistants. There is no reason, however, why an Indian of sufficient qualifications and experience should not take the place of one of the European staff when circumstances admit of it. The central hospital should be well equipped in both out- and in-patient departments, and have sanitary wards accommodating from thirty to eighty in-patients. The branches should also be able to take in from six to ten in-patients, as not only will the assistant in charge often get cases of urgency, which require immediate indoor treatment, and cannot be forwarded to the base hospital, but when the head medical missionary visits these out-stations he will be glad to be able to accommodate a few operation cases which may be waiting for him there.
This scheme would not clash with Government medical aid, because in most of these regions there are very few, if any, Government hospitals or dispensaries, and those places which already have sufficient Government medical aid might well be passed over in favour of the numberless places that have none.
Here is a grand field for young medical men who are anxious to consecrate their abilities to the service of God and man. They are not offered tempting salaries or honours, but they will have the satisfaction of knowing that they are helping to lighten the burden of mankind where that burden was weighing most heavily, and to bring the light and love of Christ into some of the darkest abodes of cruelty and superstition to be met with on the face of God’s earth.
Those who help this work with the gifts in money or kind, without which it would be impossible of execution can have the satisfaction of knowing that they are not only relieving bodily suffering which would otherwise be unrelieved, and carrying the Evangel to those who have never heard of it, but they are drawing nations together in bonds of service and sympathy, and diminishing the danger of racial conflict and devastating war.
1 “Across our Indian Frontier,” by Colonel G. Wingate, C.I.E.