"CHRISTIAN MISSIONS IN INDIAl ' 145

instances to be universal; and all he sets down to the vile*
nature of the Hindu religion or of Islam or Buddhism a&
the case may be. It is as if a Chinese visitor to England y
courteously received, were to describe to his friends in
Pekin, the effects of drink and poverty, agricultural de-
pression, the overcrowded slums with their moral and
physical results, sweated industries and dangerous traclesy
baby-farming, street prostitution, the unemployed, and the
idle rich, and ascribe all together to the vile nature of the
Christian dogma. How easy it would be for him to do-
this has, by the way, been suggested by Mr. Lowes Dickin-
son, in his ' Letters of a Chinaman. ' In just this way
the missionary home on furlough preaches his mission
sermon or gives his mission lecture ; and the collection is-
swelled by the contributions of a sympathetic but uncritical
congregation, not quite free from a suspicion of gratitude
to God, that they are not as other (heathen) men. Mis-
sionary literature is similar. A typical volume is Miss.
Carmichael's i Things as they are in Southern India, ' from
which I have already quoted. No volume could be a more-
impressive monument of the unfitness of the ordinary mis-
sionary to concern himself with the ; civilisation' of India.
When in another man's heart you can see only blackness,,
the fault is likely to be your own ; when in another civili-
sation you can see only unutterable vileness, it means that
you have not understood the parable of the mote and the
beam. The method of such a book is simplicity itself ;
ignore the presence of virtues in non-Christian, and of
vices in Christian, communities; describe all individual and!
local instances of evil known to you in a heathen society as
typical; add violence of language and morbid religious
sentiment, suggest all that you clo not say, and the volume
is completed.
10