evangelical missions have to suffer to-day from the enmity of Rome had no parallel in apostolic times.

300. Finally, it would imply a very limited conception to reduce the success of missions to the statistical results. In looking at the numbers of the present day, we renounce all foolish boasting, although the numbers speak when they are interpreted in a living way. There is a missionary success which cannot be statistically recorded, and this success far exceeds the numerical achievement of missions. About the middle of the second century the youthful Christendom, in the midst of the population of the Roman world-empire, formed a minority, not only decreasing, but also little regarded; and yet the future belonged to it. It represented an intellectual, moral, and religious power, that was ever more and more producing a ferment and creating an atmosphere which at once exerted a decomposing influence on heathen conceptions, and set in movement Christian ideas and vital forces, and so prepared for the great victory of Christianity in the future. And such a process is going on to-day. Not only in India, but in every place where missions have for a considerable time had foothold, even in the case of each of the nature-peoples, this ferment is arising, the new atmosphere is being formed, and a transformation is beginning in the domain of the intellectual, social, moral, and even industrial life which marks the commencement of a new epoch in the history of civilisation, this conception being taken in the widest sense.2 Often the baptized Christians still form an apparently powerless minority, and yet they already exert, far beyond the limits of the Christian congregations, transforming influences which have the significance of a Christianising education. In an "Outline" of missionary history it is only possible to refer very slightly to those results that cannot be statistically set forth, but which at the same time become means of Christianisation. To learn what these are, and by learning to understand what missionary success properly is, a special study of the individual mission fields is necessary. To stimulate a desire for such a study, and to form an introduction to it, is a chief aim of this general survey.

301. It is quite impossible to make a statistical record of the quality of the heathen-Christians. If the missionary task consists of "making disciples" (ware) and "converting

1 Warneck, Die apostolische u. die moderne Mission, Gütersloh, 1876, p. 47. 2 Warneck, Mission und Kultur. Dennis, Christian Missions and Social Progress, 2 vols., New York, 1897. Mackenzie, Christianity and the Progress of Man, etc.; illustrated by Modern Missions, New York, 1897.

3 See Note 1, p. 342.

(opp), then the most real and inward missionary result is such Christians won from among non-Christians as Jesus recognises as His disciples, who are not merely outwardly converted to Christianity, but show by their lives that the new faith has made new men of them. How large the number of such Christians is, no statistics can show. Undoubtedly, it is not inconsiderable, but the idealisation of the native Christian congregations as congregations of the elect does not correspond with the actual state of the facts. They are fragments of national churches, a field of mixed crops, in which, amongst the wheat, stand many tares. The majority of the members of these congregations are rudimentary Christians: not only is their Christian knowledge often very deficient, but their life is also marked with many spots and wrinkles. If they are clear of the grossest heathen pollution, and, in comparison with their past, have attained a much higher moral level, yet in many respects they still lag far behind the Christian ideal of morality. With the majority the transition to Christianity is not identical with that which we call conversion: the "old man" is not always put off when the heathen is laid aside. The field, too, into which the mission is casting the seed of the Word is more full of weeds than the church field at home; so that the growth is threatened with greater defilement. Only, one must not fall into the opposite error of making the colours too dark, and, on the ground of individual occurrences of a very distressing kind within the young native Christian congregations, pass a general judgment of condemnation on the whole results of missions. Leaving aside the numerous accusations that rest on mere gossip, as well as the numerous superficial judgments, particularly of travellers who neither have religious intelligence nor have taken the trouble to concern themselves about missions on the spot, to generalise in this way is somewhat as if one were to declare, from the mass of news which our daily press loves to offer of all the wicked deeds that happen, that the whole German nation consists of thieves and murderers. The comparatively few moral enormities which arouse attention are collected and recorded, and the large respectable part of society is ignored, as well as the virtuous life which is led in quietness. Even in apostolic times, not only were there weaknesses enough among the young Christians, but there were even hypocrites and apostates; and yet that was a brilliant era of Christianity. At all times there are chaff and weeds among the wheat; how, then, can one wonder if the heathen-Christendom of to-day is not free from them? There is shadow enough, but with it 1 Warneck, Ev. Missionslehre, iii. 1. 201.

much light also; and this light shines all the more brightly when one marks the darkness beside it from which it has burst forth, and amid which it maintains itself. In spite of all their deficiencies, the Christian congregations gathered by the missions of to-day are a salt in the midst of their heathen surroundings; and in spite of the mean aspect1 worn by the missions of the present time, they are a work in which one beholds the glory of God.

302. In conclusion, if the aim of missions is not merely the conversion of many separate individuals, but the founding of independent national churches, self-supporting, selfgoverning, self-propagating, so that at last the sending forth from the old Christendom shall entirely cease, have the missions of the present already attained this end? No, they have not yet attained it; but in several mission fields they are at least in the position of approximating to the attainment of it. The present missionary era is still too short, and the people who are the objects of missionary effort are still, for the most part, on too low a level of culture for the final goal of missions, complete ecclesiastical independence, to have been reached by this time. The comparison with apostolic missions is deceptive, owing to the total difference in character of the conditions. The doctrinarianism of Independency has here and there, in Hawaii, for example, granted independence to a young native Christian church, but the experiment has always had bad results. Even where the specific work of Christianisation has come to an end, as for example in various groups of islands in the South Seas, in the West Indies, and in Minahassa, missionary superintendence cannot yet be dispensed with. Certainly, in the initial stages of missions, the training of the native Christians to independence has been very largely neglected, but to-day this end is being everywhere laboured for on principle, and with great diligence. The financial achievements are in some cases already so great as to relieve considerably the missionary societies, and the native pastors and teachers not only increase numerically from year to year, but also ripen inwardly to growing independence. Not a few of the native Christian congregations, indeed, are lacking in aggressive force; while from others there proceeds a great missionary or assimilative influence. In most of the older mission fields the process of forming national churches has already begun, and while at present it is still mainly in the early stages, yet from decade to decade it makes a visible advance. Whether, indeed, it can everywhere be brought to the final goal, to full independence of the old missionary 1 Germ., Knechtsgestalt, "the form of a servant."

Christendom, is a question which at present no one could with confidence answer in the affirmative. The inferiority of a great part of the non-Christian humanity of to-day beside the civilised Western world, which is ever more and more overflowing, dominating, and decomposing it, does itself create a necessity for missionary superintendence even as a bulwark.

There is a missionary rhetoric which overestimates the results attained by missions up to the present time, and there is a missionary hypercriticism which undervalues them. In the foregoing work the attempt has been made to avoid both the one extreme and the other, and to present the actual facts as a sober apology for missions.