Missions.

Missions. The truth and divine origin of Christianity being assumed, it might have been expected that missions to propagate the faith should have been carried on continuously till the world was evangelised, and that that goal should have been reached long ere now. It has not been so. There have been long periods of intermission, during which the work either ceased, or was prosecuted without zeal or energy; and others during which abundant zeal was neutralised by a strange lack of discretion. In point of fact there have been but three periods in the history of the Church which have been distinctively marked as missionary periods, and a history of missions would be fairly complete if it gave an account of (a) the apostolic and immediately post-apostolic; (b) the mediæval; and (c) the modern missions. (a) Missions of the Apostolic and immediately subsequent Ages.—It is certain that the gospel made great progress during the lifetime of the apostles. From the 'Acts of the Apostles' it is manifest that within a few years of the resurrection of Christ the gospel obtained a footing in most countries to the east and the north of the Mediterranean; while from other authentic sources we learn that in the same brief period it was successfully introduced into Egypt and the other African regions on the southern shores of that sea. Neither Gibbon, in his estimate of the effects of 'secondary causes,' nor the orthodox apologists who criticised that estimate, nor writers of the history of missions in our day appear to estimate highly enough, as contributing to the production of this result, the labours of those Hellenistic Jews and proselytes of whose conversion to the faith we read in the second chapter of the Acts. While there were in Jerusalem tens of thousands of Jews who had never left the precincts of the Holy Land, and who knew no language but the Hebrew of their Scriptures and the Aramaic dialect into which it had degenerated, no mention is made of them as witnesses of the miracle of the gift of tongues, but only of the Hellenistic Jews and proselytes who had come for the observance of the great feast from numerous Asiatic, African, and European lands, and from the remote isles of the sea. Of these three thousand were baptised. They thenceforth constituted a 'native agency' for conveying the message of the gospel into their several lands, and telling of 'Jesus Christ and Him crucified' in the vernacular speech of these lands. But they needed training for this work, and remained for a time under the teaching and fellowship of the apostles. As the result of 'the persecution which arose about Stephen,' 'they were all scattered abroad, except the apostles,' and 'they that were scattered abroad went everywhere, preaching the word.' It must have been through the labours of these evangelists, under the direction of the apostles, that Christian churches were founded in many places remote from Jerusalem—as, for example, at Damascus, where we find a church of such importance as to warrant the employment of the arch-persecutor for its suppression.

As to the personal labours of the apostles we have no reliable information outside the book of the

Acts. There are innumerable churches that claim the honour of apostolic foundation; but their claims rest on traditions which cannot be traced beyond the 13th, the 12th, or, at most, the 11th century. There are, indeed, two exceptions, that relating to the foundation of a church in the kingdom of Edessa by Thaddæus, and that which ascribes the introduction of the gospel into India to the apostle Thomas. The authorities for these are apocryphal 'acts,' which are certainly of an early date. The books contain multitudes of mistakes and anachronisms, and cannot be regarded as historical authorities; but they wear the aspect of a misapprehension of actual facts and occurrences, rather than that of pure invention. A greater amount of probability than is usually assigned to it appears to belong to the apostolic origin of the Syrian Church in Southern India (see THOMAS, ST).

We have no sufficient data from which to estimate the rate of the progress of the gospel during the apostolic age. From such data as exist statisticians have estimated the number of Christians existing at the death of the apostle John, or at the close of the first Christian century, at numbers varying from less than a quarter of a million to more than half a million. It were not safe to assume that the actual number was a mean between these two extremes, or even that it lay between them at all. It may possibly have been below the smaller, or, equally possibly, above the greater. Certainly, however, the number was large. The testimony of Tertullian to this effect would not be of much value if it stood alone. But from it, confirmed as it remarkably is by the unexceptionable testimony of the younger Pliny, it cannot but be inferred that within a century of the resurrection of Christ the gospel had been preached over a great part of the Roman world, and that at least in some provinces, as in Bithynia, the gospel was threatening to supersede the worship of the gods of the empire. (b) Mediæval Missions.—Apart from missions in the technical sense of the term, it is certain that various causes contributed to the wide diffusion of a knowledge of the gospel. Setting aside some altogether untrustworthy legends and traditions, we find no reason to believe that the gospel was first introduced into the British Islands by apostles or apostolic men, or by missionaries specially set apart for the work; and yet it is certain that before the time of Constantine there were churches of considerable extent both in the southern and the northern sections of Britain. The most probable supposition is that these churches owe their origin to the intercourse of Britain with Rome, which began with Cæsar's invasion, and soon attained a great extent. Soldiers and civilians came from Rome to Britain, some of whom were Christians, while others brought with them Christian slaves. British merchants went to Rome as traders, British chieftains as diplomats, British ladies as hostages. There is some reason to believe that one of the last class was a friend of Paul during his imprisonment there. But if the British Church did not owe its origin to missionaries in the strict sense of the term, it is its proud distinction to have been the greatest missionary church throughout the earlier of the mediæval centuries. If Patrick really was a Briton, as seems demonstrable, he was the great leader of the British missionary host. He found Ireland entirely heathen, and he lived to see it professedly Christian. During his lifetime it was changed from a condition of barbarism into a land of saints and a land of scholars, in whose schools were trained not only the choicest youths of the neighbouring Britain, but many also from the continent of Europe. The debt that

Ireland owed to Scotland for the mission of Patrick she nobly repaid by the mission, just a century later, of Columba and his associates to Iona. The religion imported probably in a casual way by Roman soldiers and Roman civilians and Roman slaves, and by British sojourners in Rome, had not died out, but it had not become widespread. The Picts were uncivilised and unevangelised. It was from the sequestered I or Iona that the light went forth which shone brightly for many generations—all the more brightly by reason of the depth of the darkness which it had to penetrate. If the Scottish Patrick might fitly be called the apostle of Ireland, and the Irish Columba in some sort the apostle of Scotland, Aidan, one of the Iona 'family,' is entitled in like sort to be regarded as the apostle of Northumbria; and St Cuthbert was a spiritual descendant of Aidan. Moreover, the Irish-Scottish missionaries were the great evangelists of a large part of the European continent. Ebrard has shown the magnitude and the importance of the work undertaken and accomplished by Columbanus and Gallus and a host of others, 'numerous as swarms of bees,' who, in the midst of innumerable difficulties, introduced agriculture and civilisation, learning and religion, into France and Switzerland and Italy and Germany, of which last country the English Boniface became the 'apostle.' Not that the externals of Christianity were non-existent at an earlier time. In France, for example, these noble missionaries had to do with the religion introduced by the Romans; but the pure faith was now represented by a corrupt clergy ministering to dissolute nobles and neglecting an enslaved people. Then they had to do with the recent invaders, who were partly heathen and partly Arian. Sad to say, the missionaries seem to have suffered less from the heathens than from the Arians, less from the Arians than from the orthodox, and, among the orthodox, less from the peasantry than from the nobles, and most of all from the clergy, or from others at their instigation.

What the Irish and Scots did for Europe in the earlier middle ages the Nestorians about the same time attempted, with no less zeal, though with less success, for Asia. Condemned as a heretic by a council held at Ephesus in the 5th century, Nestorius (q.v.) was banished from Constantinople to Egypt. From that time onwards, for five centuries the Nestorians carried on extensive and not unsuccessful missionary operations in central Asia, and founded churches, some of which exist in a languishing condition to this day, whilst others recognised papal authority in the later mediæval centuries. The Nestorian Tartar Church seems to have subsisted under a succession of ecclesiastics (see PRESTER JOHN) until the country was devastated by Genghis Khan. The Nestorians either introduced the gospel into India, or else revived a church previously founded, possibly by the apostle Thomas. There can be no reasonable doubt that in the 7th century they passed through Tartary into China, that they founded churches there, that they were at least tolerated and probably subsidised by successive emperors till the end of the 9th century, when, with a revolution or change of dynasty, the system of intolerance was introduced.

In the later mediæval centuries the missionary work was mainly in the hands of the great Roman orders, the Dominicans (q.v.) and the Franciscans (q.v.), especially the latter. Their work was chiefly among the Mussulmans of Spain, North Africa, and western Asia. Las Casas (q.v.) earned the title of 'apostle of the Indians.' (c) Modern Missions.—The Jesuit order was formed immediately after the Reformation, avowedly for the purpose of retrieving the disaster which that great event had caused to the Church of Rome. By far the most distinguished of the early Jesuit missionaries was Francis Xavier (q.v.). Unquestionably Xavier was no ordinary man; it is, however, evident even from the eulogies passed on him by his admirers that he did not make any spiritual impression on the minds of the people of India and Japan, though he consolidated the Portuguese mission in India and helped to open China and Japan to missionary effort. After the labours of Ricci and Schall there are said to have been in China 300,000 Catholics in 1663. For the Jesuit 18th-century missions in Paraguay, see JESUITS, PARAGUAY. Notes on the Catholic missions in Japan and Corea will be found in the articles on these countries. There is a separate article on the Propaganda (q.v.). The Misiones Catholicae states that the number of European missionaries belonging to the Roman Catholic Church in 1886 was 2800, of mission adherents nearly 2,800,000; in India there being 1,180,000, in Indo-China over 500,000, nearly 500,000 in China, 210,000 in Africa, and over 100,000 in Oceania.

The Reformation was a great preparation for evangelistic work, but the Reformation period was not distinctively a missionary period. This was not merely, though it might be in part, because the hands of the Reformers were full of the work which they had to do at home. It is to be remembered that the nations which had foreign relations, foreign traffic, and foreign possessions were Spain and Portugal, in which the Reformation got no firm hold. But it must be admitted that the Reformers did not rightly apprehend the commission to preach the gospel to every creature. When Luther, therefore, has occasion to refer to that text, he tacitly assumes that its requirement is fulfilled when the gospel, as distinguished from Romanism, is preached to the nations of Europe. In the 16th and 17th centuries, therefore, we find no more than sporadic and ill-sustained efforts after mission-work among Jews or heathens. Leibnitz, indeed, anticipated the conception of a later age, and may well be regarded as the harbinger of modern missions, even as, along with Newton, he is honoured as the harbinger of modern science. It was natural that the needs of the English colonies should first attract the interest of Englishmen to foreign parts; the life labours of John Eliot, 'the Indian apostle' (1604-90), were carried out under the auspices of the Corporation for the Spread of the Gospel in New England. The Hon. Robert Boyle, first governor of that society, contributed to the translation of the gospels into Malay, and left a bequest for foreign missions. Bishop Berkeley laboured for the foundation of a missionary college in Bermuda; and it was mainly for the spiritual wants of the American colonies that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was founded in 1701; its first missionary to India sailed in 1818.

Early in the 18th century the first Protestant mission was sent to India. It was projected by the king of Denmark, having probably been suggested to him by his chaplain, Dr Lüttkens. At first, and for a long time, Germany supplied the missionaries; but the pecuniary support of the mission soon devolved upon England, Prince George of Denmark, the husband of Queen Anne, having recommended the object to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Among many noble men who have been engaged in this mission the most notable is Schwartz, who probably obtained an influence over all classes of the people of India such as no other European ever possessed.

While all the Protestant churches of Europe and America are now engaged in missionary work, there is one church which is distinguished from all the rest by this, that it is simply a missionary institute. Other churches make their missionary work subordinate to their pastoral functions; the Moravians or Unitas Fratrum have long regarded the conduct of missions as the end of their being. There is not in the history of human enterprise a more interesting chapter than that which relates the missionary works of the Moravians from their first beginnings in St Thomas and in Greenland to their latest undertaking in the Tibetan Himalayas.

To William Carey belongs the high distinction of having been the first to inculcate effectually upon British Protestants the duty and the privilege of missions, and the first English Protestant to engage personally in the work. He and his coadjutors were noble men, and had to contend not only with heathen prejudices, but also with the timid policy of the rulers of India. The battle which fell to them to fight had to be fought once for all; and it is due to their singular discretion and their inflexible determination that it was fought so well. These men made Serampore a classic spot, and amid all the changes, material and spiritual, which have come over India in these last years, and the greater changes which a near future will certainly effect, the names of Carey and Marshman and Ward will be held in ever-growing veneration. Carey went to India in 1793; Henry Martyn's labours lay between 1805 and 1812. In 1795 the London Missionary Society was formed, and began its work by the despatch to the South Seas of the ship Duff with a large body of missionaries. For a long time the mission was not successful; but after a time it met with great success, and now there are many of the islands in which heathenism has long been extinct. The London society cordially welcomed numerous fellow-labourers from England, Scotland, Germany, and America, and most generously consented to a division of the islands which they could not have been much blamed if they had claimed as their own. It may be noted in passing that these small islands have contributed to a disproportional extent to the enrichment of missionary literature. It is part of the common creed of mankind that truth is stranger than fiction, but is not generally so attractive. Yet in our day there have not appeared more fascinating books than Williams's Missionary Enterprises, Miss Yonge's life of Bishop Patteson, and Mr Paton's narrative of his own work and that of his brethren in the New Hebrides.

The societies of the Church of England are the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, High Church (1701), and the Church Missionary Society (1799). The English Nonconformists are represented in the mission-field all over the world by agents of the London (1795), the Baptist (1792), and the Wesleyan Missionary Societies (1817). The Americans are not behind in the good work. The American Board of Missions (1810) and the American Presbyterian Board are great organisations, whose agents are doing most effective work in many fields; while the Baptists have good reason to rejoice in their Burmese Mission (1813). The Methodist Episcopal Church came more recently into the field (1819), but set about its work with characteristic energy. Zenana missions are a special department of Indian missions. The efforts of the Salvation Army (q.v.) in the foreign field deserve mention. Missions to the Jews have a peculiar interest for many Christians; and home missions are an integral part of church work at home.

The Evangelical body in Germany is, in proportion to its strength, most creditably evangelistic. By means of many institutions they have trained and sent forth a large number of missionaries, some of whom have been men of extensive scholar- ship, but the greater proportion men of earnest piety, able and willing to endure hardness, as good soldiers of Jesus Christ. The Rationalistic party in Germany have not shown much zeal in the mission cause.

The Scottish missions differ from the others in this, that they are conducted by the churches as such, without the intervention of societies. The Established, the Free, and the United Presbyterian Churches have extensive missions in India, Africa, China, the South Seas, and Japan. The English Presbyterian Church has an extensive and successful mission in China. The Presbyterian bodies cherish the memories of Duff and Wilson and Anderson in India, and of William Burns and Carstairs Douglas in China.

The following table, based on the calculations of the American Board, will give an idea of the extent of Christian missions (other than Roman Catholic) in 1890.

The Church Missionary Society's income is more than twice that of any other English society.

The mode of carrying on missionary operations by the various bodies is essentially one, though, of course, modified by circumstances. Of recent years 'medical missions' have been found to be a valuable, and in some cases an indispensable, adjunct to the other agencies. The missions of the Scottish churches have employed education as an evangelistic power to a greater extent than the other bodies. Such institutions as the Christian College at Madras, the mission station at Blantyre, and the Free Church Institution at Lovedale in South Africa are producing a great effect on the minds of the people.

The success of missionary work in our day is not such as either to elate or to discourage the friends of missions. The actual population of the world may be taken as fifteen hundred millions, of whom about four hundred millions are professedly Christians. Thus, not so much as a third part of the world is evangelised. But then it should be considered that an immense amount of preparatory work has been accomplished; and also that great national movements often reverse in a few years the aspect of affairs. In our own time we have seen such reversals in Madagascar and the Fiji Islands and Japan. In China we have seen a change, in the freedom with which the gospel can be preached, which our fathers, and indeed ourselves at one time, would have considered simply impossible. All are convinced that in India there must come ere long a mighty change; and the friends of the gospel earnestly hope that that change will be favourable to the cause of Christ.

Some account of mission operations are given in the articles on the countries where missions have had conspicuous success (FIJI, JAPAN, &c.); there are also biographical notices of the most eminent missionaries (ELIOT, CAREY, LIVINGSTONE, DUFF, HANNINGTON, &c.). See also works on missions by Marshall (1863), Rufus Anderson (New York, 1869), R. Grundmann's Missions-atlas (Gotha, 1867-70; and Calw, 1884), Christlieb (2d ed. 1880), Young (1881), P. Joung (New York, 1883), H. Gundert (2d ed. Calw, 1886), Warneck (Eng. trans. by T. Smith, 1884), George Smith (1884; new ed. 1890); on Catholic missions, Henrion's Histoire des Missions Catholiques, and Durand's Missions Catholiques Françaises; works on special missions; the numerous missionary journals and year-books; and the lives of the notable missionaries. Buddhism (q.v.), especially in its earliest period, and Mohammedanism (q.v.) have been grouped with Christianity as missionary religions, in contradistinction to Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Brahmanism. See Max-Müller's papers on missions in Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv.