demonstrate the existence of that Christian witness which, in turn, promotes the ever extending circulation of the Book.

The Master said, "The Seed is the Word." There are hosts of men and women who believe in the Seed. Their acts show their belief; and their belief eventuates in a practical witness to the Bible. As followers of Christ they hold that the Book is ordained of God to perform a certain spiritual service; and that the world of men needs to come under the influence of the Book. They act out their conviction. Some, as colporteurs, go on daily rounds, in the home-land or abroad; others, as collectors of funds, do their part in another way. As combined, these activities express, in organised form, the witness which is registered in the reports of Bible Societies and missionary agencies. The witness in this case is direct and not indirect; it is of those who know, as distinguished from those who are ignorant and unappreciative of the message of the Bible. And in speaking of this witness I would not for a moment controvert the contention that witness is also borne along other lines, e.g., from the results of archæological research, and the influence of the Book upon the minds of barbarian people, and so forth.

The growth of mission labour in various lands shows with how much greater emphasis the witness of the Christian community throughout the world is borne to-day than was the case a century ago. "The little one has become a thousand." Does anyone ask why all these exertions in the literary world should have for their subject the book which we know as the Holy Bible? The answer is, because in the last century, more than ever before, through mental conviction and spiritual experience, hosts of men and women found this Book to show the way of Salvation as revealed to a needy world in the life and work of the Lord Jesus Christ.

513TH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20TH, 1911.

THE REV. PREBENDARY FOX IN THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and confirmed.

The following elections were announced :—

MEMBERS: The Rev. The Lord Blythswood, M.A., and J. B. Braddon, Esq.

ASSOCIATE: The Rev. J. A. Lightfoot, M.A.

MISSIONARY ASSOCIATES: The Rev. A. R. Cavalier and the Rev. Wm.
Fisher, M.A.

The CHAIRMAN introduced Mr. Baylis as one whose academic and clerical experience had given him the advantage, not common in his profession, of being qualified to form a well-trained and balanced judgment in regard to the mutual relations of religion and science.

As a graduate at Oxford in Natural Science, Vice-Principal of Wycliffe Hall, in charge of a large town parish in the north, and for the last eighteen years a secretary of the Church Missionary Society, he was exceptionally competent to deal with the subject before the meeting of the Institute.

THE

TH

RELATION OF SCIENCE ΤΟ

CHRISTIAN

MISSIONS. By Rev. F. BAYLIS, M.A.

THE relation between Science and Christian Missions would seem to be small if we were to judge by business discussions in a Missionary Committee Room.

Had there been, during the last eighteen years, any serious discussion involving this relation in the Committee Room of a certain Missionary Society, which is one of the largest in the world, the writer of this paper could hardly have failed to know of it. Yet, so far as his memory serves, there has been none such.

There may be gathered, from this absence of discussion, a strong presumption that science is in no serious way a difficulty to Christian missions. But it would be a mistake to infer that the inter-relations are beneath notice, or of less than vast importance.

At least we are dealing with two of the great contemporary living forces of the world, and it would be strange to find they had no bearing on one another.

Missions revolutionized by Applied Science.

In missionary circles it is recognised that we have now arrived at "the decisive hour of Christian Missions." The Church of Christ is face to face with a world that is being transformed within a short generation. It is not difficult to show that applied science is one of the most potent factors among the forces which (a) are changing the world; and also among the forces which (b) give to the Church her present opportunity; and which, (e) at the same time, limit that opportunity.

(a) The world is a changing world, because the great peoples of the East and the backward races of other lands are assimilating, at an astounding pace, the inventions and the knowledge of the West.

Everyone knows something of the course of events which transformed Japan in so short a time, bringing it into rank with the civilized West. The eyes of the world have been drawn upon it. Even the Missionary Committee Room is aware of the march of science in Japan. For it is not long since a letter told us of the new Bishop of Hokkaido, a missionary well known and loved among the people of his diocese, receiving in mid-ocean on his way out a wireless message of welcome from his little flock in the Northern Island. Japan is up to date.

But China is treading the same path. The change that is coming must be stupendous from the enormous population and area of the Empire. The change is coming apace-much faster, we are told, than it came in Japan. What the magnitude of it means may be illustrated by the saying that while "Japan has now nearly six millions of youth in her schools and colleges the same proportion will some day give China over fifty millions."* "The day is coming, and that very soon, when China will have more students than any other nation in the world."

As to the pace of progress, Dr. Mott says,+ " China has made more radical adjustment to modern conditions within the past five years than has any other nation, not excepting Korea. Those who have studied the great changes that came over Japan will remember that she made no such advance in the first ten years after she began to adopt Western civilization as China has made during the past five years. Sir Robert Hart, the

* Mott's Decisive Hour of Christian Missions, p. 17.

+ Ibid., p. 7,

eminent civilian and sagacious observer of things Chinese, in commenting on the recent changes in China, said that during the first forty-five years of his residence in China the country was like a closed room, without a breath of fresh air from the outside world, but that the past five years reminded him of being in a room with all the windows and doors wide open and the breezes of heaven sweeping through."

Telegraphs, railways, and factories are cited as making astonishing progress, and the closing words of one of Dr. Mott's paragraphs will serve to symbolize the revolution that applied science is working in China: "In many cities the rushlight has been superseded by the electric light. The fear of boring into the pulse of the dragon' is being lost by those who are anxious to exploit the enormous mineral wealth of the country."*

It must not be supposed that China stands alone, though it is such a conspicuous instance, in this kind of revolution. All the backward races, with remarkably few exceptions, are passing through the same experience. Steamboats, railways, telegraph systems, and motor-cars are to-day parts of the environment of well nigh the whole human race, and in many cases the fact is all the more significant because it means a sudden jump from all that was simplest, most " primitive" as men are apt to say, to much that is of the most modern and marvellous in the science of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

(b) For our present purpose we need now to notice how Christian Missions are affected by the changes that are taking place so rapidly. The applied science that produces these changes can be claimed as immensely favouring the progress of Missions. Partly this is so in a quite direct sense. The printing press, the railway, the steamboat, the bicycle, the motor-car are all agencies by which science helps to bring the missionary to his field; to put into his hands the printed Bible, the chief material agent in his work; to minimize the waste of his time and strength in service; and to give him in a thousand ways the victory over the adverse circumstances of his task. In these days, when a tourist can get from Mombasa, the port of East Africa, to the capital of Uganda in three or four days by rail and steamer, and can cable home the news of his safe arrival in a few minutes, and can be off in a few hours on his bicycle to any part of the country, it is hard to realise how things were only fifteen years ago, when the first ladies reached Uganda by a weary three months' march, and when it was no strange thing for a

*Mott's Decisive Hour of Christian Missions, p. 10.

mail party to be cut to pieces by some turbulent tribe, and for letters to be missing for many months.

Perhaps as powerfully in an indirect way science helps the missionary by the prestige it inevitably gives him. Sometimes it is merely as one of the people of the wonderful West that he is great among his hearers. But at other times it is because every article of his simple kit, every convenience of his daily life witnesses to an ignorant people of the wonderful power and science of the white man. Some of the simple people of Uganda were on one occasion a little tempted to discredit the good news of a missionary, but one of their number challenged his fellows to dare to doubt what came from men of such wonderful wisdom. "See," he said, referring to some lightning conductors erected to church and house, "these are men who can put up a hand into the sky, and catch the very lightning and dash it down into the ground so that it cannot do any harm. How can we doubt the wisdom of what these men tell us?" This is, of course, not cited as in any wise the basis on which the missionary likes his message to rest, but it shows the prestige that goes into the mission-field with the commonest scientific knowledge from our homelands.

Men with eyes to see the great events of world history have been telling us of recent years that the greatest happenings are those where mighty peoples are awakening to Nationality as their chief need and possibility, as the thing for which they must let go the old unifying forces of religion to find the new forces mightier still. Think of this in Japan, China, India, Turkey and other lands. It shows us the crisis of missions. Then dwell for a moment on the obvious course of national progress for these peoples. It is in their eyes above all things necessary for them to get the material civilisation, in a word, the science of the West. Their faces are all turned to Europe and America. The very lands that want to send them Christian missions are the lands from which they are hoping and expecting to receive light and leading.

A believer in the Providence of God will not fail to find his faith strengthened by all he can learn of the synchronising, in the world's history, of the age of missions and the age of applied science. It is possible to argue with some force that God meant the science of our day to serve great purposes of His in "turning the world upside down" as part of His agency in extending to all the world the Kingdom of His Christ. It is prima facie evidence that missions and science come of the love and wisdom of one and the same Lord.