in later chapters. The purpose of taking it up at all at this stage of our discussion is to secure our proper bearings and get established for future operations. A broad and comprehensive view of the study and the enterprise at the outset is a great advantage. It arouses interest and sets before us what is to be the aim of our endeavors.

There is no vital difference between the place of missions in Christian educational institutions and their place in the life and work of Christian churches. Under normal conditions there is no vital, permanent Christian life apart from the Church. No duties in the sphere of missions devolve upon individual Christians which are not encumbent upon the Church. And, contrariwise, whatever missionary obligations rest upon the Church the individual Christians are in duty bound to share. We must emphasize duly, but also distinguish properly between individual responsibility and corporate enterprise. And one of the most important tasks of our educational institutions is to train and develop strong and able leaders.

The Church which Jesus Christ established on the earth has a twofold task: edification and extension. They are co-ordinate activities and act and react upon one another. Upbuilding and propagation, activity within and outward-these two processes embrace all the forces and activities of the Christian life and the work of the Church. And these are fundamental and vital, the one as well as the other. Persistent neglect of the missionary life has the same effect as persistent neglect of the devotional life. The life shrivels, decays, dies. As a missionary secretary of large experience has recently said: "Propagation is a law of the spiritual life.

A living organism must grow or die. The Church that is not missionary will become atrophied." 1

Too many, both individuals and churches, treat the missionary enterprise as though it were a neat, but needless grace, a beautiful, but expensive and hence negligible ornament, a grace and ornament superadded to Christianity, rather than an impulse, a force, a factor, inwoven in the very fabric of Christianity. As we study the subject in the light of the Scriptures and the history of the Christian Church we see, ever more clearly, how mistaken this notion is, and how short-sighted and suicidal the policy that persistently ignores the claims and belittles the significance of missions.

Let us be open to conviction, glad to receive the instruction of the Holy Spirit through the Word, and willing to abide by and act upon the results of His tuition.

'Arthur J. Brown, in The Foreign Missionary

CHAPTER X.

UNITY AND DIVERSITY OF THE MISSIONARY

ENTERPRISE.

I. The Unity of the Missionary Enterprise.

The author realizes that he has undertaken a difficult task-and it may appear of questionable utility, if not propriety, to some-in endeavoring to comprehend in one small treatise a discussion of the fundamental features of the various lines and departments of mission. work. But there are two considerations that, as it seems to us, support and justify the attempt. First, the fact that this is intended to be an elementary, not an exhaustive treatise; and secondly, the vital and essential unity of the work. It is the latter that we are most concerned about. It is a principle for which we contend.

With all the diversity and multiplicity of times, places, people, conditions and methods, there is in the different spheres and avenues of missionary endeavor substantial unity of idea and fundamental aim. There is no essential difference between home and foreign missions. There are manifest and important differences of distance, of conditions, of details in methods of management and prosecution, but there is, withal-and this is a matter of primal consideration for the instruction of our home churches, for the intelligent grasp of the vital features of the whole missionary task which the Lord of glory has laid upon His Church, for reflection on the part of the volunteer who desires to become a missionary, as well as of the pastor and the average layman,

(this treatise makes no pretensions to a hand-book for specialists)—there is in all the lines of true and legitimate missionary endeavor substantially the same source, the same ground and motive, the same purpose and ultimate end.

The distinction between home and foreign missions is made and maintained for convenience, in order to facilitate the systematic administration and prosecution of the work.

2. There are Three Distinguishable Spheres or Departments of the Enterprise:

Home missions; Inner missions; and Foreign missions. These may be briefly defined as follows:

Home mission work is mission work that is carried on in our own, a nominally Christian land, and consists in gathering into self-supporting congregations the scattered brethren in the faith, together with the unchurched masses of our mixed population.

Inner mission work is mission work that is carried on in our own country, and consists in combining, by systematic endeavor, works of mercy (various Christian philanthropies) with evangelistic effort in behalf of the salvation of the physically and spiritually needy classes of our population.

Foreign mission work is mission work that is carried on, for the most part, in foreign lands, and consists in the Christianization of non-Christians (heathens, Mohammedans, and Jews), and gathering them into selfsupporting, self-governing, and self-extending Christian churches.

These distinctions and limitations are not always clearly distinguishable nor consistently maintained. Home missions and inner missions naturally overlap and

are often intertwined and combined. And as for work in behalf of foreigners within our gates, Chinese, Japanese, etc., some churches classify it under home missions, while others consider it, as it really is, foreign mission work carried on within our own borders. As regards mission work among our American Indians, Negroes, and the Jews in our immediate communities, it would, in our opinion, be more in harmony with actual conditions and practices to treat it as more properly belonging to the sphere of home missions.

Let it be noted, for the sake of clearness, that the missionary principles discussed in this Second Part of our treatise are applied, in large part though not exclusively, to foreign missions, while home and inner mission work are reserved for special treatment in the Third Part.

3. Diversity of Operations, but the Same Lord, the Same Faith, the Same End.

In his first epistle to the Corinthians1 St. Paul has a fine chapter on diversities of gifts, diversities of ministrations, diversities of workings; but the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God who worketh all things in all. This is the language of inspiration, the thought of God, the Author, the Administrator, and the Operator of the missionary enterprise.

The unity of the work is apparent from the definitions given above. The three forms of endeavor are summed up under the term "mission work." The latter goes out in different directions, is carried on in different places, and consists in going out after the unsaved, reaching down to the wayward, the lost, the imperiled, in order to bring all men under the fostering care and

1I Cor. 12, 4-6.