information supplied by the famous stone discovered at Hsianfu. The Franciscan mission in China prospered for a while, but on the death of its founder in 1328 it ceased to expand. One reason why the Nestorian and Franciscan missions failed to develop was that neither made any attempt to train an effective body of Chinese clergy. By the time that the Jesuit mission reached China few traces remained of either of these missions. In 1582 Ricci, an Italian Jesuit, arrived in China. For seven years he dressed as a Buddhist priest, and he assured the Chinese that the Christian faith was a development of Confucianism. At the time of his death in 1610 it seemed likely that an amalgamation of Christianity and Confucianism would become the religion of China. The arrival, however, of the Dominicans in 1631 and the return of the Franciscans in 1633 tended to limit the influence of the Jesuits and to discredit their work in the eyes of the Chinese. By 1650 the number of Christians was reckoned at 150,000. The steady decline in the number of Chinese Christians during the eighteenth century was in part due to a decrease of missionary enthusiasm in Europe, and in part to persecution of Christians in China. In considering the development of Christian missions we should remember that the success or failure of the individual missionary cannot be judged by any outward results that may be tabulated. The goal which every true missionary has in view is the reproduction of the character of Jesus Christ. Other religions have claimed to reveal God, or that which is divine, by means of doctrinal or philosophical statements; but the Christian religion and the Christian missionary have offered to the world an ideal character and claimed that this character was itself a divine revelation. The Christian missionary has succeeded in accomplishing his task in so far as he has been able, not merely to describe the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ, but to reflect it. We may dare to claim for many of those whose names have been mentioned, that, judged by this test, their missionary labors have been in the truest sense a success. CHAPTER XXXVIII THE NEW ERA OF MISSIONS A marvellous expansion of missionary work began with the nineteenth century, and has been aided by all the modern movements which have brought the nations closer together. These movements have at the same time made the need for missions far more urgent. Lands which lay beyond our horizon have now come near to us, and we cannot truly co-operate with them except on the basis of a common Christian culture. The present period in missions is one of transition. A new national spirit is rising in the foreign peoples, and the time is approaching when they will themselves take up the work which the missionaries have begun. Ach T the close of the eighteenth century the Protestant churches of Europe and America had extremely few representatives preaching the Gospel overseas. In southern India considerable progress had been made by the Danish mission, with its German missionaries supported by money from the English societies for the spread of Christian knowledge and the propagation of the Gospel. Here the successors of Ziegenbalg and Schwartz were beginning to reap a harvest from the seed sown by those heroic pioneers, and here also was a small group of Moravian missionaries. In northern India William Carey of the Baptist Missionary Society had landed in Calcutta in 1793, and by the close of the century he, with Joshua Marsham and William Ward, had started their great work at Serampore on the banks of the River Hugli, relegated to the Danish settlement there because the British East India Company would not permit them to reside in its own territory. In Ceylon, where the Dutch colonial administration had previously insisted on a profession of Christianity as a condition of civil rights, the British were now witnessing with apparent unconcern the reversion of nominal Christians to Buddhism and Hinduism. In the extreme south of Africa the Moravians had at last succeeded in overcoming the antagonism of the Dutch settlers sufficiently to permit the re-starting of their work among the Hottentots, which had long since been in abeyance, but Dr. Vanderkemp of the recently started London Missionary Society, had been less fortunate in his attempts among the Kaffirs. There had been work of the Moravians on the Gold Coast, and by the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the London Missionary Society had had two missionaries in Sierra Leone, but all these missions had lapsed, and there were no other missions of the Protestant churches anywhere else in Africa at the close of the century. In some of the islands of the South Pacific the pioneer missionaries of the London Missionary Society were at work. But neither in New Zealand nor Australia, nor in the East Indies nor in Malaysia and Burma, nor even in China and Japan was there a single missionary of the Protestant churches at the close of the century, nor in the vast areas of Central Asia. Two heroic Moravians, it is true, had been wandering about among the Tartars in the middle of the eighteenth century, but nothing permanent had been accomplished. Indeed in the whole region which we think of as the Moslem world, stretching from the west African coast at Dakar right across to China and the East Indies, and from Russia and Siberia in the north to the heart of Africa and the bounds of the Indian Ocean in the south, there was not one missionary of the Protestant churches. Moreover, the western hemisphere was hardly less occupied. Moravian missionaries were busy in the West Indies, and Danish and Moravian in Greenland. In North America, where John Eliot and David Brainerd had lived and died, a missionary tradition had been established, but at the close of the century little success seemed to have been achieved among the American Indians. In South America Protestant churches were entirely unrepresented. American missionaries functioned nowhere except with American Indians, and the only English ones overseas were those of the Baptist Missionary Society in Bengal and of the |