FOREIGN MISSIONS.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19149, 4 November 1927, Page 2

FOREIGN MISSIONS.

+ BISHOP WEST-WATSON'S VIEWS. In his remarks at the opening of the Missionary Exhibition in St. Matthew's schoolroom, St. Albans, yesterday afternoon; Bishop West-Watson replied to some common objections to foreign missions. Bishop West-Watson said a churchman, who was motoring him in one of the country districts, had asked him whether it was a good thing to take Christianity to the islands of the Pacific, because the Maori race, through its contact with Christianity had lost so much of Us force and vitality. But the Islanders were going to cut into the stream of modern civilisation any way, and if they, as Christians, did not send what was best in modem' civilisation, then the Islanders were going to get that which was worst. He could hardly estimate the ruin that would come to those races if that happened. It was not Christianity that did .the Islanders harm, but other things. Again, he heard of a learned professor asking whether it was any use sending missionaries to the islands where already the precepts of the Sermon on the Mount were practised, and he (the speaker) had had memories of the martyrdom of Bishop Patteson and others. Possibly some kind of village, or tribal, communism had been mistaken by casual readers and thinkers for the inner spirit of the Sermon, on the Mount, but one thought of the other things—the cannibalism, the fear, and the cruelty. It had been suggested to him that the reference to the Sermon on the Mount was meant as a joke. It was not just a little primitive communism that represented the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount, but the spirit shown and taught by missionaries which had brought so much happiness to so many people.