MISSIONARY FAILURE.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 2570, 29 December 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

MISSIONARY FAILURE.

Under the heading of the Great Missionary Failure, Canon Taylor in the Fortnightly Review takes a despondent view of the results and prospects of missionary enterprise in foreign lands. It appears that upwards of a million sterling is auuually raised in Great Britain for Protestant missions, and another million in America and on the continent of Europe; and about 6000 European and Americau missionaries and some 30,000 native agents are employed. There can be no doubt, the writer argues, that vast sums of money, and the still more precious lives of hosts of devoted labourers, are thrown away in the prosecution of hopeless enterprises. In the missions to Egypt, Persia, Palestine and Arabia, where there arc no heathen, the Church Missionary Society employs 110 agents, and has spent -is.7d. in the last two years. The net results are nil. In Egypt last year there were two "inquirers," one a negro and the other an Egyptian, but the inquiries did not lead to any further results. Iu Arabia a sick robber who wa3 doctored by a missionary promised to abstain from robbing for 10 days. In Palestine the one Moslem convert of last year, a weak-minded orphan girl who required constant guidance, and for whom the prayers of all English Christians were invoked, has gone over to Rome, and is now immured iu a nunnery. In Persia, it is stated, "a great and wondrous gospel," but no converts are mentioned, and the door seems to consist of a Persian who reads tho Bible, which is one of his own sacred books. Canon Taylor contends that to extort from Sunday school children their hoarded pence for the ostensible object of converting " the poor heathen," and to spend nearly £12,000 a year in fruitless missions to lands where there are no heathen is almost a crime—the crime of obtaining money under false pretences. As to the quality of the converts in other parts of the world, attention is directed to the statement of Mr Johnson, the well known African traveller that "in the oldest of our West African possessions all the unrepentant Magdalens of the chief city are professing Christians, and the most notorious one in the place boasts that she never missed going to church on a communion Sunday," The only successful missionaries, says Canon Taylor, are heroes influenced by the Apostolic spirit, like St. Paul and St. Xavier. The modern professional missionary, with his punkah and his bungalow and his pony carriage, who travels first class, who marries at 23 and is always clamoring to the society for grants for his wife and children, is not a hero, and fails as he deserves to Jail.