No one can speak with authority on the subject of the modern missionary policy of American societies, to say nothing of the societies that have their home in England and on the continent of Europe. Any general statements made with reference to modern missionary work can be successfully contradicted. No one appreciates these facts better than the writer of this article. Missions are so complicated and diversified, by tradition and practice, by the opinions of administrators, and by the ability and characteristics of the missionaries, that a vast and widely separating difference in a variety of respects runs through the whole body of missionary operations. Hence the almost insuperable difficulty of making general statements as to present missionary policy and methods without exposing oneself to a rejoinder that would be difficult satisfactorily to meet. It should be thoroughly understood that no statement hereinafter made can be of universal application.

A few years ago (1906) the Protestant missionary enterprise in India celebrated its bicentenary. A few months ago the centennial celebration of the founding of American missions in India was an occasion of much joy. It must be a matter of deep interest, not only to the missionary body, but to the members of our Christian community in America to study both the progress and the vast and, in some cases, revolutionary changes of this great enterprise on the mission field. Even during the missionary experience of the writer innovations have been numerous and fundamental. To those who think that the missionary enterprise is wanting in the spirit of the age, the transformations which have already taken place and are constantly going on will lead to astonishment. These changes have been coincident with and a part of the progress of the Christian world in thought and life, and embrace not only the forms and methods of work but also the fundamental principles which underlie and permeate the whole work. In the present paper it is proposed to study a few of these innovations which have marked the onward march of this great movement.

I wish to begin what I have to say on this theme by frank acknowledgment that the idea of a future life often seems to me, as I suspect it has seemed to many reflective minds, all but unbelievable. It may be true, for all that, as many unbelievable things have turned out to be true. Indeed my present purpose is to argue as best I can that it is true. But I have to start with the recognition of a certain natural repugnance toward it, on the part of minds accustomed to look at things in the cold light of reason and common sense.

Of all European countries Russia is the most prolific in religious sects. Distrust of the Orthodox state church, on the one hand, which is regarded as too closely allied to the political power and unmindful of its duties to the people, and, on the other, religious ignorance with its consequent superstition, have given rise to innumerable sects, which range from religious nihilism to the most rigid traditionalism.

From the head of the Persian Gulf extend two great plains, the one stretching northwestward along the Tigris and Euphrates, the other northeastward along the Karoun. These two plains constitute Turkish and Persian Arabistan respectively. They were the seat of one of the earliest and most highly developed civilizations of the world, or perhaps rather of two competing and rival civilizations. Once the region teemed with a vast population. Now it is largely desert. Both plains depend for their fertility not upon the rain, but upon the rivers which flow down from the mountains. When these were diked and dammed and carried every-whither by irrigating canals, the Babylonian plain and the steppe of Persian Arabistan were immensely fertile, capable of sustaining by their own products an enormous population. Now dikes and dams are broken and canals choked and the life-creating water runs to waste, part of the year causing inundations and turning vast regions into lakes and swamps, and the remainder of the time moving seaward through a single channel, shrunk far below its banks.

The conception of a preliminary period of ritual preparation for occasions of special sanctity is common to many religions, including that of the Old Testament, where the touching of holy things or coming into the divine presence requires a period of previous abstinence from anything involving ceremonial defilement. In 1 Sam. 21 5 and Ex. 19 10, 15 this period is of “three days.” The longer period of “six days” is required for the supreme occasion when Moses meets Yahweh face to face on Sinai (Ex. 24 16), and this interval becomes as it were stereotyped in the most distinctive of Jewish institutions, the periodic seventh day “the sabbath of the Lord thy God,” to which the preceding six days of toil lead up. The Jew labors and does all his work in the first six days of the week in order that he may rest and enjoy the fruit of his toil the seventh day, just as in the creation Yahweh's activity had led up to a period of satisfied contemplation of all that He had made as “very good.” In like manner the later speculators of both Synagogue and Church expected the toil and turmoil of the six ages of “this world,” each of one thousand years’ duration, to lead up to the blessed repose and fruition of “the age to come,” ushered in by the “thousand years” of Messiah.