Again it is notorious that what we call the work of the evangelistic missionary is so manifold and variegated that it includes every kind of activity, every sort of social and economic reform.  Our evangelistic missionaries are busy about everything, from itinerant preaching to the establishment of banks and asylums.  Can we afford it?  What purpose is dominant, what aim really governs the policy of those who send out evangelistic missionaries?  What decides the form of their work and the method by which they pursue it?  It is hard to guess, it is hard to discover, it is hard to understand.

Now when our missions are presented to us and we are asked to support them on all sorts of grounds, as though a society with its slight funds could really successfully practise every kind of philanthropic work, we begin to doubt whether it can really be wisely guided.  Each mission station, each institution, seems to be an isolated fragment.  The missionary in charge often appeals to us as an exceedingly good and able man, and we support him, and we support the society which sends him and others like him.  And we call this the support of foreign missions; but foreign missions as a unity we do not support because we can see no unity.  The directors of foreign missions appear not to have hitched their wagon to a star, but rather to all the visible stars, and we cannot tell whither they are going.  So we fall back on the individual missionary, or the isolated mission which at any rate for the moment seems to have an intelligible objective.

Hence the common conception of missionary work as small.  We look at the parts, and the smallest parts, because our minds instinctively seek a unity, and only in the parts do we find a unity, nor there often, unless we concentrate our attention on one aspect of the work.  But by thinking of foreign missions in this small way and speaking of them in this small way, we alienate men who are accustomed to think in large terms of large undertakings designed on large policies.

What we need to-day is to understand foreign missions as a whole.  We want to take an intelligent part in them viewed as a unity.  We want to know what is the grand objective and how the parts are related to that end.  We do not want merely to support this mission because this missionary appeals to us; we want to know what dominant purpose governs the activities of the different societies, directs, and controls them, deciding what work good and excellent in itself the mission cannot afford to undertake, what it can and must do with the means at its disposal in order to attain an end which it has deliberately adopted.