(4) In many areas two or more societies are at work and their conception of the qualifications for the name of Christian differ.  In a survey each society is tempted to ignore the members of the other, and to reckon as Christians only those who fulfil the conditions which are applied by the one society.  So certain Protestant societies ignore all Roman Catholics; but that for the reasons already stated is most misleading, for when persecution arises Protestants and Roman Catholics alike suffer for the Name of Christ.  Whatever the members of another society may be, they are certainly not heathen; the heathen deny them.  Consequently they cannot properly be counted with the heathen by any surveyor who wishes to present the facts.

For these reasons we have been compelled to adopt a very wide expression, and the expression used by the China Continuation Committee seemed to be sufficiently elastic to serve our purpose.  Nevertheless, to avoid error as far as possible, when we institute comparisons between Christian and non-Christian population, we introduce side by side with the total Christian Constituency the total Communicants (or Full Members), which is a valuable check.

Take then an example.  The figures here given are obviously not the figures of a station area; they are figures for a province; but they serve to illustrate the point.  We cannot fill up the area table; we can only supply figures for the population.

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Population. :   Total      :  Total Non-
:  Christians. :  Christians.
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32,571,000 :   534,238    :   2,036,762
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Now, here of the 534,238 Christians 500,655 are Roman Catholics, the Protestants numbering 33,583.  The Roman Catholics in this area began work about 300 years earlier than the Protestants.  Are we to eliminate them?

Are all these 33,583 Protestants more worthy of the name of Christian than some of the Roman Catholics?  Or shall we eliminate some of the 33,583?  If so, how many, and on what grounds?  Is not the denial of the Name to those who claim to be servants of Christ absurd?  Are there not enough non-Christians to be converted?

Suppose the Roman Catholic figures to be an estimate.  Is it not plain that in dealing with considerable areas estimates may be useful though faulty?  How little difference in the work to be done does an error in that estimate make?  Knock off or add on 50,000 and is the work to be done seriously affected?  It is true that in some calculations an error of that magnitude might mislead us somewhat, but hardly enough to vitiate our whole view of the situation, especially if we carefully check our conclusions by the results of other tables given later.

At the first glance these figures produce the impression that very little has been done.  In the beginning, and that was many years ago, there were over 32 million non-Christians; there are over 32 million to-day.  But let us look at proportions and see what a different impression is produced.