Suppose then that we accepted the “organised churches” as a basis and inquired what proportion of these organised churches could, and did, perform all necessary religious rites, we should indeed omit the floating and isolated members of the unorganised Christian community which in some districts might be very large, but we should nevertheless, we hope, get a definite and common basis which would really give us some light on this difficult but important problem, and if we added a question as to the proportion of the Christian constituency connected with these organised churches we should have some check upon a serious misunderstanding.

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Number of Organised Churches.                            |     |
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Proportion of Christian Constituency                     |     |
Connected with these.                                    |     |
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Number of Churches Capable of Performing all      |     |
Necessary Religious Rites without External Assistance.   |     |
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Proportion of these to Number of Organised Churches.     |     |
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Remarks and Conclusions.                                 |     |
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The second question is, How far the Church in the district can direct its own life and order its own government.  The difficulty here arises from the very diverse forms of Church government which have been taught to the natives by their foreign teachers, some of them late and difficult representative systems, not easily grasped even by educated men.  Is there then any general question which will suffice to throw light on this problem, where the people are in the midst of the process of learning an unfamiliar form of government?

Were very simple and almost universal ideas always followed, as for instance in episcopacy, which naturally adapts itself to the simplest and most common conceptions and experiences of men, in that the bishop is closely related in idea to the father of the family, or the head man of a village, or the governor of a province, or a chief of a tribe, or an autocratic emperor, or a constitutional monarch, according to the notions and experience of the people—­so that a bishop is as easily understood by a nomad family, or a village community, as by a democratic nation, according to its stage of development, and if native bishops were universal, as they are not, the problem would be comparatively simple.  Indeed then we need scarcely ask the question at all.  Either patriarchal episcopacy, or monarchical episcopacy, or constitutional episcopacy all men can understand, whether the bishop is elected by his people, or appointed by his predecessor, or by his fellows,