We have observed a certain tendency to recognise this truth in the matter of education and medicine, and to introduce into survey proposals a note, when the educational and medical tables were reached, to remind the surveyor that the educational and medical work of some society of which he is afraid, or from which he thinks himself widely separated, as extreme Protestants from Roman Catholics, must not be ignored; but in the evangelistic and Church tables no such note is inserted.  This is, we suppose, a tacit acceptance of the idea that the opposite party’s evangelical and church building work can be ignored with trifling loss—­that to ignore it does not much matter.  But if a man is surveying what he calls habitually “his” district, he is surveying it presumably to get at the facts, and one of the most important facts which he needs to know is how far the preaching of Christ has extended and where Christian churches have been established.  Unless then he is prepared to deny the name of Christ to the opposite party (and that is a very serious thing to do), he cannot ignore their churches.  The people claim to be Christians and declare that they believe in Christ.  If the surveyor without further inquiry rejects them because they belong to a society which he does not like, that may be an exhibition of ecclesiastical zeal, but it is not the science of surveying.

Whatever he may think of them, as a surveyor he has no right to ignore them.  He is surveying “his district”.  There are in it so many persons of various religious belief, amongst them his own converts and these Christians of the opposite party.  He perhaps refuses to recognise the latter as Christians; but they are undoubtedly neither Moslems nor Confucianists, nor Buddhists, nor Hindoos, nor do they belong to any of the non-Christian religions.  He cannot ignore them.  He must take count of them.  Therefore if in a district the Protestant and the Roman Catholic cannot survey together, the Protestant who does survey must carefully consider the facts before his face, and endeavour to find out what the facts really are as well as he possibly can.  The facts are that Roman Catholics are working in what he calls “his district”; the facts are that there are churches here, and here, and here, and people who call themselves Christians so many, and that the heathen population is by so many less.  And there are so many mission priests, and they win converts, and the converts won by them cease to be heathen, for they are sometimes persecuted by their heathen neighbours, even as his own converts are persecuted.

Happily all leading surveyors are realising these obvious facts and are now taking these things into serious account; but it is still necessary to insist on their importance.