In these tables, when other missions are at work in the district, all that is necessary is to add one column of the work of the other missions so far as it is known, or can be ascertained.  We are well aware that that easy phrase covers in many cases great practical difficulty.  Here is one of the places where estimates may be inevitable.  If they are inevitable, they should be estimates, not guesses, and a note should be made of the process by which they were reached.  The difference between an estimate and a guess is that an estimate is the result of a definite train of reasoned calculation and a guess is not.  For an estimate reasons can be given, for a guess none other than—­it occurred to me.

II.  The Mission which has no Defined District.

We believe that the vast majority of missions accept a territorial district; but there are missions where the station district has not and cannot be defined.

The idea of the mission is not territorial.  The object proposed is not to cover any area with mission stations, nor to establish in every town and village a church or chapel, but to create at a centre a Church of living sons trained and educated by many years, perhaps generations, of care to become the centre of a movement which may cover the whole country; or it may be to influence movements which arise in the religious, political, or social life of the people, and to direct these into Christian channels.  In such cases a territorial foundation is impossible.  The mission exists in the midst of a people and influences the people; it makes converts, it establishes them in the faith, it cares for them in mind and body, it prepares them to set the moral and religious standard for any Church of the future.  It is not concerned directly with the widest possible preaching of the Gospel.  When the native Christians whom it is painfully and slowly educating and training come to maturity they will spread the Gospel throughout the length and breadth of the land.  It is not, we are told, the business of the Foreign Mission to preach the Gospel in every village of a defined area nor to make itself responsible for such preaching directly:  it should give to converts in every country the highest and best and fullest teaching of Christian civilisation, in order that by so doing it may show to all the people of the country an example, by which they may be attracted and influenced.  If we take the widest expression of such mission activity we find that to estimate the true value of such work we should be compelled to survey not only the mission and its activities but the social, moral, material, and spiritual state of the people among whom the mission was planted, and seek for signs of a change which we could trace with some certainty to the influence of the mission.  That would be a stupendous and most intricate undertaking.  Where innumerable forces are at work such as are implied