SURVEY OF THE WORK IN A PROVINCE.

In few parts of the world is a mission station really an isolated unit.  In most of the countries to which we go there are many stations of many different missions, all aiming more or less definitely at the establishment of a native Church, whatever their conception of the Church may be.  In the vast majority of cases these stations have some relationship to one another.  The definition of districts for the mission stations is commonly recognised, and in planning new work directors of missions frequently allow themselves to be influenced, in some way and in some degree, by the position of existing mission stations.  There are also in some parts of the world bodies composed of leading members of many of the missions that work in the country, who meet to consider the progress of the Christian faith in the province or the country as a whole, and deliberately plan their work with some consideration of the position and character of the work done by the others.  Now in all this there is a manifest approach to the idea that mission work in the country or province is a common work, and that the various missions engaged in it are not antagonists, but allies.  It is certainly true that we are far from having reached the stage of a common direction and a real unification of work Rivalry and antagonism are still rampant, but the recognition of the fact that we must consider the position and character of other missions in directing our own is a most important advance; and it implies that we ought, in some measure at least, to be able to express the work of any mission station in relation to all the mission work done in the province or country, and to understand, at any rate in some degree, what place it takes in the mission work in the province viewed as a whole.  It is true that a great many missionaries would refuse to admit that the recognition of other stations in the planting of our own is an acknowledgment of the unity of our work; but whether they acknowledge it, or whether they do not, it is so, and we for our part recognise it with thankfulness and look forward to a day when missions will not only recognise others by avoiding them, but by planning missions deliberately to assist each other.  For that seems to us the necessary conclusion.  The moment we recognise a station as a Christian mission station which we must not disturb, we have gone a long way towards recognising it as a mission station which our own must not only not disturb, but must complement; and when we know that one mission must complement another we are really not far removed from establishing our missions with common consultation each to supply what is lacking to the other.