I am dumb before the mass of missionaries and the missionary question. But against the missionaries who write, not narrow tracts, but unnecessary and incorrect essays on Eastern peoples and customs, I now and here wage war.
A missionary goes to Asia, perhaps to sacrifice his life, perhaps to better his condition. In one thing at least he is sincere—in his condemnation of the religions of the East. Of these religions he knows nothing; but the missionary is not perhaps quite so unreasonable as he appears, for he expects the “native” to accept Christianity as blindly and as ignorantly as he himself condemns Buddhism, Confucianism, and a hundred other creeds of which he does not even know the names. I do not blame the missionary; we all think as keenly as we can, and our thought is only limited by our circumstances and our capacity.
My quarrel with the missionary is a personal one. I protest against his ignorance of modes Oriental being perpetuated in type.
I am reading now in the British Museum,—reading to increase my knowledge of the hemisphere I love. I select from the catalogue thirteen books. I go to my seat, the books are brought; twelve are written by missionaries, and they abound in statements so preposterously inaccurate that even my partial information balks at them.
The man who devotes his life to the study of microbes does not attempt, when he retires from active practice, to crown his life’s work by writing an exhaustive treatise on the Law of Evidence. A great Q.C. rarely spends his old age in the authorship of a book on hip-disease. We live in an age of specialists; but the missionary, at least the literary missionary, is a man apart,—he deals in generalities, and they don’t even glitter.
I came across a book the other day, or rather it came across me. It had been written by a most estimable man, and it was a most wonderful and ingenious jumble of lapidarian lore, of geological research, and of the history of Christianity in Ceylon. It was a book supremely calculated to exasperate an enthusiastic lapidarian who was indifferent to things sacred; but then, of course, such a man requires exasperating. But it occurred to me that it might be equally calculated to embarrass and puzzle the devout reader who was more religiously minded than generally well-informed.
I am not jibing at missionaries. Some of the most charming people that I have met in India were missionaries; and though we radically differed in much that was to them of the first importance, I found every cause to respect their intelligence, their mentalities, and their lives.
I spent a good deal of time in the Leper Asylum at Subathu, and learned a vast deal from the missionary in charge of it, and from his wife. What a book of intense interest they could write!—for I am sure that they have too much character to write about what they do not understand; I am sure that they have too much literary good taste to make a heterogeneous mixture of theology and irrelevant Orientalism. They both write well, for I have had charming letters from them both.
But the literary missionary per se—the man who knows superficially one thing and writes books about everything—he ought to be extinguished.