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Ten years of self-supporting missions in India
Ten years of self-supporting missions in India Author:William Taylor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON MISSIONS. In my representation of self-supporting missions, I do not wish to minify, but give briefly a broad exhibit of the gr... more »eat work being done under the auspices of the Missionary Societies; and, in addition to what I have just inserted, I wish to add the wise discriminating observations of Rev. William Boyce. He was an early Wesleyan missionary in South Africa. He wrote the introduction to my book—" Christian Adventures in South Africa." He was for years one of the secretaries of the Wesleyan Missionary Society in London. I insert most of his introductory chapter to his "Statistics of Protestant Missions," headed, " General Observations on Missions:" 1. The Mission work is slowly but surely obtaining a favorable recognition from the public press. At the beginning of this century it was looked upon by some as a dangerous outbreak of puritanical fanaticism, and by others as a harmless but mistaken effort, from which no practical good could possibly ensue. It is now, however, a great fact. One hundred and sixty-six distinct Protestant Missionary organizations, besides twentyleading Bible and Educational Societies, all of which have their subordinate branches and auxiliaries, and also their agencies in every part of the globe, cannot be contemptuously ignored. On the contrary, with the exception of one or two journals, which yet cling to their seats "in the chair of the scornful," (Psa. i, 1,) our newspapers speak respectfully of the labors of our missionaries. One of the best of the weeklies admits that " Civilization alone does not offer sufficient inducement to the savage permanently to change his habits. The labor imposed by a civilized state of life is obnoxious to him without a sufficient motive :" and further, "That Christianity has app...« less