till they remain but burnt-out lamps by the way, it does not follow that the great Christian work of helping others is to be abandoned, and hundreds of English men and women asked to return home and acknowledge that the work to which they had devoted their lives, and for which their fathers before them had spent and often sacrificed their lives, was not worth doing.
Surely the true spirit of the English nation is one of sympathy with brave men who risk their lives as freely and fearlessly as any soldier for what they believe to be the good and right. Turn away those who have flagged by the wayside, and show the contempt for them that they deserve ; but do not let the work of the true missionaries be allowed to suffer and be despised because of these. Readers who have followed me through these pages will have seen that good work is being done by the missionaries in some places at least, and let missionary enterprise be judged by the achievements of such men as these, and not simply of those who, living on the fringes of civilization, enjoying all its luxuries and comforts, and devoting but a fraction of their time to true missionary work, have deserved the sneers which have been thrown at them. These latter are the men who are most commonly met with, and the real workers are usually only seen by the few travellers who penetrate inland. But it is no more right to judge by these faint-hearted ones of the whole work done by missionaries, than it is to judge of an army in the field by the men who, from physical unfitness or known lack of energy, have been left behind at the base.
Nor should the work of missionaries be judged of by statistics of converts. Statistics are utterly valueless in cases of this sort. It is impossible to define, in the first place, what a convert is. The usual idea is that a man becomes a convert when he is baptized ; but I have known a dying man baptized without his knowing anything about it, and surely he could
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