PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.


1. We need a survey of the missionary situation in the world which will
express the facts in terms of the relationships between the different
missionary activities and between them all in relation to a dominant
idea or purpose. Such a survey is strictly scientific. All scientific
survey is properly governed by the end or purpose for which it is made.

It is this purpose or end which decides what is to be included and what
is to be excluded from the survey. If, for instance, we are making a
survey of the acoustic properties of church buildings in England, it is
not scientific to introduce questions as to the character of the gospel
preached in them. A scientific survey is not necessarily a collection of
all possible information about any people or country; that is an
encyclopaedia; a scientific survey is a survey of those facts only which
throw light on the business in hand. A scientific survey of foreign
missions ought not then necessarily to look at the work carried on from
"every point of view". The point of view must be defined, the end to be
served defined, and then only those factors which throw light upon that
end have any place in a scientific survey. We cannot be too clear about
this, because in survey of a work so vast and so many sided as foreign
missions we might easily include every human activity, unless we defined
beforehand the end to be served and selected carefully only the
appropriate factors. Carefully defined, missionary survey is not the
unwieldy, amorphous thing which people often imagine. There is indeed a
dangerous type of survey which starting with a hypothesis proceeds to
prove it by collecting any facts which seem to support it to the neglect
of all other facts which might disprove it. The procedure advocated here