missionary societies and of missionaries to supplant the native medical
practice by western scientific methods as certainly and fully as it is
their recognised and accepted duty to supplant native religion by the
faith of Christ. But that we for our part emphatically deny. The one may
be a philanthropic duty; the other certainly is a religious duty.
Consequently we deny that there is a medical need which it is the duty
of missionaries to supply in the sense in which we affirm that there is
a religious need which it is the duty of missionaries to supply. Medical
missions are, and ought to be, evangelistic in their aim, mere
handmaids[1] of evangelism. Similarly we deny a separate and distinct
educational need which it is the duty of missionary societies to supply.
The missionary societies ought not to take upon themselves the supply of
every need. We think the Christian Church is misled when it allows the
medical need of a country to be presented as a distinct need which it is
the duty of missionaries to meet, and when it allows the ignorance of a
country to be presented as a distinct need which it is the duty of
missionaries to meet. From such a presentation educational missions
become detached, medical missions become detached, each designed to meet
a distinct and separate need of the people.

[Footnote 1: If any reader experiences a revulsion at this expression,
he will know at once what we mean when we say that a distinction has
been drawn between evangelistic, medical, and educational missions as
though they were three co-equal and separate things. They are not
co-equal and they ought not to be separate. Education does not
necessarily reveal Christ, medical science does not necessarily reveal
Christ, only as education and medicine assist the revelation of Christ
are they proper subjects for Christian missionary enterprise, that is,
only when they are clearly and unmistakably subordinate to an
evangelistic purpose. Of course we do not undervalue medical and