In a recent number of The Nineteenth Century, Sir William W. Hunter,
an eminent authority, reporting the influence of the missionaries in
India, says that among the people to whom they have gone they have
built up the most complete confidence and implicit faith in the purity
and unselfishness of their motives. He declares that he regards the
missionary work of the English as an expiation for wrong-doing, and he
believes that the missionary instinct forms the necessary spiritual
complement of the aggressive genius of the English race. Sir William
also claims that the advance of missionaries in the good opinion of
non-Christian peoples is a most striking evidence of their high
character and intelligence, and that no class of Englishmen has done
so much to make England respected in India as the missionaries, that
no class has done so much to awaken the Indian's intellect and to
lessen the dangers of transition from the old state of things to the
new.

After this much of condensation of that profound article by the
Christian Union, we quote from the author:

"The careless onlooker may have no particular convictions on the
subject, and flippant persons may ridicule religious effort in India
as elsewhere. But I think that few Indian administrators have passed
through high office, and had to deal with the ultimate problems of
British government in that country, without feeling the value of the
work done by missionaries. Such men gradually realize, as I have
realized, that the missionaries do really represent the spiritual
side of the new civilization, and of the new life which we are
introducing into India."

Names and places being changed, it is coming to appear that the whole