learn that it is better to have a larger house so that the girls of
the family need not sleep in the same room as the boys; and
that all China should discover the advantages of roads over
rutty, corkscrew paths, of sanitation over heaps of putrid garbage
and of wooden floors over filth-encrusted ground. Christianity
inevitably involves some of these things, and to some
extent the awakening of Asia to the need of them is a part of
the beneficent influence of a gospel which always and everywhere
renders men dissatisfied with a narrow, squalid existence.
To make a man decent morally is to beget in him a
desire to be decent physically.

The native Christians, especially the pastors and teachers,
are the very ones who first feel this movement towards a
higher physical life. Nor should we repress it in them, for it
means an environment more favourable to morals and to the
stability of Christian character as well as a healthful example
to the community in which they live. To say, therefore, that
the average annual income of a Hindu is rupees twenty-seven
(nine dollars) is not to adduce a reason for holding the pastors
and evangelists of India down to that scale. They should, indeed,
live near enough to the plane of their countrymen to keep
in sympathetic touch with them. But they should not be expected
or allowed to huddle in the dark, unventilated hovels of
the masses of the people, or, by confining themselves to one
scanty meal a day, have that gaunt, half-famished look which
makes my heart ache every time I think of the walking skeletons
I saw in India. I am not ashamed but proud of the fact
that it costs the average Christian more to live in Asia than it
costs the average heathen, that the houses of the Laos Christians