THE RELATION OF SCIENCE TO CHRISTIAN MISSIONS. 101 



eminent civilian and sagacious observer of things Chinese, in 

 commenting on the recent changes in China, said that during the 

 first forty-tive years of his residence in China the country was 

 like a closed room, without a breath of fresh air from the out- 

 side world, but that the past five years reminded him of being 

 in a room with all the windows and doors wide open and the 

 breezes of heaven sweeping through." 



Telegraphs, railways, and factories are cited as making astonish- 

 ing progress, and the closing words of one of Dr. Mott's para- 

 graphs will serve to symbolize the revolution that applied 

 science is working in China : " In many cities the rushlight has 

 been superseded by the electric light. The fear of ' boring into 

 the pulse of the dragon ' is being lost by those who are anxious 

 to exploit the enormous mineral wealth of the country."* 



It must not be supposed that China stands alone, though it is 

 such a conspicuous instance, in this kind of revolution. All 

 the backward races, with remarkably few exceptions, are passing 

 through the same experience. Steamboats, railways, telegraph 

 systems, and motor-cars are to-day parts of the environment of 

 well nigh the whole human race, and in many cases the fact is 

 all the more significant because it means a sudden jump from 

 all that was simplest, most " primitive " as men are apt to say, to 

 much that is of the most modern and marvellous in the science 

 of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 



(b) For our present purpose we need now to notice how 

 Christian Missions are affected by the changes that are taking 

 place so rapidly. The applied science that produces these changes 

 can be claimed as immensely favouring the progress of Missions. 

 Partly this is so in a quite direct sense. The printing press, the 

 railway, the steamboat, the bicycle, the motor-car are all agencies 

 by which science helps to bring the missionary to his field ; to 

 put into his hands the printed Bible, the chief material agent in 

 his work ; to minimize the waste of his time and strength in 

 service ; and to give him in a thousand ways the victory over 

 the adverse circumstances of his task. In these days, when a 

 tourist can get from Mombasa, the port of East Africa, to the 

 capital of Uganda in three or four days by rail and steamer, 

 and can cable home the news of his safe arrival in a few minutes, 

 and can be oft' in a few hours on his bicycle to any part of. 

 the country, it is hard to realise how things were only fifteen 

 years ago, when the first ladies reached Uganda by a weary 

 three months' march, and when it was no strange thing for a 



* Mott's Decisive Hour of Christian Missions^ p. 10. 



