ALL who are in touch with missionary problems to-day are agreed that the situation is a very acute one. The wide spread of missions during the past hundred years has vastly enlarged the superficial area of the Christian Church, and at the same time raised complex problems, theological and ecclesiastical, which were quite unknown to the divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This paper is an attempt to suggest some lines along which a solution of some of these problems may be

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... by reference to the practice of the early Church. The modern missionary movement had its origin in the evangelical impulse to save individual souls. But the success of that work in winning so many thousands of individuals t o personal faith in Jesus Christ has opened up to the eye of the Christian statesman new vistas of possible advance. Exactly how the change'has come about it is hard t o say, but it is certain that to-day we think in terms of n:itions, not individuals : and our missions are directed not exclusively to the conversion of as many souls as possible but far more t o the planting in every race of a living branch of the Church, capable of adapting itself t o its surroundings, and of enriching itself by absorbing those aspects of truth which are already grasped by each race previous t o conversion. This shifting of the point of view from the salvation of the individual to that of the race seems t o underlie that great family of problems which is concerned with the relation between the home Church and the Church in the mission field. When the sole object of the missionary was 67 3*