There is also a growing demand, and an urgent need, for good books adapted to the non-Christian community—such tracts and books as can present to them, in an attractive and convincing way, the special truths and the supreme excellence of our faith. The number is annually increasing, both among native Christians and in the non-Christian community, of those who can read and whose taste for books is growing.
This method of approach to the mind of the people has peculiar advantages of its own. The prejudices connected with Christian instruction, as it proceeds directly from the lips of the teacher or preacher, does not exist in connection with tracts and books. These printed messengers of truth and salvation quietly and effectively do their work in the silent hours of the night and in the secret recesses of the woods or of the solitary chamber. And this message is the more effective because it may be read and pondered more than once, until its truth grips the soul in convicting and saving power.
The power of the printed page, as a Christian messenger in India, is second to none at present; and its influence will multiply mightily as the years increase. Missions and individual missionaries should enter more fully into this work; none needs increasing emphasis more than this; and none has larger hopes of preëminence in the great work of India’s redemption. Missionary societies also should devote more men, than in the past, to the creation of a strong Christian literature.
And even where missions are too weak to publish anything of their own and are unable to write books or tracts; there is a wide field of usefulness open to them in a thoroughly systematic and energetic work of distributing the existing literature produced by the great societies. In some missions this work of circulating Scriptures and Christian books has been reduced almost to a science and has become an exceedingly efficient help to the cause in those districts. Other missions have yet to learn the importance and blessing of this activity.
This department of missionary effort has a wide sphere of usefulness. Though not so urgently necessary now as in former times in India, owing to the ubiquitous and efficient Government Medical Department, it is nevertheless popular and very useful. This is specially so when the whole work and its agency are brought into full subjection to the Christian, as distinct from the purely humanitarian, motive. No other department is more capable of being utilized as an evangelizing agency; and in many missions its influence is thus widely felt. Everywhere its aid to other departments of mission work is much appreciated through its ability to gain friends for our cause among those who would otherwise be inimical; and in preparing the hearts of many to receive spiritual help from the Great Physician. No fewer than forty hospitals, besides many dispensaries, are conducted by Protestant missions in India today. Many of the medical missionaries give their whole time to this work; others conduct the medical as only one of the departments of their missionary activity. To each method there are advantages and disadvantages; though, perhaps, the medical missionary finds greatest usefulness when he gives himself entirely to his profession as physician. But, in that case, he needs tenfold caution lest the distinctively missionary idea of his life-work should be subjected to, or lost in, the professional and the humanitarian spirit.