Missionaries at the same station are much more closely associated than ministers at the same place at home. The management of the mission, the policy to be adopted, and the respective places to be filled, are under common arrangement and control, subject to the district committee, and through them to the home directors. Many perplexing questions come before missionaries thus associated, and human nature in them must have parted with its usual infirmities, and put on peculiar excellence, if difference of judgment and consequent variance of feeling had never appeared. We cannot plead exemption from human imperfection. It cannot be denied that at times there has been strong diversity of judgment and painful alienation of feeling, when missionaries have too closely resembled Paul and Barnabas in their sharp dispute at Antioch; but it can at the same time be most truly affirmed that with very rare exceptions discord has soon come to an end, and those who have differed widely have become attached friends, as we know Paul and Barnabas did. The normal state of things is that of mutual love, respect, and helpfulness.
Missionaries have also had their differences with the Societies that have sent them out and supported them. The respective position of home committees and foreign missionaries are so different, that a difference of judgment is in some cases unavoidable; but confiding as they have done in the goodness of each other's motives, full harmony has been soon restored. I must be allowed to say of the London Missionary Society, whose agent I was for so many years in India, that my warmest acknowledgments are due to it for all the kindness and consideration shown to me and mine. If I were now to begin my career with my knowledge of the past, there is no Society with which I could so confidently connect myself.
[Sidenote: INTERCOURSE AND CO-OPERATION.]
All have heard of the friendly intercourse among missionaries of different churches. They, too, when near each other have had occasional differences; but with rare exceptions they have been on terms not only of courteous bearing, but of affectionate intimacy. There is nothing in our Indian life to which we look back with greater pleasure than our intercourse with Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian brethren. With the Episcopalian and Baptist missionaries at Benares we were on as warm terms of friendship as if they had been members of our own Mission. For many years we were in the habit of meeting weekly with them for the study of the Scriptures, prayer, and Christian communion.