’I have for years thought that we seek in our Missions a great deal too much to make English Christians of our converts.  We consciously and unanimously assume English Christianity (as something distinct I mean from the doctrines of the Church of England), to be necessary; much as so many people assume the relation of Church and State in England to be the typical and normal condition of the Church, which should be everywhere reproduced.  Evidently the heathen man is not treated fairly if we encumber our message with unnecessary requirements.

’The ancient Church had its “selection of fundamentals”—­a kind of simple and limited expansion of the Apostles’ Creed for doctrine and Apostolic practice for discipline.

’Notoriously the Eastern and Western mind misunderstood one another.  The speculative East and the practical West could not be made to think after the same fashion.  The Church of Christ has room for both.

’Now any one can see what mistakes we have made in India.  Few men think themselves into the state of the Eastern mind, feel the difficulties of the Asiatic, and divine the way in which Christianity should be presented to him.

’We seek to denationalise these races, as far as I can see; whereas we ought surely to change as little as possible—­only what is clearly incompatible with the simplest form of Christian teaching and practice.

’I don’t mean that we are to compromise truth, but to study the native character, and not present the truth in an unnecessarily unattractive form.

’Don’t we overlay it a good deal with human traditions, and still more often take it for granted that what suits us must be necessary for them, and vice versa.

’So many of our missionaries are not accustomed, not taught to think of these things.  They grow up with certain modes of thought, hereditary notions, and they seek to reproduce these, no respect being had to the utterly dissimilar character and circumstances of the heathen.

’I think much about all this.  Sir William Martin and I have much talk about it; and the strong practical mind of the Primate, I hope, would keep me straight if I was disposed to theorise, which I don’t think is the case.

’But Christianity is the religion for humanity at large.  It takes in all shades and diversities of character, race, &c.

’The substratum of it is, so to say, inordinate and coextensive with the substratum of humanity—­all men must receive that.  Each set of men must also receive many thing of secondary, yet of very great importance for them; but in this class there will be differences according to the characteristic differences of men throughout the world.

’I can’t explain myself fully; but, dear Uncle, I think there is something in what I am trying to say.

’I want to see more discrimination, more sense of the due proportion, the relative importance of the various parts which make up the sum of extra teaching.