“The need of the hour in China is not more new stations with expensive buildings and wide itinerating. It is rather teaching and training what we have, and giving it a proper development. Most of all we should raise up and prepare pastors and preachers and teachers, who are well grounded in the truth, so that the Chinese Church may have wise and safe leaders.... There are already enough mission stations, or centers, in the province, if they were properly worked. The need of the hour is to consolidate and develop what we have, and by all means in our power develop native agency, and teach and locate native pastors,—men who are well grounded in the faith.”—LETTER TO SECRETARY FOX, of the American Bible Society, January 6, 1906. Dr. Mateer believed that sooner than most missionaries anticipated the Chinese Christians will join together and set up an independent church. He meant by this not merely a union of the ministers and churches of the various Presbyterian denominations at work in the country, such as has already been effected, but an organization that would include in its membership all the Protestant Christians, and that would leave little or no place for the service of foreign missionaries. He regarded this as inevitable; and for that reason he considered it to be of prime importance that such an effective preliminary work should promptly be done, that this coming ecclesiastical independence might not be attended by unsoundness as to creed or laxity in life. At the same time, in holding up the care and the training of the native Christians as so important a part of the work of the foreign missionary in China, in anticipation of what is ahead, he was only for an additional reason urging what he had in all his long career recognized as second to no other in importance. Of course, at the beginning of the effort to give the gospel to a people it is indispensable to do “the work of an evangelist”; that is, to seek by the spoken word and by the printed book to acquaint them with elementary Christian truth, and to endeavor to win them to Christ; and we have already seen how diligent Dr. Mateer was in this service, especially in his earlier missionary years. But he was just as diligent in caring for the converts when gained; and in the school and college it was the preparation of men for pastors and teachers and evangelists that was constantly his chief aim.