Almost half a century ago, when the school was started, and for some time afterward, mission boards and missionaries had not settled down into their present attitude toward education, lower or higher, as an agency in the evangelization of the non-Christian world. There were some very earnest and intelligent workers who insisted that for an ordained minister to engage in teaching a school was for him to be untrue to the calling for which he had been set apart. To sustain their position they appealed to apostolic example, and pointed to the small results as to conversions in the instances in which this method had been tried. Among the advocates of schools also there was a lack of agreement as to the immediate object to be sought by the use of this agency. Ought it to be so much the conversion of the pupils, and through this the raising up of a native ministry, that all other results should be regarded as of small importance? Or, ought the school to be looked upon as an efficient means of preparing the soil for the good seed of Christian truth to be sown later by preaching the gospel? In the paper from which the quotation at the head of this chapter is taken Mateer ably and fully discussed all of these questions, bringing out fairly both sides of them, and then presented his own convictions as he held them from the beginning of his missionary career, and as he unswervingly adhered to them all the rest of his life. He disclaimed any intention to exalt education as a missionary agency above other instrumentalities, and especially not above preaching the gospel; and claimed for it only its legitimate place. As to this he laid down and elaborated certain great principles involved in the nature of the case and verified by experience. Education, he said, is important in order to provide an effective and reliable ministry; to furnish teachers for Christian schools, and through them to introduce into China the superior education of the West; to prepare men to take the lead in introducing into China the science and arts of western civilization, as the best means of gaining access to the higher classes in China, of giving to the native church self-reliance, and of fortifying her against the encroachments of superstition from within and the attacks of educated skepticism from without. On the last of these propositions he enlarged with wise foresight: