Happening to take up one day an influential religious newspaper, I met with a notice of John G. Paton’s book, which spoke in very high terms of it, and of him, concluding with the following sentence, in which the editor most innocently and unconsciously brings up in another form this same false ideal, even after reading the book; which shows how prevalent the error is, and difficult to eradicate. “Now that civilisation is spreading, and owing to the general extension of facilities for travel to every part of the earth, it is to be feared that such records of missionary experience will soon be amongst the things of the past.” “It is to be _feared_” say the stay-at-home people, and editors in easy chairs. Any missionary, especially Paton himself, would have said, “It is to be _hoped_.” If the reader will but ponder that word “_feared_,” and take in all that it means, he will see that it is the very notion Paton complains of, and that I am here seeking to correct. We still need to take to heart Dr. Johnson’s exhortation to “clear our minds of cant.” After praying times without number that cannibalism, and all the cruel horrors and barbarities of heathenism might come to an end, we are found _fearing_ that our prayer is so near being answered, that soon there will be no more such tales to tell! The immense wave of sympathy that was evoked through the lamented illness and death of Father Damien, and which spread throughout the civilised world, was another proof of the prevalence of the “object lesson” ideal of the missionary. Missionaries had been at work succouring and tending lepers for many years before that, and a noble society, the Mission to Lepers, established in 1874, has now some thirty homes for lepers under its care, in India, Burma and China, under the management of twelve different Protestant missionary societies. But all this _work_ goes on in comparative obscurity, the whole of it together not attracting one hundredth part of the sympathy and notice that this one case of _suffering_ attracted. Father Damien _died of leprosy_. “_This_, THIS is what we want; this touches our hearts and our pockets,” cries out universal Christendom. It seems it is not mission work but missionary sufferings the people want to hear about. A false ideal.