“The Hindus understand real asceticism perfectly well, and revere it as a subjugation of the flesh; and if the missionary and his wife carried out the ascetic life as Hindus understand it, lived in a hut, half or wholly naked, sought no food but what was given them, and suffered daily some visible physical pain, they might stir up the reverence which Hindus pay to those who are palpably superior to human needs. But in their eyes there is no asceticism in the life of the mean white, the Eurasian writer, or the Portuguese clerk, but only a squalor unbecoming a teacher, and one who professes, and must profess, scholarly cultivation.” I have ventured, not without due reflection, to point out in this chapter what seems to be a very false ideal of missions and missionaries. The setting up of the missionary as a spectacle, an object lesson in self-denial, may be a time-honoured institution, but it ought certainly to give way now to some more rational method of recommending this important enterprise. I do not mean to say that this mistake has been universal, or even general. Many people of knowledge and common sense have risen above it. But the evidences of this idea to be found still in prominent places at home, and the instances of it abroad, which are here cited, prove that there has been in popular thought too much leaning in that direction, and show that there is need to point out the fallacy, and the evil of it. When the simple recital of missionary facts includes the actual experience of unusual trials and perils—as, alas! must still be the case sometimes—it will always command sympathy and attention; but to represent these things as at all comparable in importance to mission _work_, or to suppose that they essentially belong to it, is neither true nor judicious. And I have shown that, when this tendency is yielded to in the mission field, it leads to an asceticism which produces no increase of usefulness, but a speedy termination of the missionary’s labours. * * * * * NOTE.—Since writing the above chapter, an article has appeared in the _Indian Medical Record_ on “Missionaries and Mortality,” which is so much to the point, and from such an unexceptionable, independent, and competent source, that my readers ought to have the benefit of an extract from it:— “We would only be just to claim for the missionary every safeguard that we apply to the lives of Europeans in other callings in India. Good, wholesome food, suitable clothing, a proper dwelling-house, and ordinary English home comforts are certainly the least that might be assured to missionaries working in India. Deprived of these vital necessaries, it is no wonder that men unused to the enervating influence of the tropics, burdened with cares and anxieties in the arduous work of an Indian mission field, should rapidly succumb to conditions so trying and hostile to their constitutions.