Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign MissionsAllen, Roland
Religion
Missionary Survey As An Aid To Intelligent Co-Operation In Foreign Missions
Allen, Roland
Missions
(iv) Seeing that the missionary task is essentially world-wide, it is
obvious that a world-wide work cannot be properly directed without a
world-wide view. Now, missionary survey is in its infancy, and in most
parts of the world it has yet to be begun. A full and complete
missionary survey of the whole world would necessarily be a considerable
undertaking, for many important facts could not be easily or quickly
collected. There is then a strong tendency for men to argue that, since
all the facts desirable cannot be known at once without much time and
expense, it is futile and dangerous to collect those facts which can be
collected speedily without great expense. A little knowledge, they say,
is a dangerous thing ... let us remain ignorant.
We would venture to suggest that a little knowledge is only dangerous
when it is mistaken for much knowledge; that it is far better to act on
knowledge which can be obtained than to act in total ignorance, blindly.
Where we must act it is our duty to know all that we can know, and if,
because we cannot collect all the information that we should wish to
possess, we refuse to collect that information which we can obtain,
because we realise that it will be incomplete, we commit a serious moral
and intellectual crime. If we can know only one factor out of one
hundred, we offend if we refuse to know that one. We must act. We have
no right to shut our eyes to knowledge which ought to guide our action
because we are aware that action taken on that one factor will be
insufficiently guided. The one factor is an important one and must
influence our action, and would influence our action if we knew all the
other factors. We ought to allow it to influence our action even in
ignorance of the other factors.
In daily life we habitually act on partial knowledge, and we should
think that man mad who urged us to refuse to be guided by our partial
knowledge until our knowledge was complete; we should think a man mad
who, being under necessity to act, refused to know what he could know,
because he was aware that fuller knowledge might lead him to modify his
action. Now missionaries and missionary societies are acting and must
act, and the refusal to collect the information which they can obtain is
as culpable as the ignorance of a man who refuses to attend to the one
word "poison" printed on the label of a bottle which he can read,
because he cannot read the name of the stuff written on the label.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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