(3) The attitude of these people to the Christian missionary is quite different from that of the heathen. They acknowledge Christ as the one Divine Teacher and Lord. The missionary cannot count them as belonging to the heathen; he cannot approach them as the teacher of a new religion. He must approach them as an exponent of the religion which they already profess. However inadequate and confused their ideas about Christian theology and practice may be, they expect to receive from a Christian teacher instruction in their own religion, and that religion is a religion common to him and to them. Consequently to omit them from the Christian constituency is to do an injustice to them, and to misrepresent the true facts of the case. (4) In many areas two or more societies are at work and their conception of the qualifications for the name of Christian differ. In a survey each society is tempted to ignore the members of the other, and to reckon as Christians only those who fulfil the conditions which are applied by the one society. So certain Protestant societies ignore all Roman Catholics; but that for the reasons already stated is most misleading, for when persecution arises Protestants and Roman Catholics alike suffer for the Name of Christ. Whatever the members of another society may be, they are certainly not heathen; the heathen deny them. Consequently they cannot properly be counted with the heathen by any surveyor who wishes to present the facts. For these reasons we have been compelled to adopt a very wide expression, and the expression used by the China Continuation Committee seemed to be sufficiently elastic to serve our purpose. Nevertheless, to avoid error as far as possible, when we institute comparisons between Christian and non-Christian population, we introduce side by side with the total Christian Constituency the total Communicants (or Full Members), which is a valuable check. Take then an example. The figures here given are obviously not the figures of a station area; they are figures for a province; but they serve to illustrate the point. We cannot fill up the area table; we can only supply figures for the population. ---------------------------------------- Population. : Total : Total Non- : Christians. : Christians. ---------------------------------------- 32,571,000 : 534,238 : 2,036,762 ---------------------------------------- Now, here of the 534,238 Christians 500,655 are Roman Catholics, the Protestants numbering 33,583. The Roman Catholics in this area began work about 300 years earlier than the Protestants. Are we to eliminate them? Are all these 33,583 Protestants more worthy of the name of Christian than some of the Roman Catholics? Or shall we eliminate some of the 33,583? If so, how many, and on what grounds? Is not the denial of the Name to those who claim to be servants of Christ absurd? Are there not enough non-Christians to be converted?