With regard to the first question, all that we need to know is what proportion of the Christians are in a position to carry on their own religious life independently of foreign help. In the Anglican Communion that involves the presence of a duly ordained priest: in some societies which deny the necessity of ordination, yet give a position not unlike that of the priest to their ordained men, it would involve the presence of a pastor. Others deny the necessity or advantage of any ordained ministers. Under these circumstances we cannot use accepted ecclesiastical terms; but by capacity for conducting their own religious services we must certainly at least mean capacity to perform all necessary religious rites, and that, for Anglicans at any rate, must include Baptism and Holy Communion. Suppose then that we accepted the "organised churches" as a basis and inquired what proportion of these organised churches could, and did, perform _all_ necessary religious rites, we should indeed omit the floating and isolated members of the unorganised Christian community which in some districts might be very large, but we should nevertheless, we hope, get a definite and common basis which would really give us some light on this difficult but important problem, and if we added a question as to the proportion of the Christian constituency connected with these organised churches we should have some check upon a serious misunderstanding. ---------------------------------------------------------|-----| Number of Organised Churches. | | ---------------------------------------------------------|-----| Proportion of Christian Constituency | | Connected with these. | | ---------------------------------------------------------|-----| Number of Churches Capable of Performing _all_ | | Necessary Religious Rites without External Assistance. | | ---------------------------------------------------------|-----| Proportion of these to Number of Organised Churches. | | ---------------------------------------------------------|-----| Remarks and Conclusions. | | ---------------------------------------------------------|-----| The second question is, How far the Church in the district can direct its own life and order its own government. The difficulty here arises from the very diverse forms of Church government which have been taught to the natives by their foreign teachers, some of them late and difficult representative systems, not easily grasped even by educated men. Is there then any general question which will suffice to throw light on this problem, where the people are in the midst of the process of learning an unfamiliar form of government?