But we cannot dismiss the whole matter in this cavalier manner, and I feel like adding that the missionary magazine, however necessary, is not an unmixed good. It is not good that a man should let his left hand know all that his right hand does. The missionary magazine reports to the world what the missionary chooses to write about his own work. If his letters are interesting and report large success they are eagerly sought and published; and he of course is not callously indifferent to his reputation. But, inasmuch as there are few or no witnesses but himself, the magazine puts a premium on egotism and immodesty; and it sometimes fosters a kind of spiritual impotence which needs the stimulus of publicity. One of the bravest and best missionaries it has ever been my privilege to know, the Rev. William Chambers Gault, was seldom mentioned in a missionary magazine and little known to the church at home, though he laboured for many long years in Africa and is buried there. Mr. Gault was incorrigibly modest. But even with the utmost margin of excuse—admitting the foolishness of fulsome and indiscriminate praise; admitting that missionaries are mortal, and some few of them _desperately_ mortal—it remains that the wholesale criticism and violent denunciation that one hears on the voyage is unjust and outrageous. We must look for the reason of it in the critics themselves—the non-missionary white men residing in Africa. And in themselves we will find reason enough. First of all, many or most of these men, according to their own confession, are not men of personal faith in Christ, but men who deride the Gospel in which we believe. Of all those who have criticized missions, I have only known of one man who himself professed to be a Christian; his criticism was rather mild and was due more to what he had heard than what he had seen. Carlyle has said: “Unbelief talking about belief is like a blind man discussing the laws of optics.” How can a man think it worth while to expend lives and money in preaching to the heathen a Gospel which he himself rejects? If the Gospel itself is foolishness those who preach it must be fools, and the greatest fools are those who preach it at the greatest sacrifice. What does cynicism know about enthusiasm? It was not “much learning,” but much Christianity, that made Paul seem mad to Festus. Manifestly the first question to ask the disbeliever in missions is whether he is also a disbeliever in Christianity and in Christ. It is really astonishing that so many critics of missions, and so many of their readers, should treat this latter question as entirely irrelevant.