"Little Men & Women"

Foreign missions and missionaries have come in for much sharp criticism during the past month, in the week-by-week reports of the laymen's Appraisal Commission which surveyed the field for seven U. S. Protestant churches (TIME, Oct. 31). Last week came more criticism, in a Manhattan speech by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, author of The Good Earth and Sons, daughter of missionaries, wife and faculty associate of Professor John Lossing Buck whose non-missionary agricultural college at Nanking University is considered a model of its kind. Said Mrs Buck: "I suppose, next to the Chinese among whom I have lived, there is no group of people whom I know better than I do the missionary. . . . I have heard him criticized in the bitterest terms and I have sometimes agreed with that criticism. I have seen the missionary narrow, uncharitable, unappreciative, ignorant . . . I can never have done with my apologies to the Chinese people that in the name of a gentle Christ we have sent such people to them. . . . "I came to see what you American Christians were.* . . . I found . . . that most of the missionaries were just like you. . . . You had sent us a fair average. On the whole you felt, however, that the very best ought to stay at home . . . when there was someone whom you rather questioned, if at the same time he seemed earnest and sincere, and consecrated--that miserable word that has been used to cover so many deficiencies and so much sloppy thinking--you rather thought he would do. Preachers who would have bored you beyond endurance you sent cheerfully to the foreign field; young men and women just out of college who knew nothing and did not even know they knew nothing, you sent to a people centuries old. . . .

''How dared you send us so many of these little men and women? How dared you set them up to stand for your God, for Jesus Christ, before the world? . . .

"I am wearied unto death with this preaching. It deadens all thought, it confuses all issues, it is producing in China a horde of hypocrites. . . . Let us cease our talk for a time and cut off our talkers, and let us try to express our religion in terms of life. . . .

"As a Chinese I say to you what many Chinese have said to me: 'Come to us no more in arrogance of spirit. Come to us as brothers and fellowmen. . . . Preach to us no more, but share with us that better and more abundant life which your Christ lives. Give us your best, or nothing.' "

*Mrs. Buck was born in Hillsboro, W. Va.. in 1890, while her parents were briefly vacationing from China.

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