Non-Political Missions

A censor-delayed dispatch from India printed in the Christian Century last week revealed that the British Government was taking extra precautions that missionaries should render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. The method: a revised memorandum covering "aliens desiring to undertake missionary work" in India and Burma. Since World War I the British have required every foreign missionary to pledge that he would "do nothing contrary to or in diminution of the authority of the lawfully constituted government in the country to which I am appointed." The mission board or society which supports him now shares that responsibility. It must sign a declaration "recognizing that all due obedience and respect should be given by its members to the lawfully constituted government in whatever part of India or Burma they may be . . . and that it will employ only agents who will work in this spirit."

Cause of the revised regulation was presumably the anti-war manifesto which four U. S. Methodist missionaries in India sent to the Viceroy last winter. Said they, quoting Will Durant: "British ownership of India has been a calamity and a crime." This manifesto obviously broke the four missionaries' pledges. But the British authorities wisely lay low, let the Methodist bishops in India (who rule 256 churches, 106,237 communicants) make the running by asking their Board of Foreign Missions in Manhattan to recall Jay Holmes Smith of Lucknow, Paul K. Keene of Mussoorie, Mr. & Mrs. Ralph T. Templin of Muttra. Missionaries Smith and Keene obediently went home. The Templins refused at first, finally returned to the U. S. last month.

But the British attitude toward foreign missionaries is still markedly more liberal than that of the Japanese (TIME, Sept. 9). So long as missions are nonpolitical, they are welcome. The British Government has interned some German missionaries whom it suspected of adding fifth columny to the four Gospels but has allowed many another to work on undisturbed during World War II. With the Japanese ban on foreign church workers soon to go into effect, many a U. S. mission board last week was thinking of transferring missionaries from Japan and Korea to India, where the potential Christian harvest is great and the laborers few.

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