No student of current religious life and happenings can have failed to note the tendency of its propaganda, as a whole, toward educational methods. The appeal to the emotions, and especially to fear, which has characterized most evangelical efforts, has largely given place to the appeal to intelligence.
In mission fields the school is becoming a more and more important factor, so that a Christian teacher John Knox College, Madras, India, has been led to say, in a tone that is apparently not wholly free from policy questioning, "Whereas we once thought the success of our work was to be estimated with respect to the number of recorded conversions, we now determine that question, in large part, by the number of our native students who creditably pass the university examination." So too in the home field, Y. M. A., Chautauqua, institutional church school work steadily increasing, while the old evangelical appeal is as steadily decreasing.
With the advance of civilization. the uplift of the masses, this tendency is manifestly both inevitable and legitimate,---it expresses the more normal and more wholesome order of progress, a fact with which all humanitarian movements must reckon. To frighten or entice a man is never complimentary to him; the more creditable address is a logical presentation of facts in which as a thoughtful person he should be interested.
