Medical missions are sometimes urged upon our attention as though they were founded to meet a medical need of the people, as if it were the recognised and accepted duty of missionary societies and of missionaries to supplant the native medical practice by western scientific methods as certainly and fully as it is their recognised and accepted duty to supplant native religion by the faith of Christ.

But that we for our part emphatically deny.

The one may be a philanthropic duty; the other certainly is a religious duty.
Consequently we deny that there is a medical need which it is the duty of missionaries to supply in the sense in which we affirm that there is a religious need which it is the duty of missionaries to supply.

Medical missions are, and ought to be, evangelistic in their aim, mere handmaids[1] of evangelism.

Similarly we deny a separate and distinct educational need which it is the duty of missionary societies to supply.
The missionary societies ought not to take upon themselves the supply of every need.