To deal with the district as if that school or hospital did not exist is to deal with an imaginary district, not with the real one; and no one supposes that there is any advantage in dealing with things that are what they are as if they were something else.
We have observed a certain tendency to recognise this truth in the matter of education and medicine, and to introduce into survey proposals a note, when the educational and medical tables were reached, to remind the surveyor that the educational and medical work of some society of which he is afraid, or from which he thinks himself widely separated, as extreme Protestants from Roman Catholics, must not be ignored; but in the evangelistic and Church tables no such note is inserted.

This is, we suppose, a tacit acceptance of the idea that the opposite party's evangelical and church building work can be ignored with trifling loss--that to ignore it does not much matter.

But if a man is surveying what he calls habitually "his" district, he is surveying it presumably to get at the facts, and one of the most important facts which he needs to know is how far the preaching of Christ has extended and where Christian churches have been established.

Unless then he is prepared to deny the name of Christ to the opposite party (and that is a very serious thing to do), he cannot ignore their churches.

The people claim to be Christians and declare that they believe in Christ.