William Faunce’s Sociology of Foreign Missions

What has been the impact of missionaries in the countries where they serve in terms of sociology? This is the question addressed by the President of Brown University William Herbert Percy Faunce is this volume. My thanks to Redcliffe College for providing a copy of the book for digitisation. This title is in the public domain.

William Herbert Perry Faunce, The Social Aspects of Foreign Missions. Boston, Chicago & St. Louis: American Baptist Publication Society, 1914. Hbk. pp.309. [This title is in the public domain]

Contents

• Introductory
• Preface

1. Relation of the Individual Society
2. Types of Social Order in the East and the West
3. The Projection of the West into the East
4. Social Achievements of Missionaries
5. Social Achievements of Missionaries (Continued)
6. Enlarging Function of the Missionary
7. Great Founders and Their Ideals
8. The Interchange of East and West

• Bibliography
• Index

Introductory

In this book we are to study one phase of the con-tact between East and West. The most momentous fact of modern times is that the East and the West are coming physically nearer to each other every year, and yet intellectually and spiritually are still separated by a great abyss. The distance between any two points on the earth’s surface – measured by the time required to travel that distance – is rapidly diminishing. We live on a shrinking globe, whose surface, measured in time, is not one half as great as it was fifty years ago.

We can go from New York to Peking in much less time than our grand-fathers needed to go by “prairie schooner” from New York to Chicago. Thirty years ago” Around the World in Eighty Days” was a fairy-tale. Now the journey has been completed in less than thirty-six days. London and Bombay are to-day near neighbors. [Continue reading]