Everyone knows that the Christian world mission exists. Not everyone would be prepared to agree that the mission should be regarded as a fit subject for academic study.

There is an interesting difference in the manner in which this question has been dealt with in Germany, in the United States, and in Britain.

The Germans are the great theorists; it is not surprising that Germany was the first country to develop a full-scale theory of missions and to invent the unpleasing hybrid ‘missiology’. The first plan for academic teaching of missiology came from Karl Graul, director of the Leipzig mission, who in 1864 drew up a plan for such teaching in the university of Erlangen, and had actually delivered an admired introductory lecture on the subject. His early death made impossible the realization of the plans that he had drawn up. The first full-time professor of missions was Gustav Warneck, whose immense Missionslehre began to appear in 1897, the year in which its author was appointed as professor in the old pietistic university of Halle. Warneck the theorist was followed by the historian Julius Richter in Berlin. Richter was a typically German toiler, whose volumes on various regions of the earth are full of minutely accurate information, a little marred by the all too obvious view of the writer that only Germans understand how to carry out the task of mission, and that the British have never done anything but make mistakes in the political as well as in the religious field.