Some readers have taken exception to my statement in the eleventh chapter of The Wisdom of the Overself that the aborigine should be left alone to worship God in his own way. They point out the great uplift of religious conceptions which has followed the work of Christian missionaries amongst aborigines. My own observations as a traveller would endorse this claim as true in some cases but false in others. There has been welcome advance in some countries but definite deterioration in others. This is apart from social, medical, and educational work of the missionaries, for which I would bestow the highest praise. However, the point I tried to make is evidently not quite understood. I hold only that, just as philosophy should not disturb the advanced religionist's faith but yet should make a higher teaching available to him as and when his faith weakens of its own accord, so the advanced religionist should not disturb the primitive religionist's faith but should make his own higher creed available as and when it might be helpful to do so. This would still leave a clear field for Christian missionary activity in distant lands but it would regulate and limit such activity within wiser borders. When I wrote about the advisability of letting the aborigine alone, this applies only if he is satisfied with his religion. It is not wrong to interfere when he begins to find fault with it. I did not mean to cause doubts about the value of propagating higher and more spiritual types of religion amongst primitive peoples. On the contrary, such propaganda should certainly continue, although it ought to be less offensively, less ignorantly, and less dishonestly practised than it has been in the past. It should be there, on the spot, available for those primitives who are nearing the level where they can begin to profit by it. Between the primitive tribesman, blindly obeying his patriarchal leaders and unthinkingly following his traditional customs, and the modern city-dweller, the difference is unmistakable. It is a difference on the one hand of more liberated individuality and on the other of more developed intelligence. Hence, the kind of teaching which historically suited the one is unsuited to the other. The missionary has his place in the world of religions, and especially so when he is the bearer of a more developed religion, but that place is not, as he thinks, an unrestricted one.
-- Notebooks Category 17: The Religious Urge > Chapter 1 : Origin, Purpose of Religions > # 271
