Miner Searle Bates (Chinese name: Bei Deshi , 贝德士) (born 1897, Newark, Ohio; died 1978, New York) was educated at numerous prestigious institutions such as the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; Yale University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Chinese history; and Hiram College, in Ohio. He worked with YMCA in India and Mesopotamia (then part of the Ottoman Empire) before finally beginning work at the University of Nanking sponsored by American churches, where he taught history from 1920-1950. In 1950, shortly after the Chinese Communist Revolution, the University of Nanking was merged with Nanjing University and Bates returned to the United States and was appointed Professor of Missions at Union Theological Seminary, where he taught until 1965. He wrote Religious Liberty: An