CHAPTER XII

RELIGIONS IN CHINA

The real power of a race lies in its religion; other motives inevitably tend to egotism, disorganisation, and national death, and China is no exception to the rule; the strength and the weakness of China lies in her religion and in its absence. There are few nations who set less store by the outward observance of religion and yet there are few nations with a greater belief in the supernatural. On the one hand, the temples are deserted or turned into schools, and the Chinese are believed to have no other motives than self-interest. On the other hand, the whole of Chinese life turns round the relation of man to the spirit of his ancestors and to the spiritual world, and the Chinaman obviously believes that a man's soul is immortal and that its welfare has the very closest connection with the welfare of his descendant.

The commercial man will tell you that the Chinese are materialists—people who have no faith; and yet with glorious inconsistency he will explain that the difficulty of using Chinese labour abroad is that even the commonest coolie demands that his body shall be repatriated and shall lie in some place which will not hinder his son doing filial worship to his spirit. The whole question of what the race believes is rendered more difficult of comprehension to a Westerner by the confused nature of that belief, and is complicated by the characteristic of the Chinese of mixing all religions together regardless of their natural incongruity. It is hoped that the reader will bear this in mind during the following explanation.

The religions of China are usually classed as three. Not three well-marked religions in our sense of the word, but three elements which tend to merge into a common religion. There are separate religions. A large number of Chinese, for instance, are Mohammedan, and they neither marry nor are given in marriage to the other Chinese; there is a very small Jewish community; and there is also a native Greek Christian village still tolerated by the Chinese, which was transplanted from Siberia as the result of a Chinese conquest in the days of Peter the Great; there are a quarter of a million Christians converted by non-Roman missions, besides a million belonging to the Roman Catholic Communion. But Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism put all together, form but a small part of the Chinese community, and the greater part of China believes, according to all orthodox expositors, in three religions—Buddhism, Taoism, and what is termed Confucianism.

This conglomerate of three religions consists in its turn of composite faiths. Buddhism in China is not like the Buddhism of Ceylon with its agnostic teaching. Buddhism is divided into two great divisions—the "greater vehicle" and the "lesser vehicle." The "lesser vehicle" is known to the world as pure Buddhism; the "greater vehicle" contains many sects, all of which claim that the revelation extended to Gautama was only a partial revelation, and that the truth has been more fully revealed to those who succeeded him. This is called Lamaism, and in China has incorporated much of the idolatry which it supplanted and perhaps some of the Nestorian Christianity which succeeded it; in fact, the Buddhist temple in China is nothing more than an idol temple. Buddha of Gautama is always the principal idol; he is represented calm and without thought or trouble; he sits, the embodiment of peace and rest; but though he may be the first in the Buddhist temple, he is far from being alone; close behind him in popular estimation come two other deities, Amita and Kwannin. Amita, Amitobha or O-mi-to, is held by some to be the father of Kwannin, and is at once a guardian of the Western Paradise and the personification of purity; to this wholly mythical personage is attributed such virtue that the mere repetition of his name will secure salvation. In Japan a sect holds that every Buddhist law can be broken with immunity as long as there is faith in Amita. In China such statements are made as this: to follow the strict law of Buddhism is to climb to heaven as a fly crawls up the wall, but to attain Salvation by repeating the name O-mi-to is like sailing heavenwards in a boat with wind and tide behind, at the pace of a hundred li an hour. There is a general agreement that adherence to the strict Buddhist law of chastity, honesty, truth, temperance, abstinence from anger and serenity of mind, is an ideal which is impossible at any rate for the laity. But the exact method of escaping this burden differs in various sects. The most popular is by a "saving faith" in Amita.

If the origin of this deity can be attributed to the personification of a spirit of purity, the origin of the next, Kwannin, is probably from some source outside Buddhism. She is the goddess of mercy, but whatever her origin, she at present represents the remnants of either the Nestorian or the mediÆval Roman teaching. In Peking they have a curious image of her which any one might mistake for a Madonna, the truth being that there was at one time an intimate contact between Christianity and Buddhism, when many of the externals of the Christian religion and some of its doctrines were transplanted. The Buddhist temple with its altar in the centre looks strangely like a Christian church, and the Buddhist monks and nuns, with their rosaries and their regular hours for chanting and service, recall the Roman Catholic services; the picture of the Buddhist hell which stands in the great Mongol temple at Peking reminds one of a scene from Dante's Inferno, and among the many things the Buddhists borrow from Christian sources are these two ideas, embodied in two idols, the goddess of mercy who intercedes for mankind, and the god of faith in whom the worshipper should put all trust and confidence. Besides these gods there are the god of war and the god of good-fellowship, probably taken from old heathen sources. Again, there are hundreds of Buddhas, or as we should call them, "saints," whose position is somewhere between human and divine, much the same position that the saints occupy in the mind of a Neapolitan peasant.

After Buddhism comes Taoism. Taoism is again a conglomerate faith. Technically it is the faith of Laotze, who was an opponent and a contemporary of Confucius. He taught a dualism which reminds the Westerner of the doctrine of the Manichees. Again, Western and Eastern thought have been confused; Manichees are known to have existed in China, and whether ManichÆism originally came from the East or whether subsequently Chinese thought has been affected by ManichÆism is hard to decide. At any rate, Laotze did not claim that his teaching was original; he was merely the prophet of an established school of thought. The greater part of China follows his rival and despises Laotze's teaching, yet the dualism that he taught is part of the essential faith of China, and a part which is most opposed to all that is good. He taught that good and evil were essentially divided, were halves, as it were, of one whole. He called them the "Yang" and the "Yin"—terms which are in no way confined to the few disciples who now follow him. This division between good and evil makes up the mystery of the world—light and darkness, heaven and earth, male and female, each couple makes up one whole divided between good and evil; and so the world beyond is peopled with good and evil spirits, the "Yang" and the "Yin." Obviously such a faith has all the evil which we recognise in ManichÆism, and its practical disadvantages are very great. For instance, the inferior position of women is defended as inevitable; they are "Yin." No mine must be sunk or cutting made for fear of angering the earth spirits, for as man is as essentially a part of the world as the earth, those earth spirits will avenge themselves upon him. Even such great men and such good Confucianists as His Excellency the late Chang-Chih-Tung are not insensitive to such a superstition. The town over which he ruled was divided by a steep gravel hill. A Western engineer recommended that this hill should be cut through to facilitate access from one part of the town to the other, and the Viceroy, ever ready to accept new and Western ideas of practical advantage, immediately ordered the suggestion to be carried out. Shortly afterwards a large wen developed on his neck, and, arguing that an evil spirit of the earth, who had originally made the gravel hill, was so angered at the destruction of it that he determined to re-make it on the neck of the offender, the Governor had the cutting filled up, and there it stands to this very day, a witness of the evil influence that an evil religion can have on the greatest men of a nation. Taoism has now but few adherents, and yet there are many Taoist priests, since these priests are regarded as particularly efficient in dealing with the evil spirits in whom Taoism believes so fully.

The third religion is generally called Confucianism, and this may easily lead to a great misunderstanding, for under the term Confucianism two very different things are included. First, a belief in the philosophy of Confucius. This for the most part is outside what we are accustomed to call religion, and we shall have occasion to deal with it later on. Secondly, and more commonly, the spiritual beliefs of those who call themselves Confucians, and who, owing to his silence on religion, have to find other authorities for their faith. Sometimes they claim that their faith was the same as the faith of Confucius, that the background of his philosophy was the religion that they believe, but more commonly they accept it without any question. This religion is commonly mixed up both with Buddhism and with Taoism, but its essential doctrine is very distinct and has great weight in China, namely, that the spirits of men who are dead live and have influence over the lives of their descendants. I was told by a Chinese Christian that a religious Chinaman of the lower class never goes out without burning a stick of incense to the tablet of his father, and no one can go through Chinese towns without being impressed by the number of people who in that poor country are kept hard at work manufacturing mock money to be burnt for the use of parents and ancestors.

The missionaries find that this doctrine is the hardest doctrine for Christianity to assail; and there are not a few who, despairing of success, suggest that the position must be turned, and ancestor worship must be Christianised and accepted as an essential part of a man's belief. The logical Western mind immediately wants to know what is behind the ancestor; if an ancestor is to have power he can only have it, says the logical Westerner, by being in contact with some higher power. One of the greatest missionaries that China possesses answers this difficulty by saying that the Chinese mind is not the Western mind; that he does not concern himself very much with remote speculation; he has not that itching longing to use the word "why," which is at once the glory and the difficulty of the Western mind, and therefore he looks at the spiritual world much as he looks at the earthly world; the man immediately over him in the town is the magistrate, and, to use the Chinese phrase, "is the father and mother of his people," and so over him in spiritual things is his father and grandfather. Behind the magistrate there is in his distant thought the prefect—the head of the prefecture or Fu town—a being who only comes into his village life when there is trouble and difficulty; he comes to punish, rarely to reward, and so behind his father and grandfather in the spiritual world are the great clan leaders whom he worships at regular intervals with the rest of his clan. In civil government there are in a distant background a Viceroy with awful powers and awful majesty, and an Emperor whose very name is so divine that he scarcely likes to use it; and behind the clan leaders are many beings borrowed from Buddhism, relics of old idolatry, muddled up with Taoism; and in the dim and distant background is the Supreme Being—the Supreme Being Who rewards the just and punishes the unjust, Who can in no way be deceived, Who refuses the rain to the sinner and makes the land desolate, Who has power to dethrone the earthly Emperor and to place China under a foreign domination. This great and awful power is, however, so far distant that the average Chinaman thinks but little about Him.

The Temple of Heaven at Peking is the beautiful shrine of this Supreme Being. Here once a year, after spending a night fasting, the Emperor, as the father of his nation, worships the great God who made heaven and earth. The chief feature of this worship is that it is performed in the open air on a beautiful marble dais. No place in China is quite so lovely; it is the fitting shrine of the beautiful faith of China's most glorious days, a faith which though dormant is not dead. The traveller who stands there should remember that the worship which is here performed is as old as the date of the patriarchs and not un-akin to their religious ideals; and if there are some things which are not sympathetic to the Christian idea, they are subordinate. In the main it is the worship of the One True Being.

This faith has no right to be called Confucian. There is great doubt about the faith of Confucius. He is silent about religion, or he refers to it only indirectly; it is no part of his teaching; but his indirect references to it apparently express a belief in a Supreme Being whom he calls "Heaven," a Supreme Being who has an influence on human affairs. He also recognises ancestor worship, but with such a dubious phrase that many Chinese and English scholars have doubted his meaning. Neither is this the faith of all the leading Confucianists in China, many of whom are professedly agnostics in matters of religion, and follow the teaching of Chu; but it is the faith, the ill-understood faith, of the great multitude of thinking and non-thinking Chinamen, and it is looked upon as the State religion of China. Its power over China is universal and yet insecure.

Many ages ago it was partially defeated by the more logical and more sympathetic faith of Buddhism. The fight was bitter, the persecutions were cruel, but Buddhism conquered. Now Buddhism fails. With its failure a vast mass of superstition, kept alive by the sacrifice to the ancestor, once more rises up and stands right in the path of progress—right in the way of civilisation. It was superstition that moved the Boxer, and this it was that lost credit when Boxerdom failed. Story after story is told of the influence of this incoherent but vital mass of religion. The junk will dart across the bows of your steamer; there will be much whistling, reversing of engines, peremptory commands in English, abuse in Chinese; and when you inquire why the lowdah of the junk risked his cargo, perhaps his life, and put the steamer and its passengers in a state of excitement, if not in jeopardy, the answer is that every junk lowdah is afraid of the evil spirit that is following him, and if he crosses the steamer's bow he expects that the evil spirit, seeing a more worthy quarry, will neglect him and follow the steamer. The head of the Shanghai Telephone Company tells how he is not uncommonly met by some sleek well-to-do Chinaman who is most distressed because the shadow of a telephone pole falls over his door, so that as he goes out he passes beneath it, and that will bring bad luck. The houses in China stand unconformably with the road, because a certain aspect is lucky; a cracker is exploded to frighten the evil spirits away, and so on through tales innumerable.

The world around is full of evil spirits to the Chinaman. Every village has the witch doctor who is learned in the ways of these evil spirits. Diabolical possession is as present with them as ever it was in Bible times. Your hard-headed commercial man smiles when he relates these stories, incredulous that there can be any foundation for them; but those who have dwelt among the Chinese take much the same line about these stories as we do about spiritualism. Much is folly, more is fraud; but behind both the folly and the fraud there is a mysterious reality. The faith of the masses of China in the spiritual world has never been encouraged by its philosophers. It owes its vitality to the fact that, as with us, so with them, manifestations of powers beyond this world are real if ill-comprehended, and connected too often with man's evil side. The Psychical Research Society will do well to inquire closely into many of these phenomena. Nothing convinced me of the reality of this belief more than the line that was taken by one of our English missionaries. He was speaking of diabolical possession, and he related the same story which one has heard so often that a man suddenly spoke as another personality; and then he added, "I realised that it was not he who was speaking to me, but the evil spirit within him;" and he went on, "I was afraid to speak to him, because if you speak to those who are possessed with an evil spirit, the evil spirit will take possession of you." It was strange to hear such a testimony to the reality of diabolical possession from an Englishman, but you will hear it from every Chinaman. Those who have read "Pastor Hsi" will remember how firm was his belief in such possession.

Against all this mass of the evil world the Chinaman has but one defence: his father and his ancestor belong to that world and they will defend him; and so the ancestor cult is intimately connected with this belief in evil spirits. If the father does not bestir himself the son may come to harm—in fact, the main part of a Chinaman's religious idea centres round ancestor worship; and there is no such awful moment in a Christian convert's life as when he is required to destroy the tablet of his ancestors. A Confucianist cannot understand the missionary position; to his mind contempt for the ancestor only means a deep and spiritual scepticism, an absence of all faith in the supernatural, a negation of all sense of duty. A missionary recounted a story illustrative of this difficulty. He was travelling up-country in China, and his road lay along the same way down which a well-to-do merchant was travelling, and as they journeyed on side by side and met every night at the inns at which they put up, he noticed that the Chinaman eyed him askance; but as the missionary spoke Chinese well, and as travellers have many little wants which another traveller can supply, it was not unnatural that in spite of the mistrust manifested by the Chinaman they should fall gradually into more intimate converse. One night as they were sitting at an inn the Chinaman said to the missionary, "Do you know I thought you were a Christian, but I see you are a good fellow." The missionary assured him that he was a Christian, and did not deny that he was a good fellow. He felt, however, that there was some obstacle in the Chinaman's mind that kept them still apart, and as they journeyed on from day to day and had grown more intimate, the Chinaman said, "You know people do tell such lies that one cannot believe a word they say." The missionary assented to this general proposition as true of all the world, but asked for a more immediate application. The Chinaman continued: "Well, I hope you will not be offended if I tell you the lies they tell about you—lies that I am afraid I believed till I met you and could see what a good fellow you are. They say—" but he broke off. "Pardon me, it is such a horrible accusation that I do not like to repeat it, even though I know that it is untrue." The missionary pressed him to tell what this accusation was, and the Chinaman continued apologetically, "I know that it is such a lie that I am ashamed that my people should tell such lies, but they do say that you Christians actually teach men to break up the tablet on which their father's name is written;" and the missionary realised all at once the depth of the conviction of the Chinaman and the wide gulf that separated him from Christianity. And so many and many a person who knows China best confidently asserts that Christianity will never become the religion of China till it permits and recognises this ancestral worship.

But now a new factor has entered into this problem. Western materialism is spreading its malign influence over China; the educated classes of Japan boldly profess that they have long since ceased to believe in any religion, and they are calling upon China with great effect to follow their example, and so the position changes altogether. Ancestor worship, with all its accompanying superstition, tends to disappear where Western knowledge is taught. The Boxers were not untrue prophets when they told their people that they or Western civilisation, as they knew it, must leave China, and that they could not co-exist. The position is surely one that must excite the very deepest interest. It is scarcely conceivable that a race so deeply convinced of the realities of the spiritual world will, as a whole, accept the belief that there are no spirits. It is equally inconceivable that with modern Western education the people shall believe in the spirit that follows the junk, or in the spirit that is angered by a mining operation. The religious sentiment of China will, as it were, be turned out of doors by Western knowledge. There will be a terrible moment when, with all the insolence of youth, the young man refuses to believe in God or in a devil, and rushes into every wild anarchical and socialistic scheme to satisfy his craving for action.

It is a terrible moment, and one which one sees rapidly developing in Japan and among the Westernised Chinese; but beyond that terrible period there dawns a brighter day when China will reassert its natural sentiment and will accept Christianity as the only reasonable religion that is consonant with modern science and a belief in the spiritual world. The question of policy that needs solving is whether it is wise in the face of this great Western unbelieving movement to treat respect for ancestors too drastically. Western education must remove its objectionable features and Christianity might accept the modified form of this belief which is not wholly inconsistent with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

CHAPTER XIII

CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY AND WESTERN CULTURE

It is not realised in the West how much the modern movement in Japan owes its power and vitality to a native movement which welcomed change. In Japan Buddhism had failed, the one school of Confucianism which believed in change was dominant, and therefore it was a comparatively easy matter to introduce the extensive changes of Western civilisation. There was no religion with roots deeply entwined in the hearts of the people to oppose such a change. Shintoism had not yet been rediscovered and established, and it consisted merely of a mass of superstition, without any literature or organisation. Thus it was the combination of these facts, with the threatening attitude of Western powers, which made all the prophecies of men who knew the East untrue. No one understood the vital power of the movement in Japan. If, thirty years ago, some one had written a book to prove that Japan would one day defeat Russia, people would have laughed at the suggestion, and the authority of people who had lived in the East all their lives would have been quoted to prove that an Eastern race could never fully accept Western civilisation. The prophets were misled by the precedent of India and Turkey. The Western civilisation is met there by religions whose tenets are opposed to Western thought, and as long as those religions hold, Western views will make but small progress; but in Japan there was no such religion, and in China to-day there is no such religion. The Buddhism of China, like the Buddhism of Japan, may satisfy the cravings for spiritual religion of the uneducated and the ignorant; but the thinkers of both races—the statesmen, the writers, the leaders—are uninfluenced by Buddhism. Taoism has contributed to the thought and superstition of China, but is in no way now an important factor in her development; the philosophy of Confucius is the one vital force in the land.

Its doctrines are in no way opposed to our civilisation; it teaches mainly that a man must be sincere to his own higher nature; it has a profound belief in the greatness of human nature, and a very inadequate explanation, therefore, of the failures of that nature. That man must be sincere, so that the full beauty of his nature may appear, is one of its main tenets, and that this beautiful thing must be decorated with knowledge is a natural corollary. It undertakes the reform of the world, by convincing the ruler of his duty, and through him compelling the ruled to tread the right path, contrasting here very strongly with the religion of our Bible, though perhaps not with political Christianity. All through its teaching there is an underlying suggestion that subjects will obey their rulers not only outwardly but also inwardly in their opinions and convictions.

Confucianism does not believe in government by the people, of the people, for the people; but it believes very strongly in government for the people by the rulers. Many of its maxims might be cut out as texts, and hung up in the House of Commons with great appropriateness. It constantly pictures a well-ordered peaceful state, in which the dignity of government is well maintained, and where the working-man shall profit by his work through justice and peace, and the trader grow rich in confident security. In all this teaching it is not opposed to Western civilisation. Confucius advocates the reform of society by the action of the State. Thus the sanitary laws, the education laws, the temperance laws of the West are thoroughly consistent with the teaching of Confucius. Where that teaching differs from the West is that it disbelieves in democracy. Yet Confucianism cares nothing for a man's birth: all men are born equal to the Confucianist as to the Christian; and so Confucianism has, for many centuries, welcomed people of the lowest birth as Governors, if they could pass the requisite examinations, and, having given every opportunity to men of all classes to become officials, it entrusts them and not the people with the government of the country.

In another way Confucianism is opposed to Western civilisation. Confucianism believes intensely in the dignity of government; their classics are full of examples of people who, at the risk of their lives, defied kings and maintained the dignity of their positions; and this doctrine of dignity is consequently very deeply ingrained in Chinese thought; it is in reality the base of that curious doctrine of "face" by which a man will do anything rather than confess that he is wrong. A great missionary recounts how his wonderful work at Tientsin was once threatened with destruction because a boy from the south of China knocked a boy from the north off his bicycle, with the result that the college was soon divided into two factions on the question as to who should pay for the injured bicycle. The matter was only with difficulty arranged by the President paying for the bicycle and charging it to the guilty boy; but the boy did not mind paying—he minded confessing that he was wrong. There was another case in this same college where a boy had been induced to confess privately his sorrow that he had wilfully insulted a master. He was prepared to suffer expulsion rather than confess his fault openly. He was miserable at the prospect of leaving the college, and when a great appeal was made to his better feelings to say that he was sorry, he shook his head sadly. At last he was asked, "Have you never allowed you were wrong in your whole life?" "No," he said, with a look of pride, "never." Odious and detestable as this doctrine is in private life, I think I have the authority of St. Augustine for saying that it is a maxim of good government that however wrong an order may be, a superior should not confess his error, so necessary is this doctrine of dignity to government. Thus the Chinese expression "face" has been commonly accepted as a good English expression when speaking about governments.

No doubt it is this sense of dignity which gives such authority to the Chinese official. In many ways it may be an element of weakness. I was surprised to learn that the officials in the Yamen had never been in the shops of the city; it is beneath their dignity. Goods are brought to them and they buy in their own houses. For instance we were told how in Changsha two patriotic bas-reliefs were put up in a shop, one of them representing the Westerns bringing tribute to the Emperor of China, and the other depicting a Western woman, chained and dishevelled, being led in as a slave. Of course our very excellent and most efficient representative, Consul Hewlett, made instant representation to the Governor and the objectionable figures were removed; but the Chinese officials claimed that they were completely ignorant of what was happening in the shops of the town, because they never went there.

It is obvious that this high estimation of dignity makes much of Western government antipathetic to a Chinaman; he cannot sympathise with a civilisation which admires government by noisy agitation, vulgar posters, indecent journalism. Such an agitation as that in favour of women's suffrage is inconceivable and disgusting beyond words to the mind of a Chinese thinker; that women, whose dignity is such that they should never be tried in a public court; that educated ladies, whose names, in China, must scarcely be mentioned owing to their exalted position, should wrestle in a public crowd and be arrested, is one of those mysteries in Western government that the dignified Eastern mind can never hope to understand.

Confucianism, considered by itself, is not unfavourable to Western civilisation, and its great influence in China will no doubt largely accelerate the Westernisation of that vast empire. For instance, the policy of education is one which has been followed by China for many a long year; all that the Chinese are doing is to alter the object of that education. It used to aim at giving men a complete knowledge of the Chinese classics; now it aims at giving them in addition a knowledge of the West and of natural sciences; and so such an eminent Confucian scholar and such an ardent Conservative as the late Chang-Chih-Tung was the foremost advocate for a Western education.

Again the development of the Press on Western lines takes place rapidly in China, where newspapers have long been known, and which boasts of being a country possessing the oldest newspaper in the world, the Peking Gazette. Translations of Western literature issued by the Christian Literature Society are read with avidity by a race that esteems literature highly, no matter with what subject it deals, and who has no worse an epithet for one of its emperors than "book-burner."

Though Confucianism is not antipathetic to Western civilisation as a whole, and by its philosophy and literature encourages education in Western ideas, yet those ideas will, I fear, be fatal to that mighty system of ethics that has kept China together, and has enabled her to conquer her conquerors so many times. The countries that have never known Confucius are succeeding far better than the countries that have been taught by him. The fact that he always claimed that any race who followed his teaching would be prosperous, coupled with the fact that China, with her splendid resources and immense population, is far poorer and weaker than nations who know nothing of his teaching, is sufficient to bring its own condemnation to this philosophy. There is a marked difference in the teaching of Christianity and Confucianism in this respect. Christianity, by the example of its founder, teaches that the world must be reformed through the individual; and that the destruction of a State, whether it be Jerusalem or Rome, is only a painful incident in the upward advance of mankind. If every Western State were destroyed, the true Christian would only pause longer over his reading of the prophet Jeremiah; but when China, the home of Confucianism, realises her powerlessness in the face of the West, in sorrow and regret she will close the books of Confucius, as the books that guided the State to destruction, even though that teaching was pleasant and beautiful.

A great Chinaman realised that this was the position of Japan, and told me that he did not believe that in Japan any one really believed in Buddhism or in Confucianism or in the new-found Shintoism; and that, as they had not yet accepted Christianity, they were in a state, odious to the Western and Eastern alike, of being without moral guidance in this world. The position of Japan to-day will, in all probability, be, both in regard to the constructive and destructive effects of Western civilisation, the condition of China to-morrow, unless indeed Christianity can fill the vacant place in Chinese thought. Never before has such an opportunity been presented to the Christian world as this vast mass of population included under the name of China, left homeless by the action of world thought.

Those millions of people, for instance, who yearn for a spiritual religion, and who have found in times past some comfort in the confused and corrupt faith of Chinese Buddhism, are now ready with open ears to listen to any one who is prepared to teach them a higher and more spiritual religion. The Confucian scholar who realises the debt that China owes to the teaching of the sage, and yet who feels that Western civilisation is sapping his authority and leaving China without a moral guide, welcomes readily the teaching of the moral philosopher who is prepared to show that Confucianism is essentially right and has evidence of Divine truth within it, but that it only errs in not realising that the complete salvation of man can only be accomplished by those who appeal to his spiritual nature as well as to his moral sentiments.

If Christianity conquers China, one of her first actions will be to reinstate Confucius in the position from which Western materialism has dethroned him; but the task would be infinitely easier if Christians could take effective action at once. Every day that passes makes the position more difficult. Every Confucian scholar who shuts up his books and opens the books of the materialistic philosopher of the West, will prove an additional obstacle in the way of the Christianisation of China. The great danger is that the West, ignorant of what is happening in the East, will let this opportunity pass and allow Western materialism to establish itself as a force in China, as it has established itself as a force in Japan. The world is full of examples of lost opportunities; let us hope that China will not have to be added to that sad category.

CHAPTER XIV

INTERVIEW AT NANKING

The best view of the religion of China is to be obtained from the enlightened Chinese themselves, and their views will probably be of interest to our readers. It should be explained that one of the objects of our second visit to China was to inquire whether the Chinese officials would welcome the foundation of Universities in which Western knowledge could be taught, and whose atmosphere should be Christian. When the matter was first discussed in England it crept into the newspapers, and I immediately received an invitation from the Director of Chinese Students in London to discuss the subject with him. I had two interviews with him. What surprised me was that against all the opinion of the average Englishman who is conversant with China he did not regard the Christian character of the University as a deterrent, but he asked one question on which he apparently laid the very greatest stress. He inquired, "If a University is started in China on such lines as you propose, will you guarantee that the teachers are efficient?" I immediately assured him that the learned committees who were considering the question at both Universities would, whatever else they did, never allow any one to go out as teacher unless he was most fully qualified. He then assured me that he had no doubt the scheme would meet with very great sympathy in China, and that he would give me letters of introduction to various people who would give the very fullest information on the subject. Among these was one to that most eminent man, Tuan-Fang, Viceroy of Nanking.

When I arrived at Nanking I presented my letter of introduction through the Consul, and the Viceroy most cordially invited me to tiffin at the Yamen. With further courtesy he sent his carriage to fetch me. We had a most sumptuous repast, at which about twenty officials were present, and in consideration of my being a foreigner some European food was provided. They appeared much pleased when I assured them that I appreciated Chinese quite as much as European food. We had a most pleasant luncheon, at which we discussed all manner of topics. I was asked to explain exactly the position of Oxford and Cambridge, and when I mentioned that Oxford was over a thousand years old, I had evidently established the reputation of my University far above that of all competitors. The Viceroy then admired the school system of England. He said the schools were "like a forest," and he assured me that he took the very greatest interest in education, and promised after luncheon to show me some of his schools. I expressed admiration of Chinese learning, and he told me it was divided into four heads—morals, elegancy of style, philosophy, and manners. The respect that His Excellency had for Confucius did not prevent him from admiring other philosophers, especially Mih-Tieh, the philosopher who taught the doctrine of universal love. This was the more remarkable, because at Hankow the very same point had been discussed with some Chinese clergy over Sunday supper, and they had referred to this philosopher's works with considerable admiration, and had declared that his doctrine was much more consonant with Christianity than that of any other Chinese philosopher.

His Excellency then discussed the danger of a modern education. He quite realised the obvious evils that resulted from rashly encouraging Western education without an ethical basis. He said they had observed that those who returned from the West were less dutiful to parents than those who had remained in China. Then we had a long talk as to whether it was possible to assimilate the two and to give a man a perfect foreign and a perfect Chinese education. The difficulty felt was that men with a perfect foreign education were too often unable to write Chinese with sufficient elegance to satisfy the fastidious taste of the cultivated Chinese scholar. All this conversation was carried on at the dinner-table, chiefly through interpreters, with a crowd of Chinese servants, excluded from the room, but looking through a window to watch when our needs required their presence.

We discussed after tiffin the scheme for a University and the relations between Confucianism and Christianity. His Excellency was much pleased that I should take such interest in things Chinese, and immediately said that as I had come all the way to China to inquire into these things, I ought to receive every information. Turning to his secretaries, he told them that on the next day they were to provide scholars learned in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism to give me all the information that I required, and arranged that the Consul and I should return next day. He then suggested that we should go and inspect the school that was next his palace, and in which his own daughter was being educated.

The school was for children of the highest class, and contained only about thirty boys and thirty girls. He conducted a sort of informal examination which I should have thought must have been extremely trying for the children. His Excellency and myself came first, then two interpreters, and then about twenty officials. When the scholars were examined in Western knowledge, we were asked to put a question or to look at a copy-book; when they were examined in Confucian knowledge, His Excellency put the question, and the interpreters translated to me both the question and the answer. The intelligence of the children was of a very high order, and they were very attractive. The uniform of the boys resembled that of a French schoolboy, though the cut of the trousers showed that the costume had been made by a Chinese tailor, probably after a Japanese model. The girls were dressed in grey coats and trousers and had natural feet; this was perhaps not quite so remarkable as it at first appeared when one remembers that the Viceroy is a Manchu, and the Manchus have never admired the distorted foot of a Chinese woman; but as they went through their musical drill one could not help thinking that the neat coat buttoned across and reaching to the knees over loose trousers was about as ideal a dress as has ever been invented for women. His Excellency did not fail to make his own daughter stand up, and asked her many difficult questions, which she answered very well in a calm and collected manner. After showing us these schools His Excellency said that we must stop a third day and see many of the other schools in Nanking.

Next morning I was most distressed to find that my friend Mr. King, His Majesty's Consul, was too unwell to attend the interview which I was to have with the learned men of Nanking, and so with some trepidation lest I should make sad faults in my manners without his kindly guidance, I drove up to the Yamen. There I was received by a crowd of officials, among whom were two great Confucian scholars with the Hanlin Degree, an authority on Buddhism and an authority on Taoism, whose knowledge subsequently proved to be extremely small.

The courtesy of the Chinese officials, the charm of their manner, the mixture of dignity and good nature which is such a characteristic of their behaviour, makes controversy with them delightful. I do not think any one who has known them can be but greatly attracted by their courtesy and kindness. All Chinese are courteous, but the Chinese literati, perhaps naturally, greatly excel their fellow-countrymen in this charming characteristic. I should add that the two interpreters who were provided were men whose mastery of English was only equalled by their wide learning and pleasant address. One of them had been in England and was indeed a great traveller; he had ridden all through the passes which separate India from Chinese Turkestan; he belonged to a very great family, and traced his descent from one of the leading pupils of Confucius.

We discussed Confucianism first. I set the ball rolling by asking what was meant by the phrase "superior man." The position was a pleasant one; I was there to be instructed, and could therefore ask as many questions as I chose. The "superior man" is a translation of a phrase in the Chinese classics which perhaps might be better translated "ideal man"; at least so I gathered from these gentlemen; and that in the works of Confucius and Mencius his qualities are fully described. With great joy the whole party fell upon the question, and next minute they were engaged in a courteous polemic as to how exactly they should describe the "superior man," and the answer came that he must be a conscientious man, a man very true to himself, charitable, just and truthful. When they were pressed as to whether wealth was at all necessary to the "ideal man," they indignantly repudiated the suggestion; the "superior man" might equally be a beggar sitting by the roadside or a Viceroy sitting in his palace. It was more interesting when they were asked whether he need be a learned man. There was some doubt and hesitation in the answers; the doctors again consulted with one another, and the answer came, "No, learning was not at all necessary." I asked whether the "ideal man" might be a non-Chinaman, and it was held that he might belong to any race. But the next question was far more difficult for them to answer. Nothing that they had said prevented the "superior man" being a Christian; a Christian might be true and conscientious and charitable. I quoted the case of a foreign doctor living in their city, and asked how he failed to come within their definition of the "superior man," but the Hanlin scholars could not agree; no Christian, in their opinion, could be a "superior man." But my interpreter added that he himself did not endorse this; to his mind any man who fulfilled the requirements should be classed as a "superior man."

We then changed the conversation to the question of "whether Confucius believed in God or not?" I had been instructed in this controversy by one of the most learned missionaries in China, Dr. Ross of Mukden. They maintained, as he told me they would maintain, that the Heaven of Confucius meant Reason. But Reason cannot possibly punish the guilty, though the guilty might be punished by their want of Reason. And as Confucius refers in several places to Heaven as a power that punishes, the definition is obviously incorrect. It dates from a philosopher called Chu. Again the learned men were absorbed in controversy, every one enjoying such a discussion. The greatest number still held to the doctrine that Heaven meant Reason, but a certain number held that it meant a personal God. It ended in the controversy becoming quite heated, and in a copy of Dr. Legge's translation of the Chinese classics being fetched, so that I might fully understand their different points of view. In the end we agreed that there was a considerable force in the argument that Confucius believed in a personal God.

When I further asked how Reason could possibly punish a bad man when he was dead, and how it was that many a bad man, as we all know, died in wealth and prosperity, they answered that after death his memory was punished by his bad deeds coming to light. I suggested that if a man was dead this did not matter to him, and that Confucius' assertion that punishment followed sin implied a future life. When they were further asked whether Confucius taught that all secret sin should one day be made public, there was an eloquent silence, and we dropped the subject.

We then went on to discuss Buddhism, and a pleasant old gentleman leaning on a stick was brought up to instruct me in the doctrine of Buddhism. It was obvious from the jocose and pleasant way the matter was treated, that this was very different ground to the philosophy of Confucius. Then, though everybody was courteous, everybody was keenly and seriously interested, but Buddhism was regarded as a most amusing topic; I was assured that only a few women believed in it, and that none of those in the room gave it the slightest credence. They explained to me why the Dalai Lama came to Peking. Two of the disciples of Buddha had been reincarnated, and the greatest of those two was the Dalai Lama, but it was impossible to tell in which baby the reincarnation took place without coming to the Mongol Temple at Peking; then lots were cast and the matter was settled. I had my doubts whether the old gentleman was accurate, but clearly no one else in the room had the smallest acquaintance with the subject; they made a marked difference between the Buddhism of the Lama Temple at Peking and that of the Monastery at Hangchow, which they called Indian Buddhism, and said the district was often named Little India; but when I tried to discover how many sects of Buddhists there were in China, or what was the nature of their tenets, I could get no information from these gentlemen.

His Excellency Tuan-Fang joined us at this moment and asked whether I could possibly read a Sanscrit manuscript that he had discovered, and which, from the Chinese notes appended to it, he gathered referred to Buddhism. He also wished to discuss the origin of Chinese characters; he had a theory that they came from Egypt, and he showed many rubbings of hieroglyphics which he had had made from monuments in Egypt to prove his point.

But I wanted to ask some questions about Taoism. I had tried to understand Taoism and had found it extremely difficult, and I thought these cultured literati could give me some assistance. I was soon undeceived. Nobody believed in Taoism, and they knew nothing of its doctrine or of its worship. They suggested that the Taoist priests were often to be found in a Buddhist temple, but one scholar said that that was only because the Taoist priest liked to make a little money by selling incense sticks.

Then His Excellency turned the tables and began asking questions about Christianity. The thing that troubled him was that the Bible which he had read was in such poor style. He wanted to know whether I thought our Blessed Saviour habitually wrote in good style or not. I explained that He had originally spoken in Aramaic, which had been translated into Greek, and from the Greek into English, and then had been retranslated by Englishmen into Chinese, so naturally the Chinese version could but inadequately represent the full beauty of His words. It is worthy of notice how much the Chinese mind is attracted by all purely literary subjects, and how little they care about physical science. For instance, when the Viceroy asked me about the sun standing still in the Book of Joshua, which led us into natural science, it was immediately obvious that this was a subject in which these gentlemen took no interest.

We then repaired to a sumptuous luncheon prepared entirely in Chinese fashion. The viands were exquisitely cooked, and comprised bird's-nest soup, shark's fins, white fungus, and all the usual Chinese delicacies. The hospitality of my host made me regret that the capacity of a human body is limited, and if it were not for the excellency of the Chinese cooking, dyspepsia must have been the result. Over luncheon we discussed all manner of topics, and I noticed how extremely sensitive my hosts were to the slightest want of manners. They referred to a mutual friend, a European, in the severest terms because he lacked in courtesy. They discussed also the question of foot-binding. They were convinced that the habit is being given up, and they assured me that it did cause girls excruciating agony. They said the younger generation of Chinese gentlemen would not marry women with deformed feet.

I left the Yamen a great admirer of the culture that could make men so pleasant. If they lacked directness as controversialists, they were most agreeable in their extreme civility and their imperturbable good humour. I shall always look back to my days at Nanking as some of the pleasantest of my life.

CHAPTER XV

ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONS IN CHINA

It is only just to put in the forefront of the influences that are Christianising and changing China the French, Italian, and other missions of the Roman Catholic Communion. Our first contact with the wonderful work which these missions are accomplishing was in French China, at that very interesting but most pestilential locality, Saigon. We were received with the greatest kindness by the Sous-Gouverneur at the French Government House, a palatial residence worthy rather of an emperor than a governor, compared to which Government House at Hong-Kong seemed but a cottage. Yet even there life was hardly bearable even under an electric fan. The heat was stifling. It had been impossible to drive out except in the middle of the night, and so we were entertained by being taken by night to see our first glimpse of Chinese civilisation, for the Chinese once dominated this country, and have left their civilisation behind them.

Driving back, our French host regaled us with stories of the people, and incidentally mentioned the great power which Christianity has in these colonies. We were much impressed by his testimony to the efficiency of mission work, for the French official is far from favourable to the Roman Catholic Church. He told us not only was a large part of the country round Saigon Christian, but Christianity was such a vital thing that the Church had no difficulty in getting sufficient money to build splendid churches. Next day I called on the Bishop. He was a splendid type of Roman Catholic missionary, with his white beard and his courtly manners. We found several such in our wanderings, for Catholic missions are spread all over China, and have been founded many years. He spoke of the great success of the work, and thought that the hostility of the French Government was in some ways preferable to their patronage, for the personal lives of many of the officials are far from admirable. Their morality would better befit our Restoration Period than the twentieth century. A Governor's mistress was a person recognised and courted by official society, and it was perhaps to the advantage of the mission that in the native mind Christianity was dissociated from such evil doings.

I asked him how he supported the climate, which we had found barely endurable for two days. He replied that the climate was quite cool to the missionary who lived a chaste and temperate life, but that the Government found it terrible for their officials. This may be quite true, but still I think chaste and temperate Englishmen would find the climate of Saigon intolerable. We do not make sufficient allowance in speaking of a healthy or unhealthy climate for the origin of the missionary. If he comes from Marseilles in the South of France, it is not perhaps wonderful that he should find the countries which are not hotter than his native land in the summer quite tolerable.

The history of Catholic missions is apparently to be divided into three periods. The first period terminates in 1742 and commences with the first mission of the Jesuits under Father Ricci in 1584. During this period the Roman Catholic missions, directed by a series of men of extreme ability, endeavoured and nearly succeeded in converting China from the "top downwards," for, owing to their wonderful scientific attainments, the missionaries received important posts under the Chinese Government. The fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of China by the Manchus only served to improve their position; they directed not only the Government astronomical observatory, but they even superintended the arsenal and became the cartographers of the empire. They had many adherents chiefly among the learned. Christianity, like Confucianism, had commended itself to the intellect of the country. In pursuit of this policy they endeavoured to harmonise Christianity with the thought of the literati of China; such a process was no doubt extremely dangerous, but they thought that it was possible to tolerate ancestor worship and the adoration of Confucius; whether they were right or whether they were wrong, while they did it Christianity had many educated adherents.

Another kind of missionary next appeared in China, the Dominicans, who made up in fanaticism for what they lacked in wisdom. These men offended every prejudice of the Chinese; they taught the harshest and narrowest form of the Roman Catholic doctrine. The foot was to be made to fit the shoe, and not the shoe to fit the foot. There were riots and troubles, and the Dominicans blamed the highly placed Jesuits and freely accused them of having denied the faith and of having accepted high office as the reward for unfaithfulness. Appeals were made to Rome. Rome, many thousands of miles away, wavered, unable probably to understand either the controversy or its importance. The heroism of missionaries travelling over miles of sea and being shipwrecked in their endeavours to reach Rome reads like a romance. But in 1742 the matter was finally settled by Benedict XIV. in a Bull "Ex quo singulari," and the Jesuits were defeated—a defeat which was completed by their suppression in China in 1773.

With their defeat the Roman missions entered on the second period of their history. They were no longer directed by very able men, and they became rather the Church of the poor than of the rich. They experienced constant persecution, and, to gain weight and position, they finally accepted the French, who were then in the zenith of their power, as their patrons. Such a course necessarily involved that they must do all they could to further the French interests, and the Roman Catholic missions became more and more an adjunct of French diplomacy, defended by France and on their side advancing the interests of the French. It is impossible to say exactly when this policy began. Louis XIV. had sent large gifts to the Emperor of China, but he does not seem to have had any intentions beyond giving countenance and weight to the Roman Catholic missions. Some one pointed out to Napoleon I. the great value of China, and the man of great ideas, always dreaming of that Empire in the East which he was never to found, clearly thought there was something to be made of this. He helped the missionary societies with funds—it is curious to think of Napoleon I. as the supporter of foreign missions. This act came, like most other French secrets of the time, to the ears of Pitt; and he managed that the information should reach the Emperor of China, and sent through a safe channel advice that the Emperor of China should look upon the Roman missions as dangerous and France as a "wicked power." Whether this advice would have been taken to heart or not is doubtful. Roman missions were unpopular in China; still they had powerful friends; but the discovery of one of their missionaries with maps of China intended for the use of foreign countries convinced her of the truth of the English suggestion, and Roman missions were put down at the beginning of the nineteenth century with a relentless hand. In 1840 there broke out the first foreign war between China and the West, and after this Catholic missions became more and more an appanage of French policy. Whether the French had distantly intended the conquest of China, or whether they merely looked upon China as an outlet for her trade, they used the Catholic missions as a means whereby French interests should be pushed. Certainly the author of Les Missions Catholiques FranÇaises does not hesitate to suggest that France was rewarded for the protection of missions by an increased trade.

In 1842, as the result of a war, a treaty was signed to which we have before referred, and in 1860 it was followed by another. Both gave missionaries extensive rights. Can you wonder that the peace-loving Chinaman, looking back on history, finds it difficult to understand why the preachers of the gospel of love should have been so often followed by the armies and fleets of the military races of the West? The coping stone to this policy of propagating Christianity by the power and influence of a foreign nation was placed by an edict which just preceded the Boxer movement. That edict astonished even the Roman Catholics, for the author of Les Missions Catholiques FranÇaises au XIX. SiÈcle speaks of the extraordinary surprise it was to the Roman Catholic body. This edict ordained that bishops and priests should have official rank in China; that the bishops should be equal in rank to viceroys and governors, and the vicars-general and the arch-priests should be equal to treasurers and judges, while the other priests should be equal to prefects of the first and second class; and that if any question of importance arose in connection with the missions, the bishop or missionaries should call in the intervention of the Minister or Consul to whom the Pope had confided the protection of the Catholics. The edict closes with three injunctions. First, that the people in general were to live at peace with the Catholics; secondly, that the bishops should instruct the Catholics to live at peace with the rest of the world; and lastly, that the judges should judge fairly between Catholics and non-Catholics.

This edict can perhaps be regarded rather as a victory of French diplomacy than of the Roman Church. French diplomacy had converted the whole of the Roman Catholic work into an agency for the national aggrandisement of France; the Roman Catholic Church had sold herself to the French Government; her old traditional policy of employing the powers of this world to propagate Christianity had involved her in this position; and she had presented Christianity to her converts as something which, however great its spiritual gain, had also very real temporal advantages. The Church was a great society which would defend you in this world just as it would give you promises of security in the world to come. So she had instituted a regular system by which her adherents were defended in any lawsuit or attack. This interference in lawsuits was, however, not peculiar to the Roman Catholics. It is an old Chinese custom—a custom in which both Romans and other denominations have acquiesced; still it was exaggerated by the Roman Catholic Church till it brought down upon her the anger of the Chinese official world.

It is hard for a Westerner, with his ideas of an independent court of justice, to comprehend the system. A lawsuit is not regarded in China as a thing to be settled simply on its merits. They are only a factor in the decision. The general desire is that, if all things are equal, justice shall be done; but together with justice the judge has to consider the social position of the litigants and their power of vengeance or of reward. The best analogy to a Chinese lawsuit is an English election. If you read the speeches and addresses you will conceive that the whole desire of a candidate engaged in an English election is that justice should be done, but in practice you soon discover that the influence of individuals has to be considered as well. A candidate who always disregards justice is universally condemned; but a candidate who wilfully offends powerful people, who is not prepared to give and take, to sacrifice a conviction here, to push forward a little beyond the line of justice there, is equally unable to gain the suffrages of the voters; and in China the judge stands in the same position as the candidate does in England. If he is convinced that a certain cause is backed by very powerful people who can secure him a better appointment and a higher salary, or who if angered might even succeed in getting him dismissed from his post, he decides the case in that litigant's favour. If, on the other hand, the parties are about equally matched in influence and power, like the English candidate he then considers the justice of the case; and therefore the first thing a litigant does is to try and secure all the influential support within his reach. Chinese officials told me that they have to have their cards printed with "for visiting purposes only" written on them, otherwise they are stolen and used without their knowledge in the furtherance of some lawsuit, and English Protestant missionaries confirmed the story.

Though this interference in lawsuits is a universal custom, its extreme use is peculiar to the Roman Catholics. To attack a Roman Catholic was to bring the whole strength of his mission, with the diplomacy of France behind it, against you. It was in furtherance of this policy that the Roman Catholics were anxious to hold official rank. An official will not speak to any one below his rank; the missionary finds access to the Viceroys very difficult; but if the Roman Hierarchy had this high official rank, the Bishop had only to pay a visit in his green official chair, when, by the strict etiquette of China, he must be received with all politeness, and his visit must be returned. To procure these privileges the Roman Catholics were prepared to sell to France the large and undoubted influence they had among many thousands in China. There is a certain poetic justice in the Roman Catholic Church suffering from the actions of the French Government at home.

Still justice compels us to remember that they have not been alone in this policy. Missionaries of other faiths and other lands have both relied on the defence of foreign powers and have interfered with the lawsuits of their converts. A Protestant missionary from the Southern States of America frankly defended the system. He boldly asserted that non-interference in a lawsuit would be simply misunderstood by the Chinese. When he was young he had absolutely refused to interfere in a case where a widow was being oppressed, and a non-Christian Chinese gentleman had interviewed him, and after some circumlocution, had remonstrated with him on his hardness of heart, that he, a teacher of the religion of love, should neglect the widow in her necessity. Still, the Roman Church, as in Ireland, as in France, as in Italy, is an institution which is essentially political; and the traditional policy of the Roman Church has been followed in China with the invariable result, first, that when the power of the State is used to promote her tenets she grows strong, and next when that power is withdrawn or becomes hostile she feels the loss of the earthly support on which she has relied and apparently grows weaker. This is, however, only transitory; the Roman Church, for instance, is growing stronger, not weaker, now that she has lost the support of French diplomacy, and the missions have entered upon their third epoch when they are preaching Christianity without any special support of a foreign government and are succeeding. For there are few bodies of people in this world who are more heroic and devoted than the Roman missionaries; they have died by fever, have been massacred, they live on a miserable pittance; I was told that one enlightened missionary, once a Professor in Paris University, lived on £12 a year; and their heroism and self-denial reaps a large reward.

Their most beautiful and most successful works are the orphanages which they maintain. They accept any of those children whom the Chinese mothers cast out to die, either because of their poverty or because they are girls. These children are brought up with infinite care and kindness, and are taught embroidery, lace-making, and other trades. No more beautiful sight can be seen than one of these orphanages, with the happy children hard at work and rejoicing as only Chinese rejoice in pleasant labour. When these children grow up they are married to Christians, and from them springs a native Christian population, which has never known any of the horrors of heathenism. As a rule they live in small societies. I believe there is an island on the Yangtsze which is entirely peopled by Christians. The work may be great, but the cost is great too. Many a life has been laid down so that these children might be Christians.

I recall one scene at Ichang. There rises near the town a great orphanage, and when we visited it, we found the French sisters looking weary and whiter than their white robes. An epidemic of smallpox had broken out in the orphanage, and out of 140 orphans, 28 had died of small-pox, besides which the sisters had suffered themselves from malaria. One could but admire the devotion of these women living far off from their own country, tending children whom no one else would tend, and gaining as their reward hatred and misunderstanding from the Chinese. A Bishop belonging to this mission had been murdered, and a lay brother told me that it was because they were accused of stealing children to make Western medicine out of their eyes. This strange slander arises apparently from the desire, which is not understood by the Chinese, to save and preserve the lives of other people's children. Chinese ethics have no place for such altruism. Your duty never extends beyond your own relations, either by blood or from official position. There is another reason, however, for this notion. The Roman Catholics have a system of native agents who are prepared to baptize any child, whether of heathen or Christian parents, who is dying. This system is very well organised. Some of these agents perambulate districts and some remain at fixed points. Perhaps not unnaturally the Chinese cannot understand this methodical search for dying children, and as a reason must be found, and as the reason that seems most probable to the Chinese mind is some form of personal gain, they have invented this slander.

Whether we approve or disapprove the general action of the Roman Catholics—and our feelings are probably very mixed on this subject—we must recognise that they are a very great factor in the change that is coming over China. For centuries they have stood before the Chinese as associating with Christianity the science and the knowledge the Chinese have always admired. The wonderful work done by the Jesuits of the eighteenth century has established a tradition of excellent scientific work which is well maintained by the learned brothers of the Ziccawei Observatory. Many hundreds of lives have been saved at sea by the splendid meteorological service they have organised, and the sailor who cares nothing for Roman or for Protestant walks down on the Bund to see what the Ziccawei brothers can tell him about the probability of a typhoon. The benefit of their service, though great, is not limited to the number of lives of mariners that their science preserves; their science is an object-lesson to the Chinese—an object-lesson especially useful at a time when materialism is taunting Christianity with obscurantism.

Missionaries in the field do not entirely recognise the connection that exists between their own work and the work of other denominations. The man on the mission field sees his bit of work, and realises that it is a failure or that it is a success, but he does not realise how intimately associated that success or failure is with world movements over which he has but the very slightest control. These world movements are dependent on many factors that must be beyond his direct knowledge, and one of the factors that influence the success of Protestant missions is the wide influence of Catholic work. Conversely every new Protestant mission that opens the door of a school or a college probably tends to augment the number of Roman Catholics in China. The question put to the Chinaman is not, "Will you be Roman or Protestant?" That was the question that was put to the European in the sixteenth century. The question is, "Will you become a materialist or a Christian?" And the answer he makes must be largely affected by his experience of the intellectual efficiency and high moral tone of those he calls Christians. I despair of persuading my Protestant friends that the reputation of the Ziccawei brothers is a valuable asset in evangelical work, and I equally despair of persuading the Roman Catholic that the splendid educational establishments of American Protestantism is one of the reasons why their numbers are increasing by leaps and bounds; but the Chinaman would probably think the remark self-obvious.

How small the differences appear that we think so profound was first brought home to me as we passed through the Red Sea on the French mail in company with a body of Coptic schoolmasters who were going to civilise Menelik's subjects in Abyssinia. As it was Sunday morning these young men came up to me to ask an explanation of the ceremony of ship inspection which is performed with some pomp by the French captain on that day. With a wholly exaggerated idea as to the religiosity of the French they had concluded that this was a Christian ceremony, and when I had explained to them that on a French ship it was illegal to have a service, they were distressed, for they explained that though they had been educated in many different quarters, they were all in agreement on religious matters. One had been educated in the Protestant College in Beyrout, and another had been educated in the Jesuit College at Cairo, which, he added in explanation, is practically the same thing. This statement would be regarded as accurate by the average Chinaman.

At any rate, no one can doubt the importance of Roman Catholic work in China. They now claim to have over a million of adherents, served by nearly two thousand priests, and when one reads that they declare that they have made in Peking alone thirty-three thousand converts in one year, one realises what a power they are in the Christianisation of China. In the West such figures would mean the downfall of Protestantism, but in China such figures mean the growth of a common Christianity which all denominations can influence and in which all denominations can have a share. Remember, though a million Christians sounds a vast number, it is small compared with the four hundred millions who now form the population of China.

Though the Roman Catholic missions were first in the field by several centuries, it must not be supposed that they are now the only Christian influence at work. The work of other bodies is extensive and very important. The pioneer society was the London Mission, which began work under Dr. Morrison in 1807. Very soon after them the British and Foreign Bible Society began work in 1812. But no great mission work was undertaken till after the treaty of 1842. Then society after society sprang up. One of the earliest was the Church of England Missionary Society, which has a very extensive work, especially in Eastern China. Among the earliest of its missionaries were the two veteran brothers, Bishop Moule and Archdeacon Moule, who have for half a century ordered its ranks with courage and self-denial. The Presbyterian Mission was not long behind them, and the American Methodist Missions began work practically at the same time; and so missions have gone on increasing till there are over sixty missions, over and above the Roman Catholic Missions, at work in China, with a staff of over three thousand five hundred white workers and a body of converts numbering over a quarter of a million.

The people who are opposed to missions will immediately say what a regrettable thing it is that Christianity should present such a picture of division to the heathen, and they will probably find a great number of people who are sympathetically inclined to missions and who cordially agree with them. There can be no doubt that it would be far better if the Christian Church presented a picture of unity to the whole world. It would be far better that we should all think alike; but if we cannot think alike, it would be a great mistake to seek for unity by encouraging people to suppress their convictions. Unity is very valuable, but it can never be so valuable as are truth and honesty. Far better to accept the truth and say that there is a difference of opinion rather than by denying the truth and concealing the divisions that really exist to give a false appearance of unity. If this is true of other parts of the world, it is even more true of China. Her national tendency is to regard conviction as of little importance, and on the other hand to lay great stress on uniformity. Perhaps one should say that this is the natural result of an autocratic government. Autocratic government naturally encourages the doctrine that everybody should agree with the autocrat. Now the advance of the West has been accomplished by encouraging liberty of opinion, therefore the people who are to expound the great doctrines of Western civilisation rightly appear before the Chinese world showing a great diversity of view.

It is most regrettable when liberty is exchanged for tyranny, when the acceptance of one opinion involves the persecution of another, when Christians not only differ but persecute and thwart each other's efforts. This may be an evil in our own land, an evil which we hope will soon pass away, but in China that evil does not exist except between the Roman and the non-Roman bodies.

There are great differences of opinion. The extreme Ritualist position is ably represented in China, the ultra-Protestant position has equally able representatives, and I have seen them uniting in the Shanghai Conference in defence of the Apostles' Creed against a Latitudinarian attack. To the Chinese I think they present not the aspect of different bodies opposing one another, but rather different regiments of the same army intent on overthrowing the same enemy; and though they are clothed in a different uniform and use different weapons they serve under the same general.

TRAVELLING IN CHINA--OLD STYLE. A RAILWAY STATION--NEW STYLE
TRAVELLING IN CHINA—OLD STYLE. A RAILWAY STATION—NEW STYLE

The American bodies are far the richest. Whether it is that the United States is a richer country than England, or whether it is that they are more liberal in their gifts to missions, or whether it is that they are more inclined to spend their money on Chinese missions, the result is certain, the American missions have every advantage that money can give. Their splendid educational establishments are a feature in many towns. If the American missions have the advantage of the English missions in money, both British and American missions have an equal right to claim that they have as representatives in China a body of self-denying and enthusiastic men. It would be invidious to make any reference to the excellence of any special mission. Among the British missions, the London Mission claims indeed the greatest number of converts, though the Church Missionary Society does not come far behind it. Again, the Presbyterian Missions and the China Inland Mission have a large and growing work. The latter is a most curious development of missionary policy. The missionaries, differing in many doctrinal particulars, have agreed to co-operate under the name of China Inland Missions in the west of China; they have agreed not to oppose each other in any way, and to give each other mutual support. They are under the head of a director who organises and arranges their separate provinces. A great feature of this scheme is that they effect a large saving in the expenses of mission work by co-operation. A white man cannot live in many districts in China without a supply of medicines and some Western comforts; they arrange for the forwarding of these things, and help the missionaries in their journeys.

Bishop Cassels is at once a member of this mission and of the C.M.S. He is a splendid example of the courage that is necessary for missionary work. He has been through the Gorges of the Yangtsze twenty times. Once he was unwise enough to forsake the small native boat in which he habitually travels and to entrust himself to a steamer, which, under the pilotage of a German captain, was going to attempt the rapids. They did very well till they happened to bump on a rock, when the captain lost his head, and instead of beaching her, he tried to anchor. The water surged in and soon put out his fires, thus preventing him from raising his anchor, with the result that the ship gradually filled and sank and the passengers had to swim for their lives.

The S.P.G. Mission is excellently manned, but suffers much from want of pecuniary support. I cannot help feeling that if it was but once realised how important it is that the capital of China, whither resort all the intellectual and ambitious men of China, should thoroughly understand the logical position and the reverent worship of the Church of England, that the necessary funds would be forthcoming. It is most desirable that China should understand that there is a via media between Rome and Protestantism.

Without wishing in any way to detract from the necessity for missions to other parts of the world, we may point out that China has at this moment a very special claim. No one would say that the mission work in India or in Africa demands within the next few years that the intellectual side of Christianity should be thoroughly explained, but this is actually the case in China. The intellectual men of China who gather together at Peking are now demanding to know what truth there is in Christianity. They must be answered by men as intellectual as themselves, who will be able with courtesy and force to convince them that Christianity is a religion that is thoroughly consistent both with modern science and with the intellectual progress of the world.

No better mission to undertake that work can be conceived than the North China Mission of the Church of England. This mission, under the leadership of Bishop Scott, represents with dignity the tolerant and reverential attitude of the Church of England. One cannot help thinking that if he had a sufficiently liberal support, so that he could have a college where he could undertake the education of some of those future statesmen of China who are desiring to understand Western things, that his mission might be the means of encouraging a movement towards Christianity among the scholars and statesmen of China. That distinguished Baptist missionary, Dr. Timothy Richard, told me that he thought that the dignity of the Church of England, especially as so ably represented by Bishop Scott, might be a great asset in convincing the Chinese literati that Christianity was a religion which would harmonise with their love of order and dignity.

Of missions of other nations we saw one or two examples, but they are few in number if you except the Roman Catholic Missions. It is rather a pity that the Scandinavian Missions do not throw all their effort into work in Manchuria; few races would endure the bitter cold of Manchuria better than they, and Manchuria is readier to accept Western ideas than perhaps any other part of China. She has felt and realised the pressure of the West, she has suffered under the burden of Russian domination, she has seen the Westernised armies of conquering Japan put to flight the northern invader. As we stood on the 203 Metre Hill and realised on that shattered hill-top how Manchuria has seen the full force of the destructive power of Western civilisation; as we counted the wrecks that then lay at the mouth of the harbour; as we looked at each shattered homestead, yes, and at the bones that were still unburied, we felt that the great land of Manchuria has a special need that some one should show her that Western civilisation can indeed produce something more lovely than shells and bayonets.

I am happy to be able to say that a splendid work is being carried on by the Presbyterian Missions; they have shown to the Northern Chinese another form of courage than that which was shown by the warriors of Russia and Japan. Two stories remain in my mind among many. First a story of the old days before Russia had made the Trans-Siberian Railway, before the Japanese had for the first time taken Port Arthur. A British mission doctor was at work. The Chinese, more suo, had determined to get rid of this example of the mercy of Western civilisation. They did not dare to kill him openly, so they sent a messenger who feigned to have come from a sick man out in the country. The doctor and his Chinese dresser, unconscious of the plot, readily obeyed the summons. They noticed that a child followed them, and they did their best to induce him to go home, but he would not. When they arrived at the village inn they discovered that the sick man did not exist. They were in doubt what to do, when suddenly the door was thrown open and several of the soldiers of the Viceroy's bodyguard rushed in, and seizing the two, they declared that they had stolen a child to make medicine out of his eyes. They then proceeded to torture the doctor by tying his hands behind his back and suspending him by them to the roof. Such was the agony that the doctor lost consciousness. They then took him down, and he was put into a loathsome Chinese prison, where he was exposed to mental torture as severe as the physical torture which he had already endured. He was told that he would be beheaded, and every preparation was made, and then at the last moment he was taken back to the prison. This was repeated till they thought they had shattered his nerve, and then he was allowed to go free. With that calm courage which has so often characterised the action of the members of the missionary body he returned to his work fearless of death and torture.

Another story, which has its humorous side, was also told us. At the time of the Russian occupation of Newchwang, the Russians had, as we have described above, been "pacifying" the town, and a crowd of terrified Chinese had taken refuge in the Presbyterian Mission compound, where there was only one lady. She, however, came from Belfast, and had all the courage of the Northern Irish in her veins. A body of Russian soldiers came towards the mission with the intention of shooting the Chinese. She took a horsewhip in her hand, and regardless of the loaded rifle or the bloody bayonet, commenced to belabour the soldiers with it. There are some things which are understood by all nations, and the use of the horse-whip was at once appreciated by the Russians, who fled before her, leaving her a victor and the saviour of her Chinese friends.

I know people say that women should not be exposed to the risks of a missionary's life, but the answer is that were women not employed, half the mission work would be left undone and the heroism with which women have endured death and danger has been no small factor in the spread of Christianity and in producing the change in China.

CHAPTER XVII

THE EFFECT OF WESTERN LITERATURE IN CHINA

Among the influences that have awakened China, outside the great lesson of political events, none has been more influential than literature in its many branches. The Chinese have always been a literary race. They invented printing about the same time that the savage Saxons welcomed the first book written by the Venerable Bede, and the influence of literature has therefore held sway many hundred years in China. But for the last six hundred years there have not been many works of original thought produced in native literature. Most of their writings have been commentaries on the Classics following along the beaten paths, or works of poetry full of references to the Shi-King or the classic poetry of the Chinese. The literature of China is characteristic of her civilisation. It is confined by an artificiality which has its origin in an inordinate respect for the past and an absolute distrust of the future. Every book looks backward to the period when China's thought was pure and great.

This period continued till the Anglo-Saxon influence made itself felt through its missions. Very early in the history of Protestant missions it was perceived that in a country like China some other appeal must be made than could be made by the white missionary. A nation reverencing the printed page to such a degree that men will carefully pick up a piece of paper and put it on one side rather than trample it heedlessly, for fear lest that piece of paper should contain words of wisdom, is obviously a nation that can best be reached through printed matter, and so Dr. Morrison, the pioneer of Protestant missions, devoted the greater part of his missionary life to translating the Holy Scriptures. The matter was not so simple as might appear to those who are only conversant with the civilisation of younger and less artificial races than the Chinese. It is not enough to translate a work into Chinese; the spoken language is nowhere used for literature. The literary language commonly called Wenli probably never was spoken, and is so full of artificial rules of construction that it is only after many years that a man can hope to write it efficiently. Chang-Chih-Tung says that it requires ten years for a Chinaman to become an efficient translator. That does not mean that it takes ten years for a Chinaman to learn English, but ten years for a man to be able to put into good Chinese the thoughts that he has learned from the West.

The written language of China, it should be remembered, is not a language in which sounds are portrayed by means of signs as it is with Western languages. Each character represents an idea, the only analogy in our language being the numerals and some few signs we have for simple words such as "cross" or "and." Therefore when new ideas are developed new signs are required. These can be created out of old signs. For instance, I understand that a railway engine is called a fire carriage. This, by the way, caused great confusion of mind in a certain district to the Christian converts who were conversant with the story of Elijah, for some of them erroneously concluded that Elijah left this earth in a railway train.

Another instance of the difficulty of expressing new things was afforded when a certain mission started work in China. They were in some perplexity as to the title that they should choose for their society. They wanted to convey to the Chinese that their denomination claimed especially to feed the souls of men. They explained all this to an educated Chinaman, and quoted some well-known texts. He immediately wrote down two characters, and assured them that they represented what they had said about the spiritual food that they provided, and would also be very popular with the Chinese, as indeed it proved. The moment they opened the door of the chapel they were besieged by hundreds of Chinese of the poorer class, who, after listening for a short time, went away discontentedly. The missionaries found out afterwards that the title they had been given literally translated was "Health-giving Free Restaurant," a most attractive title to the hungry Chinaman.

There is indeed another way of representing new words. The word can be borrowed bodily from another language and pronounced in a Chinese way, and the word-signs which best represent the sounds can then be employed. This is often done with proper names. For instance, a great Chinese statesman told me that he referred to Sir Edward Grey in his despatches to China by three signs which had the three sounds Ga La Hay, but this system is obviously open to misconstruction, because the reader might be tempted to give the words their normal meaning. I believe that such terms as X-rays and ultimatum have been so adopted bodily into the Chinese language. Ninety per cent., however, of the new word-signs which go to make up what the Chinese call modern style are new combinations of ancient ideographs.

One of the pioneers in this translation work said at the Shanghai Conference that the first thing a missionary had to do before he could convert the people was to convert the language. Until he had invented a new set of word-sounds to convey Christian ideas, the preaching of Christianity laboured under the very greatest disadvantage. The "term controversy," that is, the controversy as to what sign should be chosen to signify the Christian's God, was an example of this. It arose first in the Roman Communion and afterwards gave great trouble to other Communions. The choice lay between three terms—one signifying originally "Supreme Ruler," one "Heaven," and the last "Spirit," none of which quite expressed our idea of God. What Christians felt was felt by other translators also, and one of the great causes of advance in China has been the formation of a language which can now thoroughly express all the ideas that are characteristic of the West. Many of these word-signs come from Japan. Japan, using the same written script as China, and having accepted Western thought, is more easily able to compose the word-sign necessary for its expression, and it is in this way among many others that the influence of Japan will be very important if not paramount in far Eastern countries.

Every missionary body has tried to produce Christian literature; the great difficulty has been to get the translator. The method usually employed is to get a Chinese graduate, too often not a Christian, and to make him, under careful supervision, write down the phrases rendered by the missionary into Chinese. Even so the difficulties are very great. The object of literature is differently understood in the West and in the East. A Chinese scholar who was very conversant with both languages explained the difficulties by the following anecdote. Engrossed in the study of Western knowledge he had neglected his Chinese literature, and was in imminent danger of failing in his examination. Happily for him the night before his examination he read a classical author much admired by connoisseurs but not much read owing to his great obscurity of expression. A particularly recondite phrase dwelt in his memory because it had cost him so much trouble to discover its meaning. Next day he used the phrase in his paper, and when his paper was returned to him with the marks of the examiner upon it, it was obvious that it was this phrase, surrounded on all sides by the marks of his examiner's approbation, which had been the means of his passing that examination. Subsequently he went to Chicago University. "There," he said, with the quiet humour of a Chinaman, "I learnt that the object of an essay was to convey an idea in as simple a manner as possible. This is not the Chinese plan."

One of the pioneers in this work was the body which is now called the Christian Literature Society for China. Assisted by a brilliant staff, Dr. Timothy Richard has produced a great mass of excellent work which has profound influence on thought in China. No better test can be found of the wonderful work that they have done than the fact that the greatest statesman that China possessed, and also her greatest Confucianist scholar, should refer to one of their publications, The Review of the Times, as one of the causes of China's enlightenment. The Christian Literature Society has not, however, been the only labourer in the field. Good work has been done by the Religious Tract Society, which has depÔts in various parts of China for the sale of good literature; and there have been other societies which have also published books, including the Mission Press, belonging to the Roman Catholics, which is situated at Hong-Kong.

But in speaking of Christian literature we must not forget the various Bible Societies which have done such varied and excellent work in China, chief among which has been the British and Foreign Bible Society. Far beyond where the white missionary could reach, the productions of this Society have penetrated; even right across the deserts of Mongolia have their colporteurs carried their wares. Of the conversations which I had with various Chinese gentlemen one was especially remarkable as a testimony to their activity. My interlocutor was one of those fat lazy men who enjoy the good things of life and care but little for serious matters, and yet I was surprised to find that he was obviously acquainted with, at any rate, some of the tenets of the Christian faith, and I wondered how this indolent man had obtained such knowledge. I felt certain that his dignity would never have permitted him to have talked to a Christian missionary, much less to have listened to a Christian sermon. At last he incidentally mentioned that though a Confucianist he was well acquainted with the Gospel of St. Mark. I could not well ask him how he had obtained it, but no doubt it had come to him through the means of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

We happened upon another example of the influence of the Bible Society. We were coming down on the boat from Canton, and, walking on the Chinese deck, I saw a man smoking opium and reading an English book. As I saw he knew English, I addressed him; under the influence of opium, he was wonderfully communicative. The book turned out to be St. John's Gospel, and he was reading about our Lord's Crucifixion. He had only picked it up because he wanted to improve his English, but he was deeply impressed by it, and his comments were most interesting. He asked me whether it was true that when our Lord was crucified He had stood alone against all the power of the Jews and the Romans, and when he received an answer in the affirmative, he added, "Then He must have been Divine, for no man who was not Divine could have stood alone." To the Chinese mind, which is incapable of any separate action, which is powerless unless it has the moral support of the Government, of a Guild, or even of a secret society, the story of the Crucifixion appeals most strongly as an example of Divine strength of purpose. This strange contrast between the opium-smoker and the Bible was typical of China. The forces of good and evil were wrestling together for the possession of that man's life; the forces of good having been put into his hands no doubt by the instrumentality of some Bible Society.

But the good work that has been directly done by all these societies has been greatly augmented by the good work that they have done indirectly through the medium of some of their converts. A body of Christian young men determined to start a publishing house on their own account, the object of which should be that the published books, both translations and original works, should best convey to the Chinese mind lofty and noble ideas in Western thought. If these books were not intended to be definitely propagandist they were at least calculated to teach the ethical system of Christianity. The work of the Shanghai Commercial Press has had a great influence on the thought of China; from thence has issued forth a mass of literature both for schools and for the general public which has introduced Western thought to the Chinese. Many of our standard authors have been translated, and the Chinaman, moved by his love of literature, is now becoming intimately acquainted with every literary activity of our civilisation. When one looks at those strange word-signs it seems hard to believe that any one could read them with ease and rapidity; yet Chinamen say, though writing is a matter of great difficulty and requires much time, reading the characters is quicker than reading our system of printing, each idea being conveyed by one sign, instead of, as in our language, by many letters.

These signs are apparently things to which sentiment attaches. We heard a most interesting debate at the Conference of the Anglican Church at Shanghai as to the title by which the Anglican body should be generally known, and it was instructive to watch the differences between the views of the English and the Chinese minds on the question, as the debate was translated by a most able interpreter, Mr. Tsen. We began with what threatened to be a rather dreary Anglo-Saxon debate between the High and the Low Church. One felt the old atmosphere of the sixteenth and seventeenth century of English history very present in the room. The debate was on the question as to whether the word "Catholic" should form part of the title. I need not detail the arguments that were advanced on both sides; they are too well known. Then we turned to the Chinese translation, and at once the fires of Smithfield and the thunders of the Reformation disappeared as by magic, and the blue-robed men from all parts of China woke up to an interest that was as extraordinary as it was instructive. We gathered, by means of our interpreter, two or three most interesting facts. First, there was unanimity in the room that the title should not in any way, indirectly or by allusion, convey the idea that the Anglican Church had anything to do with England. The view of China for the Chinese obviously commanded the assent of all in the room; even those who had been influenced the other way by their teachers, had to allow that the word Anglican would be fatal to the popularity of the Church. When "The Holy Catholic Church of China" was proposed as a title, it was suggested by the white men that it savoured of insolence, as implying that the other communions did not belong to it. This met with no favour from the Chinese. Their argument was simple; we are all going to be one body in a short time, so the others can share in our title if it is a good one, and if it is not, we can share theirs. Then there was this feeling, which it was impossible for a stranger to appreciate, that each ideograph had a sentiment attached to it, and that therefore the title must be composed of ideographs which had not merely a suitable meaning but also a beautiful association. In the end they adopted for their title the ideographs that are used in the Creed for the Holy Catholic Church, not meaning thereby that they were the only branch of the Catholic Church in China, but that they were a true branch of the Catholic Church. There was another point made obvious to the onlooker, a point which will be dealt with further on in this book, namely, that owing to the different policies of the missions, the American body dominated in debate because they were represented by an extremely able body of Chinamen, while the English missions had as Chinese representatives only men of ordinary education.

But to return to the question of literature. Though literature has been instrumental in disseminating both the truths of Christianity and the noble ethical teaching of the West, it has also been instrumental in disseminating much that is evil and corrupt in Western literature. Perhaps it is not extraordinary that the Japanese bookseller finds that the erotic novel from Paris sells more freely when translated than the English story whose whole motive depends on a proper comprehension of the Christian ethical position. The Dame aux CamÉlias, by Dumas, is the most popular of the Western works, and one cannot but tremble to think what incalculable injury such stories will do to a nation which does not understand the relative positions in which those works are held by men of high character in the West. Chang-Chih-Tung refers in one of his works to the apparent immorality of Western thought; and if we grant that books like these are typical of Western thought, we shall not be able to wonder at his conclusion. Through the distorted medium of such translations Western civilisation must seem wholly detestable. The Chinaman will naturally say, "Your boasted morality is merely a hypocritical covering for a profligacy which we should never permit in our land."

Not only are French novels translated, but all the works which Western thought has produced against the Christian faith. Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe" is a typical example. In literature, as in every other department of life in China, two elements of Western civilisation strive for mastery. On one side there are arrayed the powers of Christianity and the interpretation of Western civilisation as a product of Christian thought; on the other side lies materialism, and the explanation of Western civilisation as a natural result of evolution which is developing an irreligious but most comfortable world. If China listens to the first, she will become like other nations, a great power, not only rich, but honourable, true, and merciful, the result of the teaching of Christian faith and ethics. If she listens to the second, the efficiency of China will be rendered terrible by a low morality, which will not only desolate and depress many millions, but even have a deleterious effect on the West which so mistaught her.

CHAPTER XVIII

MEDICAL MISSIONS

After literature perhaps we should place medical missions as one of the most effective ways of placing before the Chinese the difference between our civilisations and of showing them the truth and beauty of Christianity. There are three or possibly four reasons why medical missions are a right and effective way of conducting the Christian propaganda. First, they are an object-lesson of the love which Christianity inculcates. In school teaching we find that the object-lesson is the most efficient and easiest way of getting the human mind to understand a quite new idea; medical missions are object-lessons of the essential character of Christian teaching. Chinese ethics are very distinct in limiting the duty of man to certain well-known relations. They are five in number: the relation of the sovereign and minister, of the husband and wife, of the father and son, of the elder and younger brother, and of friends. No Confucian recognises the universal brotherhood of man; that is solely a Christian doctrine. Thus Confucius reproves the man who wishes to offer sacrifices to some one else's forefathers; that appears to him to be as officious as the duty of offering sacrifices to his own ancestors is important; a man has no obligations to any one else but to those who stand to him in one of these five relations. Very different is the tone of the Apocrypha, which is not of very different date, and which puts burial of the dead among one of the first duties of man without specifying the necessity of any close relationship.

The action of missionaries in coming to China was therefore wholly misunderstood by the Chinese. They were regarded as merely the emissaries of foreign powers, sent to spy out the land. Considering the way in which the Roman Catholic missions did as a fact identify themselves with the foreign policy of France, one cannot altogether wonder that the Chinese attributed to their mission the selfish principles they themselves would have followed. The first purpose, therefore, served by medical missions is to demonstrate to the Chinese that Christianity has higher ideals than Confucianism.

Their second great object is one that must appeal to the heart of everybody who has been in China. It is impossible to work among the Chinese without being rendered miserable by the appalling amount of suffering and misery that exists at the present day. The poverty of England cannot be spoken of in the same breath nor can in any way be compared with the poverty of China. Deplorable as is the condition of many individuals in England, harsh as is the action of some of our casual wards, any one who has studied both will freely allow that the poor in England are rich compared to the poor in China. Among the vast crowd that wanders along the North Road to London, you will scarcely see one without boots; there is scarcely one who does not get a piece of bread to eat when he is hungry; there are none who are suffering from untended wounds or unalleviated sickness. The workhouse infirmary will always open its doors, however harsh the Guardians, to those who are absolutely ill. But in China, starvation is quite common. Missionaries tell you how at certain junctures they have travelled along a road, passing man after man lying at the point of death, and those who are sick have too often no resource but to wait with patience the pain and death they foresee as their fate. The missionary feels, as he preaches the doctrine of love, that he cannot consistently ignore these suffering multitudes.

The third reason why medical missions are maintained is because they are a means of approaching people who otherwise would not hear the Christian truth. The man who has successfully healed the body has some reasonable hope to expect that the patient will accept that medicine that he offers to cure the soul. So medical missions have been started in every place. We visited many excellent medical missions, from chilly Mukden to torrid Canton. There are many stories told how in the days when the Chinese would not listen to missionaries, the medical missionary obtained that hearing which was refused to his clerical brothers. I was told one medical missionary found that the moment that he was extracting teeth was the moment when he could best advance his teaching. I have never heard the story substantiated; unless the Chinese are very different from us, one would have thought that the teaching would have had a distinctly painful association. Perhaps he took as his thesis the extraction of sin from the character. His success was equalled by that non-medical missionary who had the advantage of having a set of false teeth; these he used to take out before the astonished coolies and replace them; then having attracted their attention by this manoeuvre, he took up his parable on the need for taking away their sins from them and for putting new life into them.

The Chinese coolie loves a jest, and once he is on the laugh he will, unlike his English brother, be much more inclined to attend to serious teaching. One of the missionaries who understands this trait of the Chinese best is Dr. Duncan Main of Hangchow, where we spent two most interesting days seeing his hospitals and work and visiting his patients.

There is no better testimony to his great work than his obvious popularity. Wherever he goes there are smiles and greetings. He explains as we walk who are the individuals who salute him. That great fat man who stands bowing and smiling is a merchant of some wealth; his wife has been in the hospital; she has been tended by Dr. Main and by his skill has been cured. That old woman who stands by him smiling is another ex-patient. That young man with an intellectual face and a dark robe is an old medical student, now a doctor himself with a large practice, and he has settled near Dr. Main's hospital. And so his work increases and grows and the good he does must live after him. He takes us into the out-patients' room; they are a motley crowd, with strappings and bandages on various parts of their persons. While they are sitting there a lay-reader expounds to them the elements of Christian teaching. What a contrast to their minds must be the plain forcible teaching and the simple effective remedies and medicines of the Christians to the incantations and nauseous compounds of their native doctors. There is a great doubt as to what is the nature of many of the Chinese drugs. They always prescribe a vast number, many of which are apparently innocuous in their effect; they always give them in large quantities, and do not in any way attempt to isolate and extract the active properties of the things they use. You see a man eating a large bowl of some nauseous compound and you are told he is taking Chinese medicine. You ask a captain what his cargo consists of, and he tells you that it is largely made up of Chinese medicine. Some of the medicine seems to be prescribed on the principle of our old herbals; that is, there is a fancied resemblance between the plant and the disease. Others seem to come from well-known remedies administered in various ways; ground-up deer's horns from the mountains of Siberia has probably much the same effect as chalk has in our pharmacopoeia. But there also seems to be some possibility that the Chinese doctors have certain useful remedies which are unknown to Western medicine.

There is a strange story told in Shanghai about a certain remedy for a horrible disease called "sprue." The story is well known to every resident in Shanghai, still it will bear repetition. A certain quack called "French Peter"—I do not know his proper name—habitually cured sprue. Cases which English doctors had absolutely failed to cure, and which threatened ruining a career or loss of life, he cured in a few weeks. He had two remedies—a white powder and a black draught. He himself was a most unattractive-looking man. My informant told me that his career was being threatened by this horrible disease, and that he was expecting to leave China in a week or two, when some one suggested that he should try "French Peter." When they met, "French Peter's" appearance was so unprepossessing that the sick man's courage nearly failed him. He had been for weeks on a milk diet, and the first thing that the man said to him was, "Look here, take these medicines and go and have a good beefsteak for luncheon." He decided to try them. He ate his beefsteak, he took the white powder and the black draught, and I think within three weeks was quite well. "French Peter" would never tell his secret or where he got his remedies; at least he used to give different accounts to different people. I believe he is now dead, but on talking the matter over with some Chinese friends they assured me that the remedies were well known to Chinese doctors, and that "French Peter" had got them from one of their compatriots.

Dr. Main deals with his patients in the same cheery way that he addresses every one; a word or two suffices to discover the nature of their ailment. If the case is very serious, the patient is detained for further examination; if it is trivial, it is attended to at once by a native dresser. For the rest he himself prescribes.

Then he takes us up to the wards, and explains that the great difficulty is to get the Chinese to care for cleanliness. That is the same story in every hospital; they cannot believe it matters very much whether the thing is kept clean or not. The medical students will proceed to handle anything after they have washed their hands and think that the previous washing insures asepticism, regardless of the fact that they have touched many septic things.

Dr. Main's hospital is typical of mission hospitals—Dr. Christie's hospital at Mukden, Dr. Gillison's at Hankow, Dr. Cochrane's at Peking, and many others. There are also hospitals for women. We saw many; the first we visited, the Presbyterian Hospital at Canton, was a good example, impressing us not only by its efficiency, but also by the great service it performed to the suffering masses of China by training women doctors, who are permitted to minister to their sisters when etiquette does not permit of male medical attendance. The lady who showed us round the hospital spoke English fluently; she was dressed in the dress of the Cantonese woman, which suited her profession admirably, as it consisted of a long black coat and trousers. Some hospitals are reserved for the very poor; at Nanking, for instance, Dr. Macklin showed us over his beggar hospital. He follows the parable of the Good Samaritan most literally, and wherever he finds a poor, starving, dying man, he brings him in. Clearly he cannot afford anything but a limited accommodation for these poor creatures, but he is on the whole most successful, and there is many a man whom poverty had brought near to death whose life he has saved. As one looked at those types of suffering humanity and realised the good that Dr. Macklin was doing, one felt that the days of saintly service were not over yet.

Another beautiful work is Dr. Main's leper hospital at Hangchow. It was a weird and strange experience to hear those lepers singing our old English hymns. Leprosy, as my readers doubtless know, does not often leave open sores; it slowly eats away the body while it leaves the skin intact; and so you see men without hands and arms yet with finger nails upon the stump, blind men without noses, and very commonly men whose voices are cracked and broken. These lepers are housed in an old temple, in one of the most beautiful situations in China—a situation which is supposed to be the original of the landscape on the old willow pattern plates; and the beauty of their surroundings contrasts strangely with their hideous forms and harsh voices. There was an infinite pathos when by that blue lake and purple mountain, those harsh but plaintive voices sang the old tune of "Jesu, lover of my soul"; and though we could not follow the Chinese words, the faces of these poor sufferers were eloquent in expressing how fully they felt the meaning of that hymn.

But above all we should mention the great work that is being carried on by Dr. Cochrane at Peking. He has managed to induce all the medical missions in Peking to unite in founding a great hospital—a hospital which has received the approval of Government. This successful example of federation has solved a difficult problem. No doubt the efficiency of medical missions in many a town is impeded by their want of unity. A mission body will open a medical mission, and will send out a doctor or even two in charge; one doctor must go on his furlough, another is perhaps ill, and the result is that the mission is closed. The commercial community are rather ready to point out that the mission hospital is closed in the summer when there is the greatest need for it. The answer to the taunt is the policy of federation. While it is next to impossible to keep open the mission hospitals in an unhealthy climate with a limited staff, it is perfectly possible to do it if the staff is increased. Every doctor in Central and Southern China must have a certain period of rest, otherwise he will not be able to stand the enervating effects of a semi-tropical climate; and however possible it is to keep white men at work for three or four years without a holiday, and I know commercial people claim that this has been done in certain individual instances, it is in reality the very poorest economy. The mission doctor is far too valuable a person to have his life cast away by such a foolish policy of extravagance. He must have his rest every year and his furlough every seven years. But it is not necessary that the hospitals should be closed if the staff is big enough; a certain number of the hospital staff can go on leave, and when they are rested, can come back and allow others to go in their turn. Dr. Cochrane has shown at Peking that such federation is possible, and the China Emergency Committee is making every effort to encourage a similar federation in other parts of China. Medical missions are splendid examples of Christian charity and love, but they are rather sad examples of the lack of unity among Christian men.

Analogous to the medical mission are the missions to the blind and the deaf. The blind are a striking example of how Christianity alleviates misery, for the blind in China learn to read more quickly than those who have sight. The teachers of the blind have invented a system of raised type by which the Chinaman can read every word that is pronounced in Chinese. It is not our letter system, which they would find difficult to understand, but something after the nature of the Japanese system. Each syllable is represented by a sign; so, strange as it may appear, the blind man not having to study the character learns to read more quickly than the man with normal sight. There is an excellent school for the blind at Peking, under Dr. Murray's superintendence. There is another at Hankow, where we saw a most striking instance of the beauty of holiness. One of the masters at this blind school was a blind man himself; he was a most ardent Christian; he had been taught to play the organ, which, indeed, is a speciality at that school, many of the organists in the mission churches in Hankow coming from it, and one could not look upon his face without feeling a conviction that his spiritual vision was as clear as his physical sight was dark.

There is a fourth reason, and one which applies as much to educational missions as to medical missions, why both are fitting and proper ways to teach Christianity. Christianity claims to and does benefit the whole of man, not merely his spiritual side. Mankind cannot properly be cut up and divided into spirit, mind, and body. He is essentially one, and it is most necessary that those who are learning about our religion, should understand that while we claim every benefit should come from the spiritual part of our nature, we are prepared to show that we in no wise despise the body, which needs religious care as much as the soul. Neither are we careless about the mind. So the three parts of mission work go hand in hand, for preaching and prayer will heal the ills of the soul, the medical mission deals with the ills of the body, and the educational mission makes the mind healthy and strong. We shall deal with the educational side of mission work later on.

CHAPTER XIX

MOVEMENT IN KOREA AND MANCHURIA

One of the movements which will affect Christianity all over the East has had its origin in Korea. Just as the suffering and miserable heart of the individual man is that which Christianity finds most suitable for its home, so it is with a nation. It is at the moment of national adversity and humiliation that religious movements most readily rise. Korea had looked upon herself as the equal of Japan. From Korea came much of the civilisation which adorned Japan before the great Western movement. When Prince Ito with the eyes of a statesman was realising that Japan must either accept the domination of the West or its civilisation, Korea was immovably entrenched in her belief in her national greatness and in her contempt for the Western world. So Westernised Japan has overcome her ancient rival and teacher, and Korea is humbled to the very dust.

In many ways that humiliation is rendered more poignant owing to the lack of sympathy between the races. Though they both have taken their civilisation from China and have a common classical literature, they are diametrically opposed in many things. The Japanese are essentially a clean race. They wash constantly; they will not enter a house with their shoes on their feet. No one who knows them will accuse the Koreans of excess in cleanliness. On the other hand, the Japanese very frequently lack modesty. Many are the stories that residents will tell; and we have seen the Japanese women clothed in the garb of Eve appear in the public bath and even in the street. On the other hand, the Koreans may be corrupt and immoral, but they are modest. The women of Seoul as they walk through the streets cover their faces with their green cloaks, till one almost thinks one must be in a Mohammedan land. Those green cloaks are a perpetual reminder of the ancient hostility between the races.

The picturesque story is worth telling. The Japanese, knowing of the absence of the Korean armies, determined to surprise Seoul. They thought they had succeeded, when to their amazement they saw the walls of Seoul covered with what they took for warlike Koreans. The ready wit of the women had saved their town. They had dressed themselves in their husbands' clothes and so deceived their hereditary foes. The Emperor rewarded them by giving them the right to wear the man's green coat, which they wear not in coat fashion, but over their heads, the sleeves partially veiling their faces; and as one wanders down the main street of Seoul and watches the modest but gaily-dressed crowd of Koreans—the women in their green coats with red ribbons, the men in white garments wearing their curious top-knots and quaint hats—one understands the antipathy they must feel for the short, muscular, soberly-dressed Japanese who by his courage and daring has subdued them and now tramples on their national susceptibilities and ignores their national rights.

There are several missions in Korea, but there is one which, prim facie, would call for no special remark. It ministers to the white-robed Koreans in the same way that many another mission ministers to these Eastern peoples—teaching and preaching. Externally there is nothing exceptional about the missionaries. I will not say that their mission is uninteresting, but it is unexciting. They are Americans by nationality and Scotch by name and blood, and they follow the national Presbyterian faith with all its cautious teaching, with all its prim simplicity. No one would regard them as the mission that was likely to create a great excitement or raise a great enthusiasm, neither indeed do they so regard themselves. Their conception of mission work was the sensible and reasonable plan of converting a sufficient number to make them teachers and preachers, and then having educated them, to send them out to convert their own fellow-countrymen. In 1906 and the beginning of 1907 they were filled with dark forebodings for the future of Korea. The temporary occupation of Korea by the Japanese was obviously going to be changed into a permanency. The murder of the Queen had shown what the Japanese would do, and the victory over Russia had shown what they could do. Korea was at their mercy. Subdued yet not conquered in spirit, the missionaries, knowing their people well, foresaw that a bitter friction must arise between the two races; that rebellions and the consequent fierce repression must bring to their infant church a time of great trouble; and so, like the wise Christian men that they were, they took themselves to the Christian's weapon, namely, prayer. They earnestly prayed that in some way a great blessing should fall on their converts. That prayer was seemingly unanswered, the grasp of Japan was not relaxed. Except for the wisdom and gentleness of the great Prince Ito, there was nothing but oppression and sufferings for the Koreans. The Japanese army had learnt not only their military art but their statecraft in Germany, and the latter is traditionally harsh. Break, crush, and bully are the maxims which find general acceptance in the Prussian Court. Prince Ito, however, was a great admirer of English imperial policy with its maxims of justice to the weak, mercy to the conquered, and reverence for all national traditions; but Prince Ito could not control the Japanese soldiers, and the moans of the oppressed Koreans echoed throughout her land.

In the spring of 1907 the Presbyterian Mission held what is called its country class—that is to say, that the men who had been converted were summoned from all the country villages to the town of Pyeng-Yang, and there they attended for several days' instructions in the Christian faith. This excellent rule enables Christians who believe but who are ignorant to acquire a more ultimate knowledge of the truths of Christianity. These meetings are wholly unemotional; they are in no sense revival meetings, nor even devotional; they are essentially educational. Their object is to teach and not to excite. For the Scottish-American has a double national tradition that knowledge is strength. These meetings had been held one or two days; they had followed their usual uneventful if beneficial course, and showed every probability of ending as they had begun, when one of the Koreans rose from the centre of the room and interrupted the ordinary course of the meeting by asking leave to speak. As he insisted, permission was given him. He declared that he had a sin on his conscience that forbade him listening to the teaching of the missionaries in peace, and that further he must declare this sin. The Presbyterian missionaries do not encourage this kind of open confession of sin, but still to get on with the meeting and to quiet him they gave him leave to speak. He then declared that he had felt some months ago a feeling of bitterness towards one of the missionaries, a Mr. Blair, who was our informant. Mr. Blair assured him that so far from feeling that there was any need for this confession he regarded the matter as trivial, and hoping again to bring the meeting back to the point he suggested that they should say the Lord's Prayer. Hardly had he uttered in Korean the words "Our Father," when a sudden emotion seemed to rush over all those who were there present. The missionaries described it as at once one of the most awful and one of the most mysterious moments of their lives. They were not revivalists; they had not encouraged it; they did not believe in it; they disliked an emotional religion with which they had no sympathy; and here they were in the face of a movement which was beyond, not only their experience, but that of the greatest revivalists. They tried to stop it, but unavailingly. The Koreans, unlike the Chinese, always sit upon the floor, and as the missionaries looked out over the meeting from the platform on which they stood, they saw the faces of their converts racked with every form of mental anguish. Some were swinging themselves forward striking their heads on the ground, hoping, as it were, to obtain by insensibility peace from their torturing thoughts; some were in the presence of an awful terror; some were leaping up demanding to be heard, longing to free their souls from the weight they felt would crush them; others with set faces were resolutely determined not to yield to the inspiration of the spirit which suggested that they should gain relief by frank confession. The missionaries having failed to bring the meeting to a close, submitted to what they felt was the will of a higher Being, and the meeting went on till fatigue produced a temporary and a partial rest. Though the meeting was closed, the missionaries learnt afterwards that many Koreans went on all through the night in agonised prayer.

The next day they hoped the thing was over, and that the incident might be reckoned among those strange experiences which workers in the mission field must occasionally expect to encounter; but not so—the meeting next night was the same as its predecessor. They noticed several interesting facts. One, for instance, was, that the women were far less affected than the men. The movement did not reach them till later, and never so fully. Another remarkable thing about this movement was that though the Methodists are by tradition a revivalist body, and though they have a vigorous mission working in that town, yet the revival only spread to their converts after many days, and then neither with the spontaneity nor the fire with which it had been manifested in the Presbyterian Mission.

Of the reality of the confession of sin there could be no doubt. One man, for instance, confessed to having stolen gold from a local gold-mining company, and produced the wedge of gold which he had stolen, and asked them to treat him as he deserved. The manager of the company luckily was a European, who wisely refused to punish a man who had so spontaneously confessed his theft. Many of the sins that were confessed would not bear repetition. Some confessed even to such awful sins as that of murder of parents. One man in particular, a trusted servant of the mission, resisted confession, and day by day became more and more racked with mental agony, till the missionaries feared that his health would not endure the terrible strain of such mental anguish, and they advised him to make a free confession of his sins. At last he came to them with a sum of money in his hand; he had raised it by selling some houses which he had bought as a provision for his old age, and he confessed to the sin that was torturing him. He had done what is constantly done in the East—he had peculated. His position had been that of an agent whom the missionaries employ to make many of their small payments, and out of each of these payments he had taken "a squeeze." With these he had bought the houses which now he had sold. He left the missionaries happy in heart though empty in pocket.

This movement spread more or less over the Presbyterian missions in Korea, but never with such intensity as manifested at Pyeng-Yang. We heard it spoken of by a non-Christian Korean, a member of the Court of the Emperor of Korea. He had heard of it, and said men were saying this movement is a wonderful thing, for under its influence men confessed crimes of which even torture would not have induced them to own themselves guilty. A Chinese merchant also heard of it in Manchuria. The man came down to Pyeng-Yang, and happened to stop with the Chinese merchants. He mentioned that there were Christians in Manchuria, and the Chinese merchants immediately took an interest. When he asked what they knew of the Christians, they answered, "Good men, good men." One of them was owed by a Korean twenty dollars, who would only allow that he owed ten, and the merchant having no means of redress, had written off the debt; but when this revival took place, the Korean came with the other ten dollars together with interest, and what of course would appeal even more to the Eastern mind, with the frank confession that he had lied. This practical illustration of the effects of Christianity greatly impressed the Chinese.

When we arrived at Pyeng-Yang the movement was over. We went to some of their meetings. They were very common-place ordinary meetings. All that struck us was that there was a tone of reverence, a sense of reality, which made one feel that Christianity was as sincere in Korea as it is in our own land.

The movement has spread from Korea to Manchuria. In Manchuria the movement had not quite the same spontaneity that it had in Korea; it savoured more of the revival meetings of the West. It needed the stirring words of a great preacher, Mr. Goforth, to start it, yet there were one or two curious manifestations of power. One is worth telling. One brother was heard expostulating with another; he was asking why his brother had, forgetful of his family dignity or "face," confessed to sins which brought not only himself but his family into disrespect. The other answered, "When the Spirit of God takes hold of a man, he cannot help speaking." Two still more curious instances are worth recording: one in which two soldiers who were not Christians were so moved that they confessed their sins; another which seems to prove the presence of a force exterior to human influence or to the emotions caused by eloquence or moving hymns. An elder of the Church had forgotten or been detained from going to one of these meetings; when the speakers went to inquire next day why he had not been there, he asked them in return to tell him what they had done at the meeting, and they told him that many people had confessed their sins. He was deeply interested, and said: "I was sitting in my house at the hour of your meeting; I suddenly felt as if all my sins were laid before me, and I realised as I had never done before my many shortcomings."

And so the movement has spread through Manchuria to China. If it has lost something of its freshness, something of its force, it still remains a movement that may accomplish great things. No one who has read the history of the Wesleyan movement, and of the wonderful manifestations that accompanied its commencement, will look without interest and expectation for the work which this movement may accomplish. Let us hope that it will bring to China a sense of reality in spiritual things which the present materialist teaching threatens to eliminate from her national life.

CHAPTER XX

THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA

At the great Shanghai Conference we always spoke of the "Church in China," implying thereby that there was to be one Christian body in the Chinese empire. This ideal is lofty and not impossible. There is a reasonable expectation that the great intellectual movement in China will render the Chinese very ready to accept new ideas, and the rate of conversion in China gives one reasonable hope that the new ideas may be Christian and not those of Western materialism. If China becomes Christian there will no doubt be a great tendency to accept the unity of Christianity as an essential doctrine. As a race they clearly tend towards union as much as the Anglo-Saxon race tends towards disunion. The British empire has been held together by its fear of its enemies; the Chinese empire has been held together through their natural love of union, which is the dominant characteristic of the race. Remove the enemies of the British empire and she will naturally divide, but force the Chinese empire apart and she will naturally return to one body. Chinese Christianity will, if it is truly Chinese, tend to one body. This truth, which I think would have been allowed by the whole Shanghai Conference, opens up a train of thought which is full of foreboding and yet of hope.

One obvious criticism of what was said of the Church in China was kept largely out of sight at the Shanghai Conference, namely, that as the Roman Communion far outnumbers the whole of the non-Roman Communions put together, the Church in China, therefore, if it is to consist of all Christians, will be something very different to what the majority of those present at that Conference would like. Some men maintain that the Chinese love of unity will not go so far as to compel the union between Protestant and Catholic, and that in China the schism which has rent Christianity in twain in Europe will be continued. I would ask those who think thus if they think this is desirable even if it is possible. Once foreign influence and support has been removed, would not such a division soon produce a state of great friction, resulting probably in the destruction of the smaller body. But it is most improbable; a race which has habitually put together Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism will have no difficulty at all in uniting Romanism and Protestantism. I do not mean to say that Rome will conquer; it does not seem likely. The power of the Romans is great when they are preaching our common Christianity, but their peculiar doctrine of the pre-eminence of Rome is most unattractive to the Chinaman. After all, Rome is a very small place to a man who lives in China. Think how little we know of ancient Chinese history, and realise how little China knows of the history of our civilisation. Home at the present day is to the Chinaman merely the capital of Germany's weakest ally. The reasoning of the universality of the Roman Church, always faulty, seems almost ridiculous in China. The Chinaman on one side is conversant with America, on the other side she is in touch with India, while on the north she has a frontier which stretches for thousands and thousands of miles between her and the great Orthodox Church of Russia. One's eyes naturally turn to this immense line of frontier between Confucianism and Christianity, and one wonders how any Chinaman can possibly think of Rome as the one Catholic Church. If the Roman Church, with its foreign domination and its tacit acceptance of the fact that only members of the Italian nation can receive Divine authority to guide the Church on earth, is unattractive to the mind of the man who lives in the Far East, on the other hand its ornate and dignified services must be most attractive to a race whose national philosophy puts pre-eminent weight on dignity and decorum in dress and demeanour. If the Roman Church could give up her Latin services, could frankly become a national Church which owed no obedience to any Pontiff outside China, one would regret the possibility but one would have to allow the probability of her complete domination over the Chinese empire. Again one's eyes turn to the northern frontier, and one asks oneself whether that great Orthodox Church, the dignity of whose services is without parallel, and which frankly accepts the national Church as a reasonable Christian position, will not one day be a large factor in the future missionary work in China. After what we had seen and heard at the Centenary Conference, and after we had realised the great extent of the Roman work, we felt that till one understood why the Russian Church conducted no missionary work one could not understand the whole missionary problem; for when the Russian Church does undertake such work, her geographical position must render her important.

The whole of this question is of the greatest interest to the student of missions, but especially to an Anglican. The great value of the Anglican position has always seemed that, to use an election phrase, we offer a platform on which all those who call themselves Christian might possibly unite. The great rent which divides Protestant from Catholic seems not only to make it impossible for Latin Christians to unite with the Teuton Protestant Churches, but also renders it hard for the latter to unite with the great Churches of Eastern Europe. Of course all this has only an academic interest in England, but in China with its rapidly growing Christianity and an intellectual revolution surging forward to unknown possibilities, all this is of vital interest. What will Chinese Christianity be? Is it to be an ornate Christianity to which the converts of Rome and possibly the converts of the Orthodox Church will adhere, an ornate Church sullied no doubt with the faults of her parents, a Church possibly attractive to the Buddhist, for he will not need to traverse any great distance in thought to enter her portals; or is it to be a great Protestant Church, cold and bare, vigorous and energetic, a Church in which the uniform of the Teuton mind will sit badly on the Chinese convert, a Church which may in many things represent truly the will of our mutual Master, but a Church which leaves the Oriental cold and miserable, while it practically tears from our Bible those endless chapters on the decoration of Temple and Tabernacle, those constant commands to an exact and ordered ritual.

I write with what the Germans call "objectivity"; the Teuton within me dislikes ritual; but the Chinaman is no Teuton, and the Chinaman loves ritual as much as any man on earth. No one who has been received by a Chinese Viceroy in his Yamen can have the very slightest doubt on this subject. If the Protestant bodies hope to force on the Chinese a non-ornate form of Christianity, they will be doing exactly what the Italian Church did to the Northern races, and which produced the great upheaval of the Reformation. The Reformation was essentially the rebellion of the Teuton mind against a forced acceptance of the Italian view of Christianity. To force on the Chinese converts a Christianity shorn of all ritual and display will produce in years to come some similar upheaval. There is yet a third possibility. The Anglican position affords the means of avoiding such an upheaval, and of permitting a union of all Christians on the basis of an ornate service and evangelical Christianity. For while it permits a service equal in dignity to that of Rome or of Russia, it insists equally with the bodies who pride themselves on the name of Protestant on the supreme value of the Bible.

The very hope I have that Christianity will conquer China makes me fearful for the future. The age of persecution is past, the blood of the martyrs has been shed, and the seed of a Church freely sown. But after the age of persecution comes the age of heresy, and to preserve Christianity in China from future dangers, not only is union necessary, but a well-ordered Church bound by creeds, respecting tradition, which shall embrace all those Christians by whomsoever they have been converted who love the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great danger I fear for the future Church in China is one of Eastern and not Western origin. I do not fear the domination of Rome. I doubt that the Protestant Communions will succeed in ultimately persuading the Chinese to worship God in a bare building and without vestments.

China and Japan will, if they are conquered by Christianity, be neither Protestant nor Catholic any more than we are Nestorian or Eutychian. Their divisions, their dangers, their struggles, will arise from a wholly different set of circumstances. I fear the dangers will come from an effort to incorporate Buddhism and Christianity in one religion. This is all the more probable as it has doubtless happened before. Nestorianism and Buddhism are the probable parents of the present Chinese Lamaism. It is, however, not given for us to see into the future, but we can look back into the past, and we can see that our predecessors in the faith nearly invariably made the mistake of supposing that the old dangers were going to recur, and of therefore depending on the old measures of defence.

The future Church in the Far East must fight her own battles. She must solve her own problems. All we can do is to hand over to her the truth in all its fulness, and teach her to look for divine guidance, to forget such words as Protestant, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and Anglican; to learn merely the word "Christian" and the word "Love." If Far Eastern Christianity will have its battles to fight, it will have also its message to give to the West, "that they without us should not be made perfect." It may be that the message of the East to the West will be that as God is One, so must His followers be; that strong and mighty as is the West, there is in her an element of the very greatest weakness; that the discord that reigns between Christian and Christian, between race and race, between class and class, is not the will of the Creator, but is the result of the national sins of the white races. The Far East, with its greater power of unity, may illumine the West with a higher conception of this great virtue, and the world may be a far holier and happier place when the yellow race has preached to the world the great doctrine of peace on earth and goodwill to men.