II A WEEK-END IN CHINA

Hongkong is a city wonderful for situation and for trade. It has a landlocked harbor encircled by precipitous hills and large enough to float the navies of the world. It is the second largest port on earth for exports and imports, over six hundred million dollars' worth in a year. It is a meeting-place of the East and the West, a fortress of Britain in China, a conglomeration of people, a center of influence for Japan and for India, an object-lesson in sanitation, education, and municipal government. The dominating religion is that of the Church of England, and the Hongkong University, though endowed in part by wealthy Chinese, follows English models and has a staff of English professors.

I mention Hongkong only to make more clear my description of Swatow, its northern neighbor. The situation of Swatow is very like that of Hongkong. A noble harbor encircled by steep hills, it is one of the chief ports between Hongkong and Shanghai, and only a single night's steamer-ride from Hongkong. Its attraction to us lay in the fact that it is more Chinese than Hongkong, a principal seat of Presbyterian and Baptist missions, and not so dominated as is Hongkong by the Church of England. As Hongkong is an island, so our Baptist Mission Compound is on an island, separated from the city of Swatow by the bay on which hundreds of sampans and fishing-boats with lateen sails are always riding, and at whose wharves many a great steamship is loading or unloading freight. When our vessel arrived, we were quickly surrounded by a multitude of smaller craft, manned by clamorous tradesmen selling wares or seeking employment. The commissioner of British customs, who was our fellow passenger, most courteously invited us to share his motor-launch, and when we had landed on the other side of the bay he sent us up the hill to the mission compound in two of his sedan-chairs, each one borne by two stout men in picturesque uniform: and wearing the insignia of the customs office.

A word about the English customs may be interesting. To satisfy English creditors, and later, to pay interest on indemnities for the Boxer uprising, China mortgaged the larger part of her duties on foreign imports. Sir Robert Hart was appointed Inspector General, to superintend this collection of duties. He introduced system and honesty, where before there had been only disorder and peculation. From twenty to thirty million dollars are in this way collected every year. Swatow is the third port in the amount thus obtained, itself furnishing two to three millions of the aggregate result. But this putting her collection of customs into the hands of foreigners, though it has taught China her own wastefulness and the superiority of Western finance, is a burden so humiliating that it cannot always continue. When China fully awakes, she will realize her strength and will reclaim what her weakness ceded to Great Britain.

Our mission compound is one of the noblest in the East. It is due to the foresight and executive ability of Dr. William Ashmore, Senior. He began his missionary work in Bangkok, Siam, but was transferred by our Missionary Union to Swatow, with the view of opening China to our missionary efforts. He had Irish blood in his veins. He was witty and eloquent, fervid and passionate. But he was also a man of grit, and a hero of the faith. He wanted a quiet base of supplies from which he could send out expeditions into the heart of China. He had no means of any account. But he saw the possibilities in these steep and barren hillsides opposite Swatow, and for six hundred dollars he bought a tract which he gradually turned into a garden, with twenty mission buildings and residences so thrust into the rocks and so overhanging one another, that the whole plant seems a miracle of engineering. Like a fortress, it commands the city of Swatow across the bay, very much as Governor's Island commands New York. From its church and its schools have gone out a score of evangelists and native pastors, to turn Swatow and the whole country within a radius of a hundred miles into a present seed-plot and a future garden of the Lord.

William Ashmore, Senior, died seven years ago. But he left a son of the same name, who is a Chinese scholar of wide reputation, a sound theologian, and a leader greatly beloved. He has nearly completed a translation of the Bible into the colloquial Chinese—a felt need of many years. At his house, so wedged into the rocky hillside that a typhoon might seem equal to washing it down into the bay, we were most hospitably entertained. Here we spent a memorable Sabbath Day. At the church service, at least five hundred church-members and pupils of the various schools were gathered, and I addressed them on "Faith, as Both a Giving and a Taking"—a giving of one's self, and a taking of Christ to be ours. Doctor Ashmore interpreted my talk to the audience, sentence by sentence. The whole service was to me an inspiring illustration of New Testament order and simplicity, for my address and the sermon of Doctor Ashmore which followed had been preceded by free participation of members of the church, in which one happy father arose to give thanks for the birth of a girl-baby, after five sons had been given him—a great change from the time when new-born girls were despised and often thrown out into the street. This reverent congregation, worshiping God in freedom and sincerity, seemed the prophecy of a redeemed China. This congeries of schools, from kindergarten to theological seminary, with Ashmore, Capen, Page, and Waters for instructors, and Groesbeck, Speicher, Lewis, Foster, and others for evangelists, has already permeated a whole province with Christian teaching. It needs an institutional plant in the city, where it already has a noble location, and it also needs a motor-launch to carry its students to the field across the bay, where they can find opportunity to win the multitude to Christ.

Even Swatow is partly Anglicized. We wished to see old China, heathen China, and Brother Groesbeck gave us the opportunity. Only twenty miles from Swatow lies the city of Chao-yang, where this pioneer missionary has for eighteen years been stationed. Chao-yang is a larger city than Swatow; the Chinese count it as containing a population of three hundred thousand. It is the converging point of all the trade that reaches Swatow from a hundred miles to the south and the west. Yet all this trade is conducted through a narrow canal, so congested with boats that there are innumerable delays. Even when the boats reach the waters of the bay, the remaining channel is shallow for lack of dredging, and launch-progress is very slow. We had ocular proof of this latter evil; but we at last reached the dock.

Then came a reception entirely new to our experience, and one which we can never forget. Eighty young men from the mission school met us, all in white uniforms with sashes of blue. We passed through their lines, forty boys on each side baring their heads as we passed. Then a procession was formed. A brass band, with bugles and resounding drums, led the way. The student escort followed. After the long rows of boys came an honor-squad of Chinese soldiers, shouldering their guns and bearing the Chinese and the American flags. This portion of the escort had been furnished by the Chinese governor, who in this way certainly showed his friendly regard for the American mission. We concluded the procession, sitting in our sedan-chairs, each of our party of four borne upon the shoulders of four men. The band struck up, a great explosion of firecrackers ensued, and we began our journey of a mile and a half to the gates of the city, and then two miles and a half farther through its crowded streets, until we reached the mission buildings and the residence of Mr. and Mrs. Groesbeck on the other side of the town. The Chinese are great on ceremonial, and all this reception had been arranged by the students themselves, in honor of Mr. Groesbeck's teacher and his teacher's wife. Needless to say that I was astounded at such a reception, for Augustus Cæsar never made an imperial entry in Rome more thrilling than the triumphal entry which Augustus Strong made that day into the great city of Chao-yang.

Mr. Groesbeck said that no public notice had been given of our coming. Yet the whole population of three hundred thousand seemed to have come out to meet us. Imagine a street two and a half miles long, but only ten to fifteen feet wide, thronged with water-carriers and beasts of burden compelled to give way to our great procession! Every nook and corner of the way, the fronts of the one-storied shops and the entrances to the cross-streets, were all a perfect sea of faces—rows of children little and big overtopped by rows of half-naked men, with scores of women peering wistfully from windows in the rear—faces by thousands and tens of thousands, till it seemed as if the whole population of the planet had emptied itself into Chao-yang. I looked upon hundreds of splendid forms of men, naked above the waist, and carrying heads worthy of notice from any sculptor, none of them hateful, all of them impressed and wondering, and they seemed to me the embodiment of China crying out for God. When we were only half-way through the city, the endless masses of humanity had so impressed me that I could not restrain the tears. The sight was simply overwhelming. And all this the parish of one man! It is to save this great city, now almost wholly given to idolatry, that Mr. Groesbeck asks for money to build in its very center an assembly-room and an institutional church, and that Doctor Lesher asks for a hospital building to facilitate his medical work.

I made an address to those eighty boys that evening, as they stood at attention before me. Half of them were still heathen, but their fathers had sent them to this Christian school, believing that they needed a better religion than that of Confucius or of Buddha. I urged them to become soldiers of Christ, and to follow him as their Commander. I did not conceal from them the fact that such following might involve opposition and earthly loss. But I promised them that, if they suffered with Christ, they would also reign with him.

We returned from Chao-yang very sober and thoughtful, for our visit had been a revelation of appalling needs. Swatow seemed a paradise after such a visit. The smiling faces of so many Christians, and the signs of a truly Christian civilization, inspired me with new hope for the future. But our time had come for leaving China, at least temporarily, and India was at once to be visited. Our departure from Swatow was almost as spectacular as our entry into Chao-yang. There was no military guard, and there were no firecrackers, but there was a fine brass band of academy boys, to lead our procession of sedan-chairs, as we passed through the long lines of scholars who had gathered with their teachers to bid us farewell. The schools were all represented. First came the little kindergartners, then pupils of the grammar school, the girls' school, the women's school, the Bible-women's training-school, the boys' academy, and finally, the theological seminary. They numbered more than three hundred in all. Some of the teachers accompanied us to the steamer. We parted from them with regret, but we were thankful that they could remain to prepare the way for a new religion, education, and civilization in China.

My week-end in China leaves me with a new sense of the vastness of the heathen world, and of its absolute dependence upon Christ, as its only possible Saviour. The question whether the heathen will ever be saved if we do not give them the gospel, is not so serious a one for us as the other question whether we ourselves will ever be saved if we do not give them the gospel.