Chapter XXXIX · NOTES ON PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN CHINA

Two thousand four hundred and fifty-eight Protestant workers (including wives) represent the missionary energies and the many divisions of Christendom. The native Protestant communicants number 80,632.^[61]

The shock which China received through her defeat by Japan has produced, among other results, a disposition to make inquiries regarding the God, faith, and learning of those “Western Barbarians” from whom Japan received the art of war. Although hostility to Christianity as a destructive and socially disintegrating power has been recently evidenced by the anti-Christian riots at Kien-ing and elsewhere, the spirit of inquiry gathers volume, and expresses itself in large gatherings in street-chapels and churches, the thronging to mission schools, and the avidity with which Christian literature is purchased. Those who profess themselves ready to abandon heathenism and connect themselves with Christianity are more than the missionaries can instruct. In Manchuria there are six thousand inquirers in connection with the Scotch and Irish missions. In the Fu-kien province the movement towards Christianity is on so extensive a scale as to attract the serious attention of the provincial authorities, as well as emphatic recognition by our own consuls. In one mission alone of the American Board, in another province, the number of inquirers into the Christian religion is estimated at 12,000.

The growing influence of Christianity, however, cannot be measured either by the numbers of communicants or inquirers. For many years past, large numbers of Christian men and women have been scattered through nearly all the provinces of China, 519making their homes among the Chinese, with the avowed object of promulgating what is known as the “Jesus Religion.” Their methods of propagandism—preaching, conversation, schools, dispensaries, hospitals, and the circulation of Christian literature only differ slightly. Their knowledge of Chinese is necessarily imperfect, and they often make grotesque and even serious blunders. As their methods and mistakes in the language are much alike, so too are their lives. The keenest Chinese critic finds no difference in conduct and the motives which rule it, between the Scotch missionaries in Manchuria, the China Inland Mission and Canadian, etc., in Sze Chuan, the Church Missionary Society in the Fu-kien Province, and the German and American in Kwantung. These 2500 men and women are seen under the “fierce light” of criticism which beats upon them, whether at home or abroad, to lead pure, just, truthful, kind, honest, virtuous, patient lives, restraining temper and suffering long. These lives preach a higher standard of living than is inculcated by the highest Chinese teaching, and by slow degrees produce results which cannot be tabulated. The fame of the foreign teacher’s payment of wages agreed upon, without drawbacks, his truthfulness, justice, kind treatment of servants,^[62] control of temper, and accessibility, travels far, and each life so lived is an influence making for righteousness in the neighbourhood, exciting inquiry into the “Jesus Religion” and foreign learning, and exercising a distinct influence on surrounding morality in certain directions.

The direct part of missionary work need scarcely be touched upon. It consists in awakening the conscience to a sense of sin, by the preaching of “righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come.” It dwells upon the justice and love of God, on the atonement of Christ, on that Divine Fatherhood before whose infinite compassions there is not a stranger, an alien, a foreigner; on the “one sacrifice for sin once offered”; and teaches that the purpose of the sacrifice, and of law and gospel, is, that men may live “soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world,” in preparation for a stainless and endless life. It teaches that the morality of the Great Teacher is but a “shadow of good things to come”—of the higher and perfect morality demanded by the 520Divine law, and that the power outside ourselves which “makes for righteousness” and “helps our infirmities,” is the power of God; that “God is love,” and yearns over His wandering children; that He has “showed man what is good,” and that “His only begotten Son,” who in some mysterious manner “bore our sins in His own body on the tree,” is “He who is alive for evermore,” and “ever liveth to make intercession,” and that He “hath abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through His Gospel.”

This, in brief, is the teaching of all Protestant missionaries in China, to whatever church they belong, and with one or two exceptions all regard baptism as an obligatory confession of faith, and as the evidence of a complete break with the beliefs and practices of heathenism.

Under such teaching 80,000 Chinese in 1898 were making a public profession of the Christian faith. Many annually lapse; the greater number owing to family influence, and difficulties in the abandonment of the time and custom-honoured social observances connected with idolatry; some because they find the moral restraints of Christianity too hard for them, and others because they hoped for worldly advantages which they failed to obtain. A large number of professing converts are employed by missionaries as servants, gatekeepers, teachers, printers, translators, and writers, of whose sincerity it may not always be possible to judge, as foreign employment is much coveted.

But after putting these and other dubious converts aside, there remains a large body of native Christians, gathered into societies, which after long and careful inquiry I believe to be fully up to the average mark of our churches at home in essential knowledge, and above it in practice, specially in propagandist zeal and liberality—societies of men and women, in which the virtues of purity, honesty, self-denial, and charity are apparent. These converts contribute liberally out of their poverty to Christian objects, specially for the advancement of Christianity in their own country, in some regions contributing 6s. per head per annum. These Christian societies are constantly showing an increasing disposition to help themselves by the building of church edifices, as at Paoning Fu and elsewhere, and by contributing the entire support of not a few of their own pastors.

521A large number of these converts are earnest and successful propagandists, and the very large increase in the number of Christians during the last five years is mainly owing to the zeal, earnestness, and devotion of Chinese converts, both men and women, who owe their conversion and instruction, as well as guidance and inspiration, to the foreign teachers. In Manchuria a few years ago the senior missionary told me that out of between three thousand and four thousand converts he estimated that not more than twenty had received Christianity directly from the European missionaries, and the same proportion holds good with regard to the 8875 inquirers at the present date. In Che-kiang the present Bishop of Victoria estimated the number of converts through the work of Chinese as 80 per cent. of the whole.

These societies, in the beginning very small, and numbering from ten up to over four hundred members, are gradually crystallising into brotherhoods, with a very strong bond of union and definite aims of their own. They show in a marked degree the strong Chinese tendency to combination and association, and may be regarded as guilds. At present among the communicants there is a strong desire to conserve the purity of the churches by a careful exercise of discipline. Members who fall back into evil ways, as many do, are “suspended,” and if incorrigible are sloughed off, and it certainly would not be possible for such abuses as disgraced the church of Corinth to exist in the infant churches of China.

In brief these Christian societies are earnest in propagandism, zealous for purity and discipline, liberal in their contributions, desirous for instruction, docile and teachable, and apparently increasingly anxious to translate Christian doctrine into righteous living. These bodies in very many places are slowly exercising an influence in favour of righteousness, and are thus among the many influences which are tending to undermine the old superstitions.

If China is to be Christianised, or even largely leavened by Christianity, it must inevitably be by native agency under foreign instruction and guidance. The foreigner remains a foreigner in his imperfect and often grotesque use of the language, in his inability to comprehend Chinese modes of thinking and acting, 522and in a hundred other ways, while a well-instructed Chinese teacher knows his countrymen and what will appeal to them, how to make “points,” and how to clinch an argument by a popular quotation from their own classics. He knows their weakness and strength, their devious ways and crooked motives, and their unspeakable darkness and superstition, and is not likely to be either too suspicious or too confiding. He presents Christianity without the Western flavour. It is in the earnest enthusiasm of the Chinese converts for the propagation of the faith that the great hope for China lies.

Until now Christianity has made very slow progress. Among the special obstacles are: First, the national vanity, and the contempt for anything introduced by the foreign barbarians. Second, the posthumous influence of Confucius, whose moral teaching, negative and defective as it is on some points, is regarded as final, and his maxims as perfect in their adaptation to the needs of society and government for all time. Third, the Chinese language itself, with its absence of an alphabet, the peculiar inflections and tones, the guttural and aspirated modulations which must be carefully observed, and the necessity of creating a vocabulary which shall rationally express the Christian ideas, and yet not be offensive to a critical and literary people. Fourth, the carefulness and universality of home education in superstitious and idolatrous beliefs and practices, children being taught from early infancy that reverence for the divinities of the Chinese Pantheon, shown according to established forms, is necessary to success in life.

Fifth, greater than all these special obstacles combined, is that of ancestor-worship, the actual and universal cult of the Empire. To abandon idolatrous worship and practices is easy, but withdrawal from the worship of the ancestral tablets, with its rites and sacrifices, brands a man as a reprobate and a brute. These rites represent reverence, sacredness, and filial piety; they have the sanction of immemorial usage and of the earliest memories of home, and the first act of worship recorded is the worship of ancestors by the Emperor Shun on his accession, in the dawn of Chinese history.

The practice probably took its rise in a tender and beautiful filial feeling, but apparently it has come to be largely inspired 523by fear. A Chinese truly “passes the time of his sojourning here in fear,” and is in slavery not only to the terror of a dim and demon-haunted future, but to the present dread of the evils wherewith he may be afflicted in this life by the malevolence of the dissatisfied spirits of his ancestors. Dr. Yates, a very careful student of things Chinese, in an able paper on ancestor-worship, states that, including the cost of the festivals for the destitute dead, the enormous sum of 151,752,000 dollars is annually expended by the Chinese in quieting the spirits of the departed, and securing the living from their malignant action. If this worship ever dies, it will die hard.

Islam is absolutely intolerant of every form of ancestor-worship. The Roman Catholic missions, as my readers are aware, were agitated by a controversy as to concessions on this subject from 1610 to 1758, when Pope Benedict XIV. rejected all compromise. Protestant missions take the same course.

While making careful inquiries into mission work, both from the workers and from outsiders, and comparing the present status and conduct of Chinese converts with what they were when I was in China twenty years ago, I formed certain opinions on Protestant missions in China, which I now place briefly before my readers. At this time missions constitute so important a factor in the awakening of the empire, that no sensible or thoughtful person can ignore them without sacrificing his reputation for both sense and thoughtfulness. If I venture to write of myself at all in connection with the subject, it is but to say that I am not an enthusiast regarding foreign missions, but soberly believe that to “teach all nations” is the path of duty and of hope.

During the earlier period of my eight years of Asiatic travel the subject was of little or no interest to me. I may even have enjoyed the cheap sneers at missions and missionaries which often pass for wit in Anglo-Asiatic communities, among persons who have never given the work and its methods one half-hour of serious attention and investigation, and in travelling, wherever possible, I gave mission stations a wide berth.

On my later journeys, however, which brought me often for months at a time into touch with the daily life of the peoples, their condition even at the best impressed me as being so deplorable all round, that I became a convert to the duty of 524using the great means by which it can be elevated. To pass on to these nations the blessings which we owe to Christianity—our eternal hope, our knowledge of the Divine Fatherhood, our Christian ideals of manhood and womanhood, our best conceptions of the sanctities of domestic life and of the duties involved in social relationships, our political liberties, the position of women, the incorruptible majesty of our equal laws, the reformatory nature of our punishments, the public opinion permeated by Christianity which sustains right and condemns wrong, and a thousand things besides, which have come to us through centuries of the “Jesus Religion”—is undoubtedly our bounden duty. It is surely the height of unchristian selfishness to sit down contentedly among our own good things, and practically to regard China merely as an area for trade. Is it not also the height of disloyalty and disobedience to our nominal Master, whose last command, ringing down through centuries of selfishness, we have been satisfied to leave unfulfilled?

I was influenced not so much by seeing the good work done by missionaries, as the tremendous need for it and the hopelessness of the religious systems of Asia. Several of the Asiatic faiths, and notably Buddhism, started with noble conceptions and a morality far in advance of their age. But the good has been mainly lost out of them in their passage down the centuries, and Buddhism in China, aiming at eclecticism, absorbed so much of the dæmonism, nature-worship, and heathenism of the country, that in the number and puerility of its superstitions, its alliance with sorcery, its temples crowded with monstrous and grotesque idols, the immorality of its priests, and the absence of the teaching of righteousness, it is now much on a level with the idolatries of barbarous nations. There is nothing to arrest the further downward descent of these systems, so effete, and yet so powerful as interwoven with the whole social life of the nation. There is no resurrection power in any one of them, and to the men who here and there are athirst for righteousness, and are groping after Him “who is not far from every one of us,” they offer neither guidance nor help.

That there are such seekers is certain. Among the many “secret societies” of China, a “good few” are mainly religious, and a great number of the Christian converts in North China have 525been in their membership. An attempt to attain righteousness is their characteristic, and something may be learned from them of self-denial and aspiration. Their efforts all take more or less of an ascetic direction.

Among them are “Vegetarians,” who abstain from meat with the object of “rectifying the heart, accumulating merit, and thus avoiding calamities in this world and retributive pains in the next.” Several others are pledged to abstain from gambling and the use of opium, wine, and tobacco. The chief teaching of another is the duty of maintaining a patient spirit under injuries.

The books of the religious secret societies contain the best maxims and the highest moral teaching of “The Three Religions.” They exhort to chastity, benevolence, carefulness in speech, self-denial, good works, the conservation of the mental energies by rest and reflection, the cultivation of the heart, and to much besides which is good. In alliance with the good are idolatrous rites, incantations, divination, and many grossly superstitious and puerile practices. It is believed that even the best among these societies are not altogether free from seditious tendencies, i.e., the accomplishment of reform by destruction. But after making due allowance for what is foolish and evil, it is evident that in these unsatisfied spiritual instincts and cravings after righteousness, and above all in the substitution of a dissatisfied and earnest spirit for the self-satisfied complacency of the Confucianist, and the stolid materialism of the average Chinese, Christianity has allies not to be despised.

Up to this time (1899) the slow success which has been won has been almost entirely among the lower classes, and it has not been possible, by the methods hitherto pursued, to reach the literati, who in China are the leaders of a people whose reverence for letters is phenomenal.

Of the 2458 Protestant missionaries, including wives (many of whom are incapacitated for work by maternal duties), accredited to China, a large number are always at home “on furlough.” Promising Christian work is often broken up by the departure of the missionary. A substitute may or may not be appointed, but the “personal equation” counts for much in China as elsewhere. The force available for actual work ought not to include the large number of new missionaries, who must inevitably spend the first 526year or two in learning to speak Chinese, during which period they are useful chiefly by lives of consistent righteousness. Throughout my long journeys I never saw a mission station, except perhaps Paoning Fu, which was not undermanned, i.e., in which mission work was not seriously crippled and denied its natural expansion by lack of men.

In this time of inquiry into Western religion and science it becomes more and more important that missionaries, both men and women, should study the difficult language carefully, so as to fit themselves for conversation with the literati, and not be content with a limited command of the colloquial speech of coolies. It is being recognised in most influential quarters that if our trade is to expand, clerks and others going into mercantile life in China must begin the study of Chinese here under competent Chinese teachers. It might possibly be desirable for intending missionaries to do the same, and it would have the advantage of testing in each case the capacity for learning a difficult language, the incapacity being under present methods only discovered when it is too late to draw back. It appears very important that medical missionaries should have an undisturbed year after arriving in China for the study of the language.

Women’s work has grown, and is growing so rapidly in China that its regulation needs serious consideration. Admirable as much of it is, and might be, it is beset with special difficulties. The fact of a young unmarried woman living anywhere but under her father’s roof, exposes her character to the grossest imputations, which are hurled at her in the streets, and which can only be lived down by scrupulous carefulness. The Chinese etiquette, which prescribes the conduct seemly for women, and limits the freedom of social intercourse between the sexes, certainly tends to propriety, and though to our thinking tiresome, no young foreign woman attempting to teach a foreign religion can violate its leading rules without injury to her work.

For instance, it is improper for a woman to “ride” in an open chair, to receive men visitors at her house, or to shake hands with men, or to walk through the street of a town or village or to visit at native houses unattended by a middle-aged Chinese woman. It is not only improper but scandalous for a woman to be seen in a tight bodice, or any other fashion which shows her figure, and 527a foreign girl lays herself open to remarks which I scarcely think she would like to hear, when she appears in a fly-away hat, bent up and bent down, on which birds, insects, feathers, grasses, and flowers have been dumped down indiscriminately! The Mission Board of one large and successful Mission has found it desirable to issue rules for missionaries regarding dress and etiquette, and the China Inland Mission everywhere, and the Church Missionary Society missionaries in Sze Chuan have solved the difficulty by adopting Chinese costume, the only Oriental dress which Europeans can wear with seemliness and dignity. I think it would add much to the safety of female missionaries, and to the respect in which they are held, if those missionary societies which object to Chinese costume would agree upon neat, simple uniforms for summer and winter, fulfilling the Chinese demand for propriety, and the European demand for tastefulness, and which should indicate at once that the wearer belongs to a large and important international union, and cannot be insulted with impunity.

Again it is necessary for young women to remember that a yellow skin makes no difference, and that any familiarity of manner or carelessness in deportment, which would be unsuitable here, is ten times more unsuitable in the case of Chinese men, such as servants, teachers, and “native helpers.” In one province in which lady missionaries are specially numerous the violations of etiquette by some of them have been regarded as so likely to lead to outbreaks that the attention of our Foreign Office has been called to the subject. The openings for the work of sensible “godly” women are very great, but as a large proportion of those who go out are young and inexperienced, and the number is increasing, it is desirable that the whole subject should be reconsidered, and that women’s work and general conduct should have the advantage of experienced and effectual supervision for the protection of the workers, and the prevention of those hindrances to the work which arise out of ignorance and inexperience, and in a few cases out of self-conceit and self-will.

Having ventured on these criticisms and suggestions, I must add that much of the wisest, most loving, most self-denying, and most successful work that I saw done in China was done by women.

528My earliest ideas of missionary work were taken from a picture which represented a white man standing under a tree, preaching to an earnest, quiet, and dark-visaged crowd. Crowds gather round the foreign preacher in China, but this is often a temporary phase, with curiosity for its leading motive. His appearance, mistakes in speech, and attitudes are satirised, jeered at, and mimicked. One of the most popular theatrical performances in Shanghai a few years ago was a clever farce, representing a foreign missionary preaching to a crowd of Chinese.

Preaching is not a Chinese mode of instruction. Confucianism, still the great force in China, never had a preacher, and was propagated solely by books. It is said that there is not a lecture-hall in the empire. The Chinese methods of influencing are chiefly literary, catechetical, and conversational. The results of preaching have not been what was once hoped for, nor what they have been in some other countries. Many missionaries have told me that even the Chinese preaching in the “street chapels” is not fruitful in results.

It is possible that the introduction of Western modes of evangelising, not applicable to China, was at least premature, and has been the cause of much failure and disappointment. The foreign element, whether in methods, church architecture, house building, or the ignoring of Chinese custom, though partly inevitable, must always tend to represent Christianity as a “foreign religion,” and to perpetuate it but as a sickly exotic. It is, I think, of great importance that Christianity should ally itself with all that is not evil in the national life, that it should uphold Chinese nationality, that it should incorporate Chinese methods of instruction with our own, and conserve all customs which are not contrary to its spirit. The teachings of experience have not been thrown away, and many missionaries have come to see that these are the lines of progress.

Those competent to judge have no doubt that Christianity is about to make great progress in China. With this, many questions already emerging will come to the front, and among the foremost is that of native agency in foreign pay. There is on one side the certainty that China can only be Christianised by the Chinese, and on the other the risks connected with the worldly or mercenary element, which have been fatal to many such persons whose 529sincerity had not been suspected. Here again experience is teaching useful lessons, one being that Christianity is never so extensively and rapidly propagated as by the spontaneous efforts and renovated lives of private Christians.

Among other questions are: How far the differences between Western churches are to be perpetuated in China; the place of the Chinese classics and of English in missionary schools; the obligation of the Sabbath; the attitude of Christianity to certain Chinese customs, and to any modified form of ancestor-worship; social intercourse between foreigners and Chinese; the social and pecuniary position of a native pastorate; the self-government of churches; and in Anglican missions the retention of the Prayer Book, as it at present stands, as the sole manual for public worship.

In conclusion I think that there is now an “open door” for the gospel in China, and that the prospect for Christianity is fairer than at any former period, but that if the Christian nations fail to realise their obligations to enter that door promptly and in force, with an army of earnest and well-equipped teachers, China may follow the example of Japan, and accept Western civilisation, while rejecting the Christian religion.

“Talk,” said Mr. Gladstone on one occasion, “about the question of the day; there is but one question, and that is the gospel. It can and will correct everything needing correction.”

It may be that the gospel will yet bring about the regeneration of China.

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