The challenge to Christian missions : missionary questions and the modern mind

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Theology
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THE
CHALLENGE

TO ^

^

CHRISTIAN
MISSIONS

MISSIONARY QUESTIONS
AND THE MODERN MIND

BY R. E. WELSH, M.A.

w

SECOND EDITION

LONDON H. R. ALLENSON LIMITED
RACQUET COURT FLEET STREET
E.C. ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ J906

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Page

CONTENTS
I

Introductory: Where the Question presses . 13

The Storm-centre — The Missionary in the
Critics' Den — Points of View : Diplomatic,
Mercantile, Agnostic, Prophetic — The
New Horizon — The Challenge and the
Defence — The Fire that Christ has lit.

II

Political Complications : Is the Missionary the

Troubler of the Peace ? . . -23

Lord Curzon, Lord Salisbury — Relentless
Propagandists — Missionary Strategy —
Souls and the Commonweal — Why the
Missionary is Suspected — Foreign Agents
Provocateurs — Cat's-paw to France — Law-
suits— R. C. Dictatorship — Secular Forces
and Missions interlinked.

Ill
Many Races Many Religions : " East is East

and West is West " . . . 41

P. and O. Theology — Zone System of Race-
religions — Heathen Britain Christianised
— Christ of the East in the West — Miss
Kingsley, Kipling — Christ Catholic — A
Pantheon the Death of Christianity — The
Inevitable Break-up — The Salt of Secular
Civilization.

viii Contents

IV Page

Good in Every System : The Cosmic Light— and

Dark ...... 55

Bibles of the East—*' The Light of Asia "
— Confucius, Buddha — Fragments of the
Truth — Cryptic Prophecies — "Some Better
Thing" — Christ's Treatment of Hebrew
Beliefs — " Things-as-They-Are " — Bovine
Content — Elect Souls — Cake of Custom
— Mrs Besant and Pagan Morals — The
New Creation in Christ.

V
Liberal Thought and Heathen Destinies . .71

Dr Morrison — Where are the Convert's
Heathen Ancestors? — Carey, Xavier —
Relenting Hearts— The Child leads the
Way — Via Media — Spirits in Prison —
Principles of Judgment — Salvation B.C.
— Symbols of the Unseen — Attitude is
Destiny — Unknown Issues.

VI

Can the Missionary Motive Survive: Does
Liberal Thought cut the nerve of
Missions? ..... 87

Apostolic Motives — The Human Cry —
The True "Damnum" and True Salva-
tion — The Child Again — The Urgency
of Christ.

VII
Chequered Results: "Counting the Game'* . 95

Civilians' Verdicts — The Cost of a Con-
vert — Laying Foundations — Sunk Capi-
tal, Future Returns — Indian Census :
30 p. c. — Korea, China — Have Literati
Believed? — Stock of the Coming Race —
Christian Public Men in Japan — " Christ
Rules India " — J. Russell Lowell.

Contents ix

VI 11 ^*«*

Chequered Results : ' ' The Mission-made Man " . 1 1 1

Miss Kingsley — Spoiling the Natives-
Wastrels and Saints— White Men's Pre-
judice — Child-races' Slow Ascent — St
Jerome on Barbaric Britons — Happier
Raw?— Progress by Unsettlement — The
March of Civilisation — Government
Education — Liquor and Lust — R. L. S.
— The Best the Enemy of the Good?
—Fire-tested Converts — The Power of
Christ.

IX

The Men and their Methods . . • HS

Comfortable Missionaries— Wise Men and
Zealots — The Best for Abroad — Mr
Julian Ralph v. Capt. Younghusband
and R.L.S.— Questions of Policy— Dying
Races — Industrial Training.

X

The Aim: The Coming Kingdom . . .159

" Outgathering " v. "National Chris-
tianisation " — Livingstone — The Second
Advent— Prepare for Permanency.

XI

The Return- Value of Missions . . .165

Daring Faith — The Miracle proceeding
—Moffat's Vision— Dr Duff— The Social
Boon— New Verification of Christianity
— The Triumph over Paganism— The
Dynamic Love of Christ.

X Contents

Appendix A Page

The Powers and the Priests in the East . . 175

Recent Literature — France, Germany,
and Roman Catholics — Foreign Priests
as Magistrates — Lawsuits — Other
Sources of Offence.

Appendix B
Checks to Progress in India . . .184

Mr Meredith Tovinsend's Asia and Europe
— Europeanising the Asiatic — Caste —
Convinced but Unconverted — A Prince —
Mr Kidd's "Unborn Generations."

INTRODUCTORY
Where the Question Presses

n

I

INTRODUCTORY :

Where the Question Presses

With three different types of men, the minister
of state, the modern man of liberal mind, and
the civilian doing business or travelling among
native races, the work carried on by the foreign
missionary is usually a sore point and a storm
centre.

The utterances of British statesmen and
international events have been thrusting this
problem before public attention. When a
Prime Minister, an Indian Viceroy, and press
correspondents abroad deal gravely with the
complications created by mission work as " one
of the practical public questions of the day,"
it is clearly a living issue of the time which
cannot be ignored. Is not the missionary the
troubler of the international peace, the source
of racial embroilments ? This issue has been
expressly raised by Lord Curzon of Kedle-
ston as publicist, and by Dr Morrison, famous
as traveller and press representative in China.

At the same time, the missionary cause is
being called to the bar of the modern mind

«3

14 The Challenge to Missions

and required to justify itself in the light of
liberal thought. The discovery of good things
in the bibles of the East, world-travel, com-
merce, and the spread of broader Christian
sympathies and scientific knowledge have ex-
panded our mental horizon and dispelled the
old romantic conception of the heathen. A
kindlier view is taken of ancient Asiatic re-
ligions and of heathen destinies.

The citizen of the world, too — represented
by the late Miss Mary Kingsley, traveller in
West Africa, — has pertinent questions to put,
concerning the actual effects of the work, which
demand courageous consideration.

On the veranda or the stoep after dinner,
and on board ship, what is said as to the
" mission-made " native by the average layman
who knows life among dusky races? The
subject is often on the lips of civilians, military
men, ships' officers, traders, travellers, and
ladies who have had experience of native
servants. Many of them are frankly critical
of the missionary and his converts. Some,
while disappointed with the results of the
work, are silent because reluctant to say any-
thing against well-intentioned Christian effort.
Only a few of them are warm supporters of
the missionary cause.

Home-keeping churchmen, while quietly
faithful to the enterprise, are secretly staggered

Introductory 15

to find that so many come back from business
abroad with greater or less hostility to missions.
Hence, even in the Church there are numbers,
and outside there are many, who " don't believe
in Foreign Missions."

Missionary work is challenged on the ground
that—

1. Politically it is objectionable.

2. Religiously it is superfluous.

3 Morally and socially it is unsatisfactory in
its outcome.

From various classes of men, intelligent or
shallow, come questions such as these —

Are not missionaries the source of racial
embroilments and social disturbance ?
Why should we interfere with the religious

beliefs of other races ?
Is Christianity the thing that will best suit

them ?
Can it possibly be indispensable for their

salvation ?
Do not enlightened views of heathen
destinies take away the reason for
missionary work.-*
Does it not unsettle and spoil the native
and produce but poor results ?
Missionaries know that they and their work
form a frequent dish in the den of the critic.
They do not mind that. The Church or the
Society which sends them out may mind as

1 6 The Challenge to Missions

little. All of them are too busily engaged
upon their immediate duties to give heed to
what aliens say — aliens whom they perhaps
set down summarily as either worldlings or
enemies, as in numbers of cases indeed they
are. And certainly the final answer to both
friendly and hostile critics must lie in the
unfaltering fulfilment of Christ's great com-
mission, in the unconquerable vitality of the
cause. The workers must not halt in order
first to satisfy objectors ; the work itself will
answer for them better than all arguments;
there are no apologists so effectively defending
the faith as those who are living it and spread-
ing it. They feel that they are *' doing a great
work " and " cannot come down." Yet something
is due from them to honourable questioners.
Answer must be made when sinister facts and
grave problems are set before us.

It is noticeable that missionaries in confer-
ence are occupied throughout with their opera-
tions and their experiences, and take no share
in the controversy which their work raises in
the outside world and in some corners of the
Church. And those at home who have nothing
to disturb their satisfaction with the work are,
quite naturally, interested for the most part in
quotable cases of converts and in missionary
sketches.

Is there not even some prejudice in the

Introductory 17

Church against anyone who holds parley with
the critic, or who engages in discussions which
appear to doubt the wisdom of current methods
or examine the theology and social results of
missions ? The case in these respects is closed
by a foregone conclusion.

The Church, however, must not close her
ears to what is said, on the one hand by sea-
going people and men in the consular and
mercantile service, who look at the practical
outcome of the work, and on the other by
men who go deep into the problems of pagan
life and religion.

Much of the criticism current is doubtless the
irresponsible gossip of clubs and camps and
open ports. Much of it comes from objectors
who dislike all natives and carry over this
dislike to the work done among the natives.
Much of it is second-hand, the echo of common
prejudice caught up by easy people of the
world. Underlying some of it there is secret
revolt against work that condemns the treat-
ment meted out by too many white men to the
native, and that " spoils " him for their use.

Yet, as truly, it is quite unjust to ascribe all
criticism to these sources. There are weak
points and stiff problems in mission work and
its ethical outcome in the native character.
Occasionally a strong and courageous mission-
ary speaks out on the subject — witness what

1 8 The Challenge to Missions

Dr Stewart, of Lovedale, has written concern-
ing the misuse and disappointing results of the
higher education of Kaffirs.^ There are also
questions of missionary policy and methods
which are at any rate proper subjects for frank
debate. And the traditional view of pagan
religions and heathen destinies exposes the
enterprise to easy attack and calls for correc-
tion and reconstruction.

Some deduction from criticism must be made
when it comes from people who have no great
store of religious convictions, or who, like
certain men to be named in the following
pages, are infected with the sceptical spirit.
Mr Michie's Missionaries in China, the feeder
of so much other censure, has to be read in
the light of the author's disappointments and
alienation from the Christian community, and
of his ties with Li Hung Chang. Certain press-
men, whose journalistic animadversions have
been consumed by multitudes of home readers,
write out of an agnostic mind. We have to
allow for the personal equation in the sceptic's
standpoint, and must keep our judgment well
in hand.

Yet, even if the critic speak from the agnostic,
the detached, the irreligious, or the worldly
point of view, we are not to put his report or
his argument quite out of court, as though he

^ 2''he Experiment of Native Education.

Introductory 19

had no right to give his evidence. Others
have listened to him, and we must do so also,
if only for their sake. In any case, some of
the statements advanced against the work
proceed on a basis of clear facts, and must
not be waved aside or ignored. These facts
must be balanced by other facts, and shown
not to affect the cause as a whole when a
larger outlook is taken. Many are critical
because they are ignorant of the work, or do
not see the wider bearings of it and the price
to be necessarily paid meanwhile by the
Christian Church as the condition of ultimate
success. They must be supplied with informa-
tion and carried to the higher point of view
from which the far look is taken.

It is not Miss Kingsley, Lord Curzon, and
Dr Morrison alone — I take them only as spokes-
men of a considerable public — who force this
question on us. It arises in the mind of many
within the Church because the first romantic
period of missions is over, and they find that
the campaign is to be more protracted and
costly than they expected. The glamour of
the early venture is somewhat spent. The
conquest of the pagan world is not to be
achieved by a flying column. The Church has
to brace herself for operations which will prove
taxing and will last through many generations.
Backward tides will check the onward flow of

20 The Challenge to Missions

the age-long movement. This discovery not
only gives the critic reason for his question-
ing, but it also makes many a Christian draw
breath and pause wearily to discuss the whole
campaign.

Early illusions about the enterprise, then,
have been dispelled. A time of hesitancy may
follow ere the Church takes it up again in
steady persistence and enlightened faith. Even
if it were only a case of meeting criticisms
from without, we should set ourselves to realise
the true nature of the work, to take a wider
measure of the missionary cause as it is inter-
laced with all human interests, and to set
pagan religions, as related to God and the
Christian faith, in better perspective, and see
them at the modern angle.

Like all truth, the Christian cause has a habit
of going on its way independently of men's
praise or blame. It needs no defence. And
we do not come forward with any apology for
the missionary enterprise. The primary basis
of the work and the religious motives which
inspire it remain unalterable. No fluctuation
of thought and no criticism can affect our
Lord's universal love and world-wide mission.
The devout Christian heart knows a secret and
possesses a divine intuition which make this
cause a necessity. A fire has been lit which
nothing can extinguish.

Introductory 21

Yet something has to be done to interpret
the missionary cause. The task as here out-
lined is of much too great a magnitude to be
fully overtaken in a little volume of ten brief
chapters. It will be enough for the writer's
purpose if, without going into confusing detail,
he can ventilate the subject, and contribute
even a little towards the provisional solution
of current missionary problems.

II

POLITICAL COMPLICATIONS
Is the Missionary the Troubler of the Peace?

83

II

POLITICAL COMPLICATIONS .

Is the Missionary the Troubler of the Peace?

Lord Curzon has said of the missionaries:
" It is impossible to ignore the facts that their
mission is a source of political unrest and
frequently of international trouble, and that
it is subversive of the national institutions of
the country in which they reside." ^ He is
confessedly echoing the faithful challenge of
that candid friend, Mr Michie, of Tientsin,
who holds the aggressive missionaries mainly
responsible for the civil entanglements and
the outbreak of race-hatred which time after
time have brought such confusion and loss in
the Far East.^

According to him they have driven on their
religious propagandism without considering the
difficulties they were creating for the Chinese
authorities and the foreign legations. In their
meddlesome interference with the functions of
the magistrate, in their intolerant defiance of

^ Problems of the Far East,

^ Missionaries in China, by Alexander Michie.

25

26 The Challenge to Missions

native traditions and prejudices, in their "war
to the knife " against native faiths, they have
disregarded the religious customs and institu-
tions of the people, have denationalised the
converts, and will continue to constitute in
the future the chief obstacle to friendly re-
lations between the foreign communities and
the people of the country among whom they
reside. They have pushed far into the interior,
claiming the shelter of treaties which were
wrung from the Government under threat of
naval guns. When native animosities have
broken out and imperilled their lives, either
they have appealed for protection to their own
Governments, or their position has compelled
these Governments to come to their rescue.
In the French Chamber a similar view has
been expounded.

Lord Salisbury tells us plainly that " at the
Foreign Office the missionaries are not popular."
There are plenty of men ready to extend the
charge and say, "the missionary is at the
bottom of all the trouble, and will continue
to be so as long as he is not restrained."

The summary, loud-sounding answer might
be given that Christ's work must go on at all
costs ; that His kingdom is the greatest of all
Great Powers, with an imperial mission that
is paramount ; that He is a factor in all human
issues, and lays His hand on all institutions

Political Complications 27

and customs for their reform ; that, if His
agents are charged with creating social and
civic confusion, it is only the old complaint,
" these men turn the world upside down." In
Mr Michie's own words, "men of every shade
of opinion recognise the dynamic force of a
religion which splits up nations as frost does
the solid rock." He admits that " the mission-
aries cannot cease their operations."

" That governments should fight," says Lord
Curzon, " or that international relations should
be imperilled over his (the missionary's) wrecked
house or insulted person would strike him as
but a feather's weight in the scale compared
with the final issues at stake — viz., the spiritual
regeneration of a vast country and a mighty
population plunged in heathenism and sin."
And certainly in the last issue such " spiritual
regeneration " does outweigh every other con-
sideration.

We are bound, however, to take the larger
statesmanlike view of the work as it affects
the public life and ultimate progress of the
communities in which it is prosecuted. Unlike
certain missionaries who have overlooked the
civic side of the Christian kingdom, we must
not consider merely how to "gather out" a
number of " souls " from a doomed world, but,
like our Master, must link spiritual work with
the commonweal. We must take the far look,

28 The Challenge to Missions

and consider what will ultimately work out the
joint social and moral well-being of each com-
munity.

Many of the most influential missionaries act
upon this wider view of the Divine Kingdom.
But undoubtedly there are some of them who
have an eye for little beyond individual " souls."
These are the men and women likely to make
ruthless assaults on all traditions and customs
knit into the fabric of the social life, and to
disregard the offence and the complications
they create. At home there are the same two
classes of religious teachers — (i) those who
make an outspoken frontal attack on every
public and social evil, careless of prudential
considerations and of the impediments which
their vehemence may raise, and (2) those
who spread Christian principles and rely on
enlightenment of conscience for the gradual
undermining of social and public evils. Publi-
cists like Lord Curzon have good reason for
calling upon missionaries of the more relent-
less class to calculate whether their present
intemperate methods may not arouse an undue
amount of prejudice, and raise obstacles which
in the long-run will impede the progress of the
cause. But the misguided earnestness of the
few who, with all their good intentions, are
unwise and aggressively intolerant is no argu-
ment against the quiet, steady, many-sided

Political Complications 29

work carried on by the large better-class of
missionaries. Among so many in the field, so
variously prepared, there must always be some
who are tactless, blindly making mistakes. Are
diplomatists themselves universally patterns of
wisdom, and have none of them followed a
policy which has excited native prejudice and
created disturbance? In both cases the im-
policy of the misguided few hampers, but must
not silence or cripple, the work of the wise.
And even the wise (by nature) have to learn
by experience.

From the very essence of the Christian
enterprise, however, some measure of social
disturbance and even political unrest is in-
evitable. And the Church does unflinchingly
hold that, after a policy of prudence has been
followed, these troubles must be faced and
borne, that nothing — to accept Lord Curzon's
charge — is of such moment to the races of
mankind as their moral regeneration, which,
as in our own history, may involve ferment
and disruption in the process.

Coarse pamphleteers among the Chinese
literati issue gross caricatures of Christianity
and charge the missionaries with the foulest
crimes and vices. Such things cannot be
averted under any Christian policy. Orphan-
ages and medical missions are accused of
kidnapping children and turning weakling

30 The Challenge to Missions

infants to hideous medical uses. Only by-
continuing their beneficent work among multi-
plying numbers can these humane agencies
wear down blind prejudice. There are many
such misunderstandings and animosities which
are unavoidable until time and experience have
dispelled them.

But against some native prejudices, it may
well be, sufficient precautions have not been
taken in the past.

Lord Curzon is admittedly correct when he
says : " The institution of sisterhoods planted
alongside of male establishments, the spectacle
of unmarried persons of both sexes residing
and working together both in public and
private, and of girls making long journeys
into the interior without responsible escort,
are sources of misunderstanding at which the
pure-minded may scoff, but which in many
cases have more to do with anti-missionary
feeling in China than any amount of national
hostility or doctrinal antagonism." Even the
Western handshake and the friendly kiss are
grounds of suspicion.

Mr Julian Ralph demands that on this
account all women missionaries should be
withdrawn from China. This cannot be; yet
every reasonable effort should be made, even
at the sacrifice of freedom of movement and
social intercourse, to defer to native concep-

Political Complications 31

tions of etiquette and modesty. But most
missionaries have already learnt prudence in
these respects, and some misunderstanding
will be unavoidable until the Asiatic is brought
to a more just and enlightened appreciation of
the Christian domestic relationships.

Much offence has been given, at first un-
wittingly, by the choice of sites for mission
buildings where the feng shui or good luck
of a native house or grave has been spoilt.
In Tokio, Pekin, Canton, and elsewhere
cathedrals and churches have been erected
on high situations where they have been like
an "evil eye," offending the earth-supersti-
tions of the citizens ; and some of these have
had to be removed for this reason. Even rail-
way lines have had to make a detour in order
to escape any seeming dishonour to the graves
of the dead.

Most missionaries have learnt, a few may
still have to learn, to treat the sacred things
and even the superstitions of the people with
proper forbearance and without signs of brusque
contempt. On the other hand, what can the
missionary do to disarm the popular suspicion
that he bewitches his neighbours and is the
cause of their ailments and of droughts and
floods? Much of the hostility which the
censors ascribe to Christian missions cannot
be averted by the most prudent care, and

32 The Challenge to Missions

must be faced and weathered in patient
goodness.

But is the Christian religion the real ground
of native hostility ? In some measure, especi-
ally at first when the missionary's motives are
not understood, it is. That is to be so far
expected, for reasons already indicated. But
that accounts for only a fraction of the
antagonism aroused, as the greatest journal
in the land, at a recent crisis, argued vigor-
ously and proved. For evidence take the fact
that, when native officials executed murderous
edicts and refused safe conduct to foreigners
taking refuge under their care, missionaries
who took flight were in many instances
harboured with the utmost friendliness by the
humbler classes of the people, and even
sheltered and helped on their perilous way
by minor officials and priests who in the act
were at their risk disregarding superior orders.
In short, there has been no popular fury visible
in such crises.

The missionary in certain countries is hated,
not usually to any appreciable extent on account
of his religion, nor on his own personal account
— he is found to be harmless and kind — but
because he is suspected of being an advance
agent of a conquering foreign power. The
people cannot easily understand his purely
benevolent aims — especially where he has not

Political Complications 33

been tried by time and experience. Why has
he come ? For business ? If not, then for what
purpose? The answer, simple enough to us,
only breeds mystery in the native mind. As
Lord Curzon tells, the treaties by which the
missionary travels and resides in the country
were wrung from a reluctant government by
shrewd scheming or armed force — witness the
dishonourable interpolation in the Chinese text
of the French Convention made in i860.
"Christianity," says Mr Michie, "is therefore
inseparably associated with the humihation of
the empire (Chinese). The missionaries bear
the brunt" of the animosity. Their presence
is a perpetual reminder of the hated "foreign
devils," and seems to threaten foreign domina-
tion. Like all strangers, et dona ferentes^ they
are suspected of hiding treachery behind their
gifts, of creating a foreign disloyal party, and of
being spies and forerunners of the foreign army.^

^ Since these pages were composed a Secretary of Legation
and Acting Minister at Pekin, Mr Chester Holcombe, has
written: "It is far too commonly believed that missionaries
are at once the main cause and the special object of the anti-
foreign feeling so universal and so intense throughout China.
The facts sustain no such belief. Missionaries as such have
had little to do with this bitter hostility to foreigners. They
have suffered heavily from it, but it is not of their creation.
Christianity is objected to, not so much because it is Christi-
anity, as because it is a Western religion. And those who
preach it are objectionable to the Chinese, not as preachers
but as foreigners." {The Real Chinese Quesiion.)

34 The Challenge to Missions

No wonder they are looked on as political
agents. The molested or murdered missionary
has been used as the convenient excuse for
military interference or for demanding " con-
cessions." Under this false cloak Germany
concealed her policy of " grab " when she seized
Kiao-chau : would that she were solitary in
such practices !

France has openly employed the Roman
Catholic mission as a mere cat's-paw. Roman
Catholics have for two centuries sought political
power in China. With the sinister help of
France, they have lately compelled the Chinese
Government to grant them an independent
status and authority as high officials of the
empire.

Is it known to the British public that the
Roman Catholic clergy have secured the right
to sit on equal terms beside the Chinese judge,
to impose their own verdict on the magistrate
in every case in which one of their converts, or
even one of their friends, is involved ? When
certain Roman priests travel, they travel as
high officials, armed, and accompanied with a
retinue of armed supporters. They have
equipped many of their converts with arms.

It is to the Romanist missionary that the
shady character goes, who for his offences
wants protection against the strong arm of
the law. When the priest takes the offender

Political Complications 35

under his wing, the case must be disposed of
as he dictates. He can enter the courts and
defy native authority.^ "Bishops are entitled
to demand interviews and conduct affairs
with viceroys and governors, and priests with
prefects and magistrates, just as if they were
possessed of ministerial or consular rank."^
They have established an imperiuni in imperio.
Lord Curzon declares that this is the chief
fear of the Chinese Government. That in-
dividual missionaries of the Roman Church
deserve honour for their personal devotion
and work is not in question ; it is the policy,
not the individual, that is here accused.

1 See Appendix A., p. 175, for ample confirmation and still
graver statements given, since these pages were set up, in H.
C. Thomson's China and the Powers, A. R. Colquhoun's Over-
land to China, A. H. Smith's China in Convulsion. See also
Dr J. Ross's Situation in China, and The Chinese Crisis by
Gilbert M'Intosh.

^ Referring to the resentment against powerful bodies creating
an imperium in imperio, the Times, in a remarkable pronounce-
ment on the above lines, declares that "a distinction must be
established between the missionaries of the different Protestant
denominations and those of the Roman Catholic Church." The
latter have displayed the same fortitude and devotion as the
former. " But the claims set up by France, and more recently
by Germany, to exercise a peculiar protectorate over Roman
Catholic Missionaries, and indirectly even over native Roman
Catholics, and the methods by which that protectorate has in
cases been exercised, must give some colour to the charge that,
under the cloak of religious propaganda, political objects have
not infrequently been pursued and achieved." (November
15, 1901.)

36 The Challenge to Missions

Such facts as the above are known to the
natives all over the land. And it was under
compulsion from France that these arrogant
claims were successfully pressed. Is it any
wonder that the people, who, at first, class all
missionaries together, see in their persons
political emissaries, and distrust and hate
them accordingly? Is it not natural that
some of the most shifty citizens should seek
admission to the convenient Roman fold ?

The hostility of the Chinese to the foreign
missionary, which is raised in the secular press
as the hue-and-cry against the whole work, is
ten times more due to this overbearing domina-
tion of native authority and insult to native
justice by the Roman Catholics, backed by
foreign forces, than to any other cause.

Let the blame be laid on the right shoulders.
Let it be known that Protestant missions have
never sought, and have refused to accept, privi-
leges so subversive of Chinese rule. " In China,"
says Lord Curzon, " it not infrequently happens
that a shady character will suddenly find salva-
tion for the sake of the protection which it
may be expected to confer upon him." But
Protestant missionaries have refused to take
up the legal cases of their converts ; they will
not have their churches turned into a cave of
Adullam. They will not champion even the
Christians whom they believe to have justice

Political Complications 2>7

on their side, lest they encourage others out-
side to attach themselves to the mission for
the sake of the protection expected. Their
policy, however, does not avert the animosity
which the different tactics of the Roman Church
have brought down upon the whole missionary
propaganda. It takes the Chinaman some
time to discriminate between the innocent
Protestant and the Roman offender against
native authority.

It is charged against the missionaries that
they clamour for a gunboat and the avenging
sword when they are molested and in peril of
their lives. But comparatively seldom has such
an outcry been heard from Protestant mission-
aries. Quite as often it is the foreign Power,
whose subject the missionary is, which feels
compelled to go to his relief or to teach the
Chinese a lesson over his sufferings. It would
usually be as near the truth to say that the
foreign Power takes advantage of the mission-
aries' case for its own political ends.

Now that a new progressive and more
hospitable spirit is being displayed by the
best Chinese leaders, it is significant that they
are turning to enlightened missionaries for
their help, and making use of the works of
Western learning on history, science, and social
economics, which the missionaries have trans-
lated into Chinese or have specially written.

38 The Challenge to Missions

Already there are signs that enlightened native
leaders will call to their aid in certain social
and educational matters the best class of
foreign missionaries, as Japan availed itself of
the invaluable services of Dr Verbeck when
it awoke from its mediaeval sleep and opened
a new epoch in its history.

Political complications do indeed arise at
times as the indirect outcome of missionary
work in certain countries. But the converse
is not less true, and true, not in China alone,
but in every foreign nation.

The Christian cause is constantly complicated
by the action which governments, politicians,
armies, and civilians take in their relations
with yellow and dusky races. This has been
seen repeatedly in the making of treaties,
the waging of wars, and the general policy of
governments — in, for example, the French
conquest of Madagascar. To be more specific,
take for illustration the Government system
of education in India (of which more will fall
to be said later), the Cantonment system, the
opium trade forced on China (which now
cultivates the poppy but remembers the deadly
wrong), the Glen Grey Act in Cape Colony
and other laws which make it hard for the
Kaffir to hold land and which drive him into
locations, the settlement of the endless Native

Political Complications 39

Question in other countries besides South
Africa, and the Liquor Laws adopted by
the authorities. In these and many other
matters of political policy the interests of the
Christian cause are involved for better or for
worse. Every public action works round for
the benefit or the detriment of the moral and
social life of the people, and in many ways
affects the prospects of Christian work. It
is easy to see how, for example, any unjust
treatment meted out by Powers nominally
Christian to dark-skinned races of the world
conveys to their minds a hostile and false im-
pression as to the true character of Christianity.

Not with politics only, however, is the
missionary cause interlaced.

What experience have native races had of
foreign residents generally, of prospectors,
soldiers, and mercantile men? How have
traders as a class behaved to them? Some
industries have been started among them which
have become instrumental in their develop-
ment. On the other hand what has been the
effect of the cheap and fiery liquor supplied
to them on easy terms ? The Europeans and
Americans sent out to train native forces, to
act as magistrates, or as professors in colleges,
and to build railways — what influences and
habits, wholesome or deleterious, have they
carried with them ? Has the advent of public

40 The Challenge to Missions

men and men of business been accompanied
by the dissemination of sceptical literature,
creating the impression among the enlightened
that the modern white man does not really
believe in Christianity? Later in these pages
it will be shown how these questions have to
be put in the same breath with the missionary
question.

Enough to indicate here that the Christian
cause, abroad as at home, is interlaced with
the entire political, civil, commercial, and pro-
fessional life by which it is accompanied. The
world needs, not only missionaries and Bibles,
but sound rule, honourable diplomacy, in-
dustries, and fair trading; and upon these
hangs much of the success or failure of mission
effort

Ill

MANY RACES, MANY RELIGIONS
" East is East and West is West "

Ill

MANY RACES, MANY RELIGIONS:

"East is East and West is West"

Kipling, when he put in everyone's mouth the
dictum, " Oh, East is East and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet," condensed
what many silently think or frankly say— that
the gulf dividing different races cannot be
bridged, that the East has its own religions
which suit its peoples as our religion suits us,
and that it is not for us to interfere with what
they believe. Men of a philosophic turn call
in ethnic science to certify that the various
religions of mankind are racial products, and
cannot be transplanted and universalised. Like
their rice, clothing, and languages, the faith
that has grown on Asiatic soil is the proper
faith for Asiatics.

You will hear it under the punkahs and on
board ship— it is a sort of P. and O. theology :
"These Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese have
religions of their own that are adapted to their
conditions and mind, as we have one that fits
us. Why should we foist our ideas on them,
disturb their beliefs, and undermine their

43

44 The Challenge to Missions

customs and simplicity?" Jonah was possibly
the first exponent of the principle !

This point of view commends itself to the
modern travelled mind by its look of liberal,
cosmopolitan wisdom. It places the religions
of mankind on the zone-system, relates them to
climate and latitude ; and it has all the more
attraction for the world-wise because of being,
in a double sense, latitudinarian.

I. But, to take first the practical answer,
solvitur ambulando : it is too late in the day to
bind Christianity within racial or geographical
limits. History has settled this controversy in
advance. To begin with, Jesus was not of
Aryan birth, with our white face ; His religion
was not a product of Western soil, native to
our land ; it was of Oriental, Semitic origin,
as foreign to Europeans at the time of its
emergence as it is to Bengal or Mongolia to-day.
When St Paul's vessel crossed the ^gean Sea,
it cleft asunder for ever the supposition that
Christianity is unsuited to different races. In
that short voyage it was transplanted as far as
the East is from the West, as far as Hebrew
thought was from the Greek and Roman mind ;
and that was as far as Thibet, Japan, and New
Guinea are from Great Britain. When the
Gospel bridged that Middle Sea, it potentially
bridged all racial distinctions all the world over.

We ourselves are among the alien races whom

Many Races, Many Religions 45

Christianity has conquered and suited. It was
the chief means of lifting our pagan ancestors
out of barbarism, and has transformed our
personal, social, and national existence. There
is something inept, cool, if not ridiculous, in
Britons viewing Christianity as an Anglo-Saxon
property and not suited to remote alien peoples,
when we, a foreign race, owe everything to it !
Those who oppose foreign missions on this plea
are hopelessly, gloriously in debt to missions
in past times for all the blessings funded in
their hearts, hopes, homes, liberties, and en-
lightenment. What if early Christians had
adopted this racial policy — the very policy of
the Judaising Christians who disapproved
preaching to the Gentiles — and had argued,
"Greece, Rome, and Britain have their own
religions which suit their conditions ; we have
no right to carry on a propaganda among them
and disturb their beliefs " ? Happy for us that
they saw deeper and ignored race-distinctions !
Of all races in the world the Anglo-Saxon may
well believe enthusiastically in what Christ can
do for every human race. What he has done
for us He can do for others — if we allow the
same number of centuries in which to reap
the slow harvest of moral regeneration. Let
it be reiterated, written in large, illuminated
letters : we ourselves are the fruit of Christian
missions, the living disproof of the race-religion

46 The Challenge to Missions

plea. That fact alone meets a hundred
questions.

And the past century's experience of mission-
ary work among every race of mankind goes
far to confirm our own experience. We have
taken many hundreds of years to ascend from
barbarism to our present state of enlighten-
ment; but already, within one or two genera-
tions, tens of thousands in all parts of the world
have been visibly elevated in personal character,
and in domestic and social life and economic
conditions.

Here the objector to missions has shifted
his ground. It was first argued that it was
vain to ofier the Gospel to raw, barbaric races,
that Christianity was too fine and exalted for
them to be able to appreciate and profit by it.
But after the transforming work effected in
Tierra Del Fuego — which amazed Darwin and
made him a subscriber to the South American
Missionary Society — and in Fiji, the New
Hebrides, Uganda, and elsewhere, the argument
is reversed, and it is now said that Christianity
\sjust fit for raising the savage races, but is not
suitable or required where ancient and philo-
sophic religions are rooted in the life and mind
of the people.

It is certainly the " publicans and sinners "
of the world-races that have been the first to
receive the gospel — the Bantus, and Ainus, and

Many Races, Many Religions 47

Karens, and low castes in Asia. It is among
the " wise " of the world-peoples that we find
the stiffest task. Yet among no people of the
earth has Christianity failed to win victories of
a decisive and convincing character — except
perhaps the doubtful case of the Jews and the
Mohammedans (is this because they are our
"near relations," or because it is a case
of "arrested development," or pharisaism
repeated ?). Signally in Japan, but in India
and China also, the racial barrier has been
successfully overcome, not only in the conver-
sion of tens of thousands, but also in the visible
transformation of the domestic and social life
of the little communities where Christ has
shown His renewing power.

There is indeed a sufficiently deep gulf
between the races, which needs to be kept in
view in adjusting the form of mission work and
the expression of the message to the several
races. The apostles to be sent out to the East
must have aptitudes for acquiring difficult
languages and wisely appreciating Buddhist
and Confucian modes of thought, able to
lay broad foundations for a slow process of
Christianising great nations. Those who evan-
gelise the child-races must follow simpler lines
and may be men of more limited intellectual
endowments. And possibly Christianity as
recast in the different mould of the Eastern

48 The Challenge to Missions

mind may turn out a somewhat different thing
from ours in its type and creed-language — as
witness the recent trend in the Christian Church
of Japan.

At the same time, as the English language,
built for the concrete Western mind, has not
resources enough to hold and express some of
the subtle ideas of the Asiatic mind, so that
full translation is sometimes impossible, it may
be that only the mystical Asiatic mind will be
able to interpret and fully realise the Oriental
and mystical quantity in the Scriptures, which
after all are of Oriental mould. The Eastern
races, seeing it on the side that faces the East,
may have their contribution to make to the
deeper comprehension of our own faith — each a
beam to bring for the great world-temple of
Christ. But all the more may we confidently
expect that they will be suited by a faith which
arose on their own soil. {Cf. Appendix B., p. 184.)

Yet, on a larger view, Christ is not the son
of the Jew, neither the son of the Orient nor of
the Occident, but the Son of Man^ with an
appeal to the human instincts which are uni-
versal throughout the whole earth. Those who
argue that the religion of the West is not
adapted to the Eastern, and who quote Kipling's
catch-word, should hear him out to the end of
his verse ; they would find him swiftly reversing
their argument.

Many Races, Many Religions 49

"Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the
twain shall meet,

Till earth and sky stand presently at God's great Judg-
ment Seat ;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed,
nor Birth,

When two strong men stand face to face, though they
come from the ends of the earth."

The surface differences naturally strike us as
enormous ; but all are of one blood — for proof,
take the signal fact that children spring from
the union of a man and a woman of the most
diverse races. Miss Kingsley told the mission-
aries that the difference between the Africans
and themselves was a difference, not merely of
degree, but of kind. But when black and white
" stand face to face," when they get down to the
deeps of their being, they show ultimate identity
in their moral fibre, the same desire for love
and good and life, the same sins — in Byron's
language,

" New times, new climes, new arts, new men ; but still
The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill," —

and the same craving to know the Unseen and
be delivered from death and from the fear of
its mysteries. With all differences of tongue,
there is one language they all understand, the
language of love, a bit of kindness. And it is
the discovery of a great Heart of Love reigning
in the Unseen, love that suffers in order to save,
love that cleaves the gloom of the grave with

D

so The Challenge to Missions

the promise of "another day" — it is this in
Christianity which has its universal appeal for
all men of all breeds, for all wistful, weary
human hearts. If the advocates of the P. and
O. Theology had deeper insight into the naked
needs of all mortal men alike, and especially if
they had a keener sense and appreciation of
what Christ has been and is to ourselves as
our one Hope and the secret of our best life,
they would have full faith in the universal
address of the Christian message.

2. Moreover, under the theory that Eastern
religions are for the Asiatics and ours for
ourselves only, we should be landed in a sort
of Pantheon, and our faith in Christianity as
an absolute verity, even for us^ would gradually
pale and die out. Buddha for Burmah, Con-
fucius for China, Christ for the West — that
is to create local divinities, and local divinities
are pagan, involving either veiled polytheism
or pagan pantheism. The Hebrews, who at
first conceived Jehovah as their race-god over
against other gods, escaped from polytheism
only by at last learning to universalise their
Jehovah as God of the whole earth. But they
failed to universalise the scope of their reh'gion.
And when Christ revealed the universal Father
loving "the world," it was left to St Paul to
carry out the principle by proclaiming Christ
to be for the whole of Gentile heathendom —

Many Races, Many Religions 51

and it has taken the Christian Church nineteen
centuries to rise to the height of this world-
wide outlook.

If Christianity were not for these outnumber-
ing millions of the race in the East, and only
for us, it would suffer shrinkage in its scope,
and therefore in its truth and power ; it would
shrink in the eyes of its own disciples, dwindling
down to be one of the wistful dream-fictions
of the human Aberglaube. Ceasing to be
universal truth, with world-wide values, it
would sink to the level of a provincial,
parochial cult. Our faith in it could not then
long survive. Buddha for the whole world we
can understand ; but Buddha for the East and
Christ for the West conducts to a loose and
easy pantheism secretly infected with the
agnostic spirit. A Pantheon, where each com-
munity allows the others to have their several
divinities, means ultimate death to the faith
of each in his separate religion. " Heresies,"
said Lightfoot, " are at best ethnic ; truth is
catholic." Hence Christianity is ruled by an
imperialistic policy.

Lord Curzon condemns "the selection of a
single passage from the preaching of the
Founder of the faith as the sanction of a
movement against all other faiths." But, far
from depending on the command, " Go 5^e into
all the world, etc.," the missionary movement

52 The Challenge to Missions

lies knit in the very structure of Christ's per-
sonality, work, and teaching. Not only is the
greater part of the New Testament a collection
of missionary literature — the "Acts of the
Apostles " being a record of primitive mission
operations, and the Epistles mostly mission-
aries' letters to the little companies of converts
gathered out of the pagan community — but
the universal love of the universal Father —
" God so loved the world^' — the sacrificial
suffering of Christ for mankind, the sublime
ideas of the incarnation and redemption, with
the vast vision of the whole Christian revela-
tion, are out of all proportion to the limited,
local scope allotted to it by this race-theory.
Why all these supreme wonders and divine
agonies of love, if the scale of their applica-
tion be not world-wide? Our own belief in
it would become thin and feeble, and melt
away. The very build of it, the bare truth
of it, requires its universality and calls for
missions to the whole world so greatly loved.

Talk of " Little Englanders " ! Are not they
"Little Christians" who vote against carrying
Christianity to other races ?

Moreover, it is impossible to leave these
peoples alone in their simple faith and un-
scientific traditions. Our commerce, with its
ships — like shuttles weaving the web of a
common lot and lio. — with its explorers, pro-

Many Races, Many Religions 53

specters, traders, and railways is penetrating
to the recesses of every country. Our science,
taught in their schools and books, is under-
mining the foundations of their superstitions.
They are sending their most intelligent youth
to be educated further in our colleges and
law-schools. Over 100,000 of the most re-
ceptive minds in India bear the mental imprint
of the foreigner's tuition, and they go out into
the community with their old faith shaken at
its base. The Indian Government, by pro-
viding state education for India's youth, is
as much responsible for this result as are
the missionaries. The Government policy,
indeed, is more perilous, for it supplies teach-
ing in secular knowledge alone, and is thus
breaking down the old altar without pro-
viding anything to take its place. Western
civilisation is marching irresistibly upon the
people. Its new ideas, foreign habits, revolu-
tionary knowledge, are invading their ancient
preserves and even showing in their temples.

We could not insulate them any longer, even
if we tried. The old is bound to break up in
spite of us. The new wine of the West will
burst the old bottles of Eastern beliefs. And
what is to enter in and save the moral life of
such lands when Hindu and Buddhist mytho-
logy and Chinese ancestor-worship are dis-
credited in the eyes of the awakened millions ?

54 The Challenge to Missions

If we do not give them pure Christianity before
the complete break-up comes, how are they to
escape agnosticism and soulless secularism?
The sceptical literature of the West is already
to be seen in the foreign bookshops of the
cities of the East. Already large numbers of
the disenchanted are finding a refuge in the
sterile negations of unbelief And, bad as a
false or half-false religion may be, a godless,
unspiritual secularism is incalculably worse.

It is the plain finger of God pointing the
way of the Christian Church. So vital to our
common well-being is Christianity that we
tremble to think what will befall us should
that saving salt lose its savour in our life.
And if that materialistic civilisation is not to
carry degrading corruption among the dark-
skinned races, it must be accompanied by the
same saving preservative ; we must even be
well ahead of it with the moral power of the
Christian life.

IV

GOOD IN EVERY SYSTEM
The Cosmic Light— and Dark

55

IV

GOOD IN EVERY SYSTEM :

The Cosmic Light— and Dark

Now to go a little deeper into the problem.

The pioneers of a hundred years ago viewed
all non-Christian religions as unmitigated error,
either black superstitions or diabolic inventions
and blinds. Since their day the " Sacred Books
of the East" have been translated and the
cream of their contents collected in popular
summaries for the casual reader. The science
of Comparative Religion has arisen. Sir Edwin
Arnold's "Light of Asia" has blazoned Buddha's
heroic, compassionate endeavour to find a salve
for the misery of men's lust for life. Mr Henry
Fielding, in " The Soul of a People," has ex-
quisitely interpreted the mystic Buddhist ideal
as seen through Burmese eyes. We have found
ethical rules of a high order — reminding us of
single items in the Sermon on the Mount — in
the Persian, Indian, and Chinese Scriptures,
profound speculations about the mystery of
human existence in Hindu religion, and laws
of family gallantry towards parents in Con-
fucian teaching.

57

58 The Challenge to Missions

Many in consequence have been asking and
still ask whether, after all, these Asiatic races
have not religious and moral light serving their
needs sufficiently well ; whether, then, even
though our faith be ideally the higher, there is
any urgent reason for thrusting it upon them
and upsetting their satisfaction with beliefs
they hold dear. It is not only from adverse
critics outside the Christian Church but from
enlightened worshippers within it that we hear
this plea for leaving these people to the light
they already have.

Now, we should greet all such light with a
cheer. Our only complaint is that there is so
little of it. To deny or depreciate the good
in other faiths in the supposed interest of
Christianity is to show signs of defective con-
fidence in its incomparable superiority. To
attempt to make out their light to be darkness
comes near committing the sin against the
Holy Ghost. The more of it the better : it is
so much more to the good in the common stock
and store ; it is so much more working capital
in the resources available for further develop-
ment. All flying shafts of light sprang from
the same source in the Eternal Sun^ — the
" Logos," or " Word." Fragments of the truth,
"in many parts and diverse fashions," are only
waiting to be released from obscuring encrusta-
tions and knit into the full body of " the Truth,"

Good in Every System 59

China contributes to the common store
practical domestic and state laws, enforces the
fifth commandment, " Honour thy father and
thy mother," better than the rest of the world,
and urges the homage due to the spirits of
the dead who " live again in minds made better
by their presence." ^ Hinduism contributes the
immanence of the Eternal as the ocean of
common being — and in a mode of this con-
ception the Christian thinker to-day is finding
a deeper basis for the incarnation of Christ.
Buddha prescribes the conquest of desire as
the secret of release for the distracted heart
of man, and shows the " eternal process moving
on" by which "from state to state the spirit
walks " in seons upward or downward. Toward
such segments and arcs of the rounded orb
of truth our attitude cannot but be one of
sympathetic appreciation. They, we claim, are
prophetic workings of the Spirit. They also
offer so much more common ground between
the missionary and the Asiatic mind.

The human heart is the greatest of all the
prophets — the mother of the prophets of the
earth — speaks in many languages of symbol and
phrase, and never dies. These gleams of light
are cryptic prophecies of good to come, and for

1 See the lofty, spiritual prayers to " Shang-ti," the Supreme
Spirit, in uncorrupted Confucianism, quoted in Dr Campbell
Gibson's Mission Problems ^ pp. 76, 77.

6o The Challenge to Missions

their fulfilment Christianity is indispensable.
" Whom ye worship in ignorance Him declare
we unto you," Paul's message to the Athenians,
is our message to all superstitious worshippers
of dim symbols of the Mystery. The blind
homage which is addressed to the material
shrine and symbol God may interpret as merely
misdirected through ignorance ; He may esteem
and appraise it as really meant for Himself.
None the less, however, the worshipper is not
spiritually quickened and saved from his sin
where such blind ignorance reigns. And, to
meet the confused desires of his heart and
morally redeem him, it is imperative he be told
that the One after whom he has been groping
through the mists is here in full glory.

It is more than doubtful if we can ever
articulate Christianity into the Hindu, Buddhist,
and Confucian systems, as it was related to the
Jewish system. Yet the moral aims and
yearnings underlying them Christ does fulfil.
Their better contents, like the Jewish Law,
may have served a temporary purpose ; they
have kept alive in some measure the spiritual
sense of the devout votary, although, again like
the Jewish Law, they have become materialised
and have encrusted the inner life with a cramp-
ing shell of mechanical ritual. While not
utter, unmitigated delusions, they are often so
utterly imperfect and corrupted, and so distort

Good in Every System 6i

the truth, that wherein they have hints of good
they must be fulfilled and consummated in
Christ, and wherein they are currently false
and debasing, as for the most part they are,
they must be supplanted by Christ. "Some
better thing " — that which justified Christ in
superseding the Jewish religion — amply justifies
His Church in superseding or crowning pagan
faiths with Christianity.

The missionary, it is true, is apt to be a little
impatient with such academic appreciations
and balanced comparisons of other religions
with the Christian revelation. He may, as he
ought to, seize their good points, the wise things
said by their own teachers, as common ground
on which to start his address ; but the common
ground is usually only a jumping-off ground.
He is face to face with so much dark debase-
ment that it seems wasted breath to talk of
good things in pagan faiths. And the early
apostles did not depend upon such reasoning;
St Paul was usually uncompromising. Great
victories cannot be won for a new, aggressive
religion by genial concessions, although the
manner of the fight must not be rude and
ungenerous. The native convert, too, seldom
has much to say about the half-truths in
paganism. We must allow for the polarity
and revulsion of human nature to extremes in
any change of belief like his ; yet we cannot

62 The Challenge to Missions

but note that what impresses him is not the
partial light but the utter darkness and falsity
of the old religion.

But it is not the missionary and the convert
we are specially addressing. The Western
mind makes a more detached valuation of
world-religions, judging them chiefly from their
scriptures and absolute contents, and knowing
to discriminate between their pure primitive
form and their corruptions, such as, we
remember, have in past times overlain and
debased our own Christian religion. For the
sake of such, the problem requires new
treatment.

Why interfere with the sacred things of the
Asiatic? The Hebrew religion, while only a
mixed, imperfect symbolism of the truth, a
stage on the way like other world-religions,
surpassed them all in the amount of light and
grace it contained. Yet our Lord did not spare
it for the truth that was in it. " India and the
Far East have religions of their own, with good
elements in them : why not leave them alone ? "
People who speak thus should make a further
demand : " The Jews had a religion of their
own, with good contents in it: why should
Christ disturb their minds and upset their
sacred customs?" On that principle how
could Christianity ever have entered the world
at all on any field ? It must disturb something.

Good in Every System 63

Was Copernicus not to disturb the traditional
astronomy of Europe in case he should shock
men's minds for two generations during the
transition time? Then also it is wrong to
interfere with the childish ideas of our little
folk and give them the fuller truth required to
develop their manhood. The interference is no
less commendable when we take to the heathen,
not only what fulfils their symbols and
glimmers of good, but what is of momentous
consequence for their characters, lives, social
redemption, and destinies. Christ is indispens-
able to them as the answer to their needs, as a
revelation of the bedazing Mystery, and as a
rest to their world-weary, self-sick hearts,
bringing them a better salvation than they had
ever conceived.

We have first striven to deal fairly with the
light and good in these religions which find
appreciators among us in the West.

" The God of Things-as-They-Are," however,
requires that we look with open eyes at the
bald realities of pagan belief and life.

It is the bare truth, unfortunately the truth,
that these fine elements are far from being
typical of the Asiatic faiths from which they
are drawn. The tit-bits of ethical wisdom
gathered from afar are dug out of heaps of
superstitious rubbish. The mass of the "Sacred
Books of the East "would nauseate the Christian

64 The Challenge to Missions

at least as much as the rare flowers selected for
anthologies delight him. We pay our ready
tribute to the humane heart of Buddha. But
Arnold's " Light of Asia " is not the native
article ; it is a Western setting of the Buddha-
story, recast in the Christian mould by one who
has unconsciously carried over Christian ideas
and terms for its interpretation. By Mr
Fielding's own confession, his " Soul of a
People " is not the every-day Burmese religion
but a semi-poetic subtilising of it. Buddhism
in its pure form is despairing pessimism, and in
its popular guise is unhappily blind, idolatrous
superstition. Superstitions as blind envelop
the Chinese worship of ancestors {pace Lord
Curzon, who likens it to the memorials of the
distinguished dead in Westminster Abbey),
and leave the soul without a God. The ancient
symbols which once held striking imagery of
the Unseen are no longer transparent but
opaque, and obscure more than they reveal.

These races of the pagan world know no
personal Father of mankind enveloping the
world with conscious care and love, no re-
demptive suffering in the Divine heart, no
salvation from sin as sin (only from the ache of
life^), no Spirit of grace descending to make
new creatures of evil men, no pledge of vital

^ For a sane and just statement of the reality in Chinese
temples, see Gibson's Mission Problems^ p. 141 ff.

Good in Every System 65

eternal life in fulness of manhood, no assurance
of the re-knitting of family ties broken in death
— in short, no adequate idea of salvation in its
rich Christian sense. Their hopes and solaces
are but adumbrations of hope and love. The
average Asiatic millions are fed with empty-
puerilities, or with metaphysical abstractions
which are out of touch with human life and
void of moral elements. Or they are held under
the terrorism of " Nats," nature-spirits, departed
spirits, and magic, and are prostrated before
grotesque material images. Religion for the
most part, alas, is a matter of prayer-wheels,
fortune-telling, mechanical repetition of in-
coherent words, and pathetic mummery — would
that we could report it otherwise !

It is no wonder if these race-religions lack
spiritual and moral power. Where, as in China,
ethical precepts are given for prudential conduct,
the loveless, impersonal code is chill and sterile,
more impotent for making pure hearts than
were Hebrew Tables of Stone, because lacking
a personal God of exalted and exalting char-
acter. Elsewhere religion is practically divorced
from morals. Christianity, it has been said, is
the only religion which has for its aim to make
men good ; and the saying is true, if by " good "
we understand positive inward moral purity and
high character. The Christian ideal of holiness is
substantially a new conception to the pagan mind.

66 The Challenge to Missions

Myriads of simple-hearted votaries visit the
pagan temples ; but the faiths these enshrine are
morally decadent, moribund, effete. They lack
the dynamic power which is indispensable for
the deliverance of men from the mastery of sin
and the weight of material things, for the
creation of soul and of purest manhood and
womanhood, and for working social and com-
munal regeneration. And they appear to have
no power of self-renewal. In Japan certain
sects have attempted a Buddhist revival, but,
in spite of one or two such spurts of " Catholic
Revival," the pagan religions have no resurrec-
tion-power like that by which Christianity rose
in renewed vitality and might out of the grave
of its mediaeval corruptions.

The moral and social life of pagan peoples
naturally matches their faiths. The missionary
may see pagan life too unbrokenly black, not
unnaturally having eyes chiefly for the grim
moral degeneracy which confronts him ; at the
other extreme the modern cosmopolitan mind,
like Mr Fielding, makes light excuses for its
moral evils, After one's young imagination has
been fed on mission literature which painted
heathendom as one unqualified scene of cruelty
and vice, a black romance, it comes as a sur-
prise to see the swarthy little children playing
happily and the old folk sitting contentedly in
the shade, to hear sounds of domestic merriment

Good in Every System 67

and discover bits of human kindness. In every
way it is one thing to read about pagan lands
in books, and quite another thing to look on
" the heathen " in flesh and blood in their motley
life of chequered light and shade and their
pathetic superstitions.

There are indeed kind hearts among them,
domestic tendernesses, filial devotions, brave
deeds of self-suppression — what Augustine
perversely called "splendid vices," Here and
there are enlightened men who see beneath the
crust of superstition, disavow the worship of
material objects, and revere only pure intelli-
gence. In every land there are happily select
souls, like Neesima of Japan, and the Chinese
viceroy, Chang Chih Tung, whose heart God
has touched after the manner of Cornelius. But
these are comparatively few and rare among the
superstitious millions. They scarcely count in
the practical problem of heathendom (except as
possible progenitors and founts of future en-
lightenment). And they are as little typical
of the races to which they belong as Seneca
was typical of Roman and Socrates of Greek
paganism.

The people generally are held in a state of
soulless stagnation and impassive content.
" They are quite content as they are," say some,
among them Lord Curzon. True ; and that is
the worst of it They are content with a sort

68 The Challenge to Missions

of bovine contentment, as a race of men may
be who have been held under slavery that
has unmanned them and taken the soul out
of them. Petrified by the unintelligent custom
of long ages, they have little consciousness of
wanting anything. More insurmountable than
the Chinese "Myriad-Mile Wall" is the im-
penetrable wall of proud self-satisfaction in
which the people are encased. The missionary's
difficulty is, not to deal with pagan religions,
but to pierce the Asiatic's haughty, supercilious
sense of superiority and break through "the
cake of custom " and wake the torpid soul and
heavy conscience to the perception of moral and
spiritual need.

Generally they recognise nothing evil in the
vices which reign among them. Moral corrup-
tions are rife, and they neither hide out of sight
nor raise a blush. So widely is religion divorced
from morality in India that the devout priest
may be vicious without remark. What wonder,
when lustful and debasing practices are sanc-
tioned by Hindu religious rites !

When Mrs Besant went into ecstacies over
Hindu mysticism. The Rets and Ruyyet, an
influential Hindu paper in Calcutta, said :
"When an English lady of decent culture
professes to be an admirer of Tantric mysti-
cisms and Krishna worship, it behoves every
well-wisher of the country to tell her plainly

Good in Every System 69

that sensible men do not want her eloquence
for gilding what is rotten. ... In fact abomina-
tion worship is the chief ingredient of modern
Hinduism." And the Daily Hindu^ of Madras,
said, " Our religious institutions are a festering
mass of crime, vice, and gigantic swindling."
Lord Curzon and Mr Michie tell us that it
takes a Chinese imagination, charged with
brutal coarseness, to invent the horrible accusa-
tions levelled at Christian missionaries.

No need of the critic to remind us of the
vices besmirching Christendom. But, for differ-
ence, the Christian conscience has always
protested and fought against these evils, and
is the great moral force engaged in reducing
them. They have to conceal themselves as
illicit. In paganism, on the contrary, they
enjoy common sanction ; native religion is not
at work against them ; they often flourish
under the shelter of the gods,

Yet far more serious than all these evils is
the moral torpor at the back of them, the
absence of conscience in things unclean. In
many the first work to be done by Christianity
is to create the very sense of sin, which is
indispensable to the beginnings of moral re-
newal and the cry for holiness — and this is one
reason why missions, having John Baptist's
preparatory work to do, take long to produce
great results. Christ has first to develop con-

70 The Challenge to Missions

science, establish personality, and wake the
flying ideal which both condemns and inspires.
What pagan peoples— Buddhists, Hindus, Con-
fucianists, as well as barbarians — most pro-
foundly need is to be inwardly quickened, born
from above them out of their moral callousness,
to have soul created and the cry of the child
of God waked within them.

f' It is remarkable how, when a people, like an
individual, receive Christianity, an outburst of
new energy appears. It not only transforms
character ; it creates a new type of manhood
and womanhood ; it sets up a new ideal of
holiness such as the pagan mind never dreamt
of before. But, still more, it opens new springs
of vitality, awakens hope, and supplies motive-
power for personal sacrifice and social regenera-
tion. It is for such work as this, not less than
for personal salvation from sin, that the world

, imperatively requires Christ and His gift of

I new Life.

LIBERAL THOUGHT AND HEATHEN
DESTINIES

7»

V

LIBERAL THOUGHT AND HEATHEN
DESTINIES

Under the more liberal theology approved
by the modern mind the ruling conception of
heathen destinies has silently changed. Is
the change calculated to "cut the nerve" of
the missionary spirit?

Dr Morrison, famous as Times correspondent
at Pekin/ makes merry over China Inland
missionaries who picture the hundreds of
millions of Chinese hurrying unconsciously
to eternal perdition. "They tell the Chinese
inquirer that his unconverted father, who never
heard the gospel, has, like Confucius, perished
eternally." We have no wish to deliver such
men out of Dr Morrison's hands ; but he must
know that they are a diminishing number, at
least among the better order of missionaries,
and that the enlightened, if they have no clear
theory on the subject, at any rate utter no such
sentence of wholesale anathemas.

It is true that Carey and other pioneers,
holding all to be lost indistinguishably who
had not known and believed in the historic

^ An Australian in China.

73

74 The Challenge to Missions

Jesus of Galilee, conceived the swarming
multitudes of fellow-mortals in heathen lands
as consigned by the million to a common,
indiscriminate doom — actually brands to be
plucked from the burning. (By the same re-
lentless logic the men of the " Hard Church "
had to leave to a like fate all our unfortunate
little ones who had died in infancy.) If not
saved — and was there any Saviour except
Christ? — must they not be relegated to outer
darkness ? Otherwise why take trouble to send
them the gospel ?

Jonathan Edwards even claimed that the
happiness of the beatified saints would be en-
hanced by the thought of the outcast legions,
thus making heaven take toll of hell for its
keener bliss !

No wonder the Japanese asked Francis
Xavier, and Radbod,^ chief of the pagan
Frisians, asked Bishop Wolfran, whether all
their forefathers were hopelessly condemned.
Xavier writes in a letter in 1552: "One of

1 According to the well-known dramatic story, Radbod, a
candidate for baptism, had ah-eady one foot in the water, when
he stopped and asked the bishop, "Where are my dead fore-
fathers at present?" "In hell, with all other unbelievers."
Withdrawing his leg, the revolted chief exclaimed, "Mighty
well ; then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls
of Woden than dwell with your little starveling band of
Christians in heaven." The story is told in Motley's Dutch
Republic (Introduction), whether adorned or naked fact we
need not here inquire.

/

Liberal Thought and Destinies 75

the things that most of all torments our con-
verts is that we teach them that the prison of
hell is irrevocably shut. They grieve over
the fate of their departed children, of their
parents and relatives, and they often show
their grief by their tears. So they ask us if
there is any hope, any way to free them by
prayer from that eternal misery, and I am
obliged to answer that there is absolutely
none. Their grief at this affects and torments
them wonderfully — they almost pine away in
their sorrow." (C/. 'E. Coleridge on Xavier.)

That gospel, if they understand its backward
bearings, must sound a strange piece of " good
tidings" in their ears. Let Whittier express
it—

" Oh those generations old.
Over whom no church-bell tolled,
Christless, lifting up blind eyes
To the silence of the skies ;
For the innumerable dead
Is my heart disquieted."

This conception of heathen destinies has
not been overthrown by the battering-ram of
argument. It has been imperceptibly dissi-
pated by the spread of a more liberal spirit.
We have made discovery of certain good
elements in pagan systems. We had dealt
with shadowy abstract heathen under the logic
of an abstract dogma ; with the aid of travel

"](> The Challenge to Missions

and reading we have learnt to imagine these
human beings in their palpitating flesh and
blood, and picture the awful issues. How did
we manage to close our eyes in sleep of a
night for thinking of these torrents of ignorant
brother-men flowing unwittingly to destruction,
except just by not conceiving them to our-
selves in human face and feeling? Whenever
such a stupendous unintelligible human holo-
caust came vividly before the Christianised
imagination, the theory fell devitalised and
undone. The sunshine of a warmer Christian
compassion coming from the infinite love of
Christ made the unutterable dogma pale away
into the dim limbo where lie the shades of
departed creeds.

Possibly it was the case of the little child
that was set in our midst to test and smile
away this belief — the little child dying in
tender years without hearing of Christ. The
gracious, illogical exception allowed for the
child's future destiny broke an opening through
the wall of stern dogma, and the opening
widened to make room for child-races, for
men and women who, in proportion to their
opportunities, were not naturally worse than
ourselves, but only less fortunate in their birth-
place, for the generous treatment of people
who could not believe the gospel since, un-
luckily, they had never heard it.

Liberal Thought and Destinies 77

Enlightened minds to-day insist on a theory
of judgment at once more scientific, ethical,
and Christian than that which drove the
earlier missionaries to the rescue.

Now any theory which either (i) consigns
the heathen en bloc to " adamantine chains and
penal fires," or (2) claims that, since they are
simple innocents and have their own gleams of
light and God is good, all is well with them
here and beyond, is palpably false. The iron
view is not more immoral than the easy view.
The latter is inconsistent with visible, grim
realities in the actual character of the heathen,
and makes free with heaven and God's moral
laws. The former, if realised, would strike with
a rebound against God's good name and clash
with Christ's revelation of the Father-heart.

To some the question seems a gratuitous and
an idle one. They are content to leave it out
of their horizon and obey their Lord's marching
missionary orders — as obey His command we
must in any case. But not all can close their
minds to such a problem. We do not go seek-
ing it ; it comes seeking us. It is forced upon
us by the change of thought, and by frank
questioners in the Church and out of it who
have a right to ask us what new theory has
taken the place of the old. Earnest workers,
also, ought to have clear ground on which to
base their enterprise. We are very far from

y2> The Challenge to Missions

seeking to settle particular destinies ; we do not
know the destinies of even the people about us
in a Christian land ; we only know the principles
on which they will be judged. At bottom our
rest is in God's fairness. Yet we can and must
mark out the lines and principles on which, so
far as present light takes us, God deals with the
heathen.

We shall see later that the real question is not
one of future destinies at all. Yet, none the less,
we must meet men's questions on the subject.

Now — to take a negative first — it will not
satisfy to import specially for the heathen a
theory of another chance in a future probation.
However far that may be permissible as a
speculation, the Scripture about spirits in prison
(i Peter iii. 19), on which it is chiefly founded,
is too obscure, too doubtful in its meaning, and
too solitary in the Bible to clear up the mystery.
Moreover, to ride off along this line is to seek
easy escape from the issue. And if the idea
got possession of average minds in the Church,
it would still indeed be theoretically imperative
on them to give the saving light of life to all
men as soon as possible, but the working effect
would be to "cut the nerve" of missionary
enthusiasm. Any theory which relaxes earnest
effort is thereby proved to have for us the value
of a falsehood. We have no need or title
positively to lay down close limits in any

Liberal Thought and Destinies 79

veiled region where God is, but there is nothing
here to work with or count upon.

It is not enough, either, to make special bye-
laws for a few exceptional " good heathen," like
Buddha and Socrates. We have to do with
millions. The allowance must be regularised,
the principle of treatment broadened down to
the multitude and universalised.

The principles of judgment are the same for
the heathen as for ourselves. The standards,
the tests, vary with varying conditions ; but the
principles are universally the same.

(i) Judgment is proportioned to the good
within reach. It is our Lord's own
principle, that responsibility is pro-
portionate to what is possible to each,
to his light, capacity, and opportunity.

(2) The grace of the Eternal Christ operates

beyond the area in which the historical
Jesus is known.

(3) Judgment goes, not by the gross bulk

of goodness attained, but by that faith
in good which is the root of goodness.
Destiny is determined, not by absolute
present character, but by the germ
which potentially is ultimate character.

(4) Salvation is salvation from present sin

and moral death, not from destinies,
which are only incidental to ultimate
character.

So The Challenge to Missions

One result of these principles is that we
cannot deal with the heathen in the mass and
pronounce them either all saved or all lost.
Invisible differences divide them, equally with
ourselves.

The common idea is that all will be saved
who act up to the light they have. It is half
true, yet suggests a falsehood. Not one of the
best of the pagan peoples ever lived up fully to
the light he had. Equally on the small scale
as on the large, there is no man who has done
as well as he might, none who is without sin,
none who must not at the last depend on sheer
mercy. There cannot be two different grounds
of acceptance before God — one, the ground of
merit, among the non-Christian races, the other,
"by grace are ye saved," among Christians,
from under whose feet all trust in personal
merit is sharply taken away by Christian
teaching.

Take the Road of the Scriptures to reach
the proper point of outlook upon the heathen
world.

The Jews — on what ground were any of
them saved ^ We cannot speak of " the Jews "
being saved en dloc, as though all who offered
Jewish sacrifices were accepted in the lump,
and as little can we classify the heathen and
say of them in one breath that they are either
all saved or all lost. But how was it possible

Liberal Thought and Destinies 8i

for Abraham and other devout Jews to be
accepted of God without the knowledge of the
historical Jesus ? It will not do to suppose
that they stood on tiptoe and foresaw the
personal Jesus and the Cross in the distance ;
it is not true. They had their moral law and
the knowledge of the one holy and merciful
Godc And they had their symbolism of sin,
of sacrifice, and of self-devotion. Abraham
was justified because he believed God, and
that was counted for righteousness. This was
no fiction ; he was not righteous ; but his faith
in God had in it the germ and potency of
righteousness. In proportion as Jews were
humble-hearted and believing, making appeal
to the mercy that was hinted to them through
material symbols and imagery — in proportion
as they responded to the light that shone —
they had the mercy of God for their sins.

The heathen to-day are B.C. What operated
B.C. in God's treatment of Jews operates pro-
portionately in Asia and every continent and
island which is not yet Anno Domini. That the
Jews had fuller light and clearer symbols of the
Unseen is beside the point here. God's method
or principle is the same for all alike, when deal-
ing with different races all of them B.C. The
grace which was at least within reach of the
humble-hearted Jew has always been and now
is within reach of the Gentile in proportion

F

82 The Challenge to Missions

as there is similar response or appeal of
spirit.

Were the redemptive virtues of Christ's cross,
then, delivered to the devout Jew in advance
without having as yet been acquired by Christ ?
Rather say, more Scripturally, that that suffer-
ing love in the Divine Heart which once for
all in history became embodied in Jesus was
a timeless, eternal reality and therefore avail-
able B.C.

The Cosmic Light, the " Word " or " Logos "
of St John, "that light which lighteth every
man," did not first come into existence in Jesus,
but " came into the world " in Him, incarnate
in human personality. As there was a diffused
light through our universe before the sun, and
as that diffused luminous mist became centred
and embodied in the sun, so there was and is
a universal " Word " or Light, — " Logos sper-
matikos " — an eternal Christ or Good. Every-
where in human hearts, in infinitesimal or
considerable degree, there have been glimmer-
ings of the Mystery and the Truth, bits of good
and light and love. Everywhere the touch of
the Unseen has been felt, whether interpreted
superstitiously here or known intelligently there.
Men have cast their intuitions in the form of
symbols — the sun, or the image of the Great
Calm in the still face of the Amita Buddha of
Japan, or in the Jewish shechinah on the

Liberal Thought and Destinies 83

mercy-seat stained with the blood of offered
lives. These symbols, at first luminous with
significance, have become obscured with gross
superstitions — yet not utterly; they have con-
tinued faintly to signify something of the
Unseen Good, or they have gathered up the
heart's dumb desires for Good. And at the
same time all men have seen fellow-men suffer-
ing and needy — mankind (with whom Christ
Jesus made Himself one, Matt. xxv. 45)
crucified before their eyes ; they have met
human need, and either ignored it or responded
to its appeal to the kind heart.

Where and in whom among the peoples of
both Christendom and heathendom God's all-
seeing eye has found the needful response to
existing light and good, no human mind can
conjecture. How far He may have seen an
outstretching of the half-encrusted spirit to the
Mystery and the Pity ; how far any hearts may
have waked to the only symbol of the Divine
within sight ; how many or how few have shown
a beat of compassion towards human want
or a relenting over sin, or a humble, weary cry
for help beneath the sky — these secrets can be
known only to Himself. Our difficulty is not
about the cosmic grace of Christ being available
wherever among mortal men the fit response is
shown. Our doubt is about the likelihood of any
sufficient response among many both at home

84 The Challenge to Missions

and abroad. But, certainly, if God All-wise
accepted the man who offered a slain bullock as
a symbol of his self-devotion, we may be sure
that He has an eye and an ear for any symbol-
language of the human heart appealing to the
Unseen wherever He finds it, whether among
simple suppliants of the Merciful Virgin or
others of the same order. It is not righteous-
ness. But, according to Scripture, God, so far
as it is true, counts it for righteousness ; for it is
the germ and prophecy of righteousness under
happier conditions to come.

For judgment goes, not by absolute present
character, but by the germ of potential character
which is wrapped up in faith in Good or sym-
pathy with Humanity. The penitent thief on
his cross had not time to acquire good char-
acter ; but in his appealing cry to Christ there
germinated the seed of potential goodness.

Attitude is destiny. Not absolute attain-
ment : have average Christians much more than
their faces turned towards the light, more than
mere seeds of holiness ? But, however meagre
their attainments, they have taken an attitude
in relation to the light in Christ; and that
attitude is the forecast of their destiny. What
lies in heart-faith, however crudely formed, is
the seed of righteousness, of ultimate character.

If anywhere, East and West alike, by dim
or clear faith the Light of the Eternal Word

Liberal Thought and Destinies 85

has met with response, there the grace in-
carnated in Christ may find the attitude of
spirit it everywhere is seeking as the condition
of higher blessing. Thus no one anywhere is
saved except by the Eternal Christ— unrecog-
nised perhaps, i^' when saw we Thee?") — and
except through faith or desire as the germ that
grows to goodness and fruits in bliss. Whatever
further scope or cycles of existence for the
development of these faith-germs or love-seeds
of good may come in other aeons having their
own new issues, we see only thus far, that the
issue of this aeon is determined by these attitudes
of the secret soul.

How seldom or how often God perceives

such germs of faith, either in Anglo-Saxon,

Asiatic, or African, He alone can know. We

are not one step nearer being able to say who

among the heathen are blest and who suffer

loss. We can as little assign destinies to them

indiscriminately as we can to the folk who live

next door to us — enough and well if we can

forecast our own. To read destinies is not our

aim in these pages. None but the Omniscient

Heart-Interpreter has the materials for such

discrimination. Yet much is gained if we can,

humbly, discover the lines on which God deals

with men of all colours and conditions. Even

as to ourselves we only know the principles of

divine judgment and the grounds of faith and

86 The Challenge to Missions

hope. And the discovery frees us on the one
hand from the goad of the old, unthinkable
horror over indiscriminate destinies, and on the
other from lax latitudinarianism as to the needs
of the heathen.

VI

CAN THE MISSIONARY MOTIVE
SURVIVE?

Does Liberal Thought cut the Nerve of
Missions?

»f

VI

CAN THE MISSIONARY MOTIVE
SURVIVE ?

Does Liberal Thought cut the Nerve of
Missions ?

Does this modern way of viewing the heathen
relax the missionary motive ?

Certainly the older conception of their
destinies gave a sufficiently violent reason for
missionary urgency. It held up a picture which
was vivid, concrete, and therefore calculated to
tell on crude or emotional natures. On the
other hand, the unthinkable issues for these
unenlightened and unfortunate millions, if rea-
lised in clear imagination, instead of offering
an inspiring incentive, would singe and sear
the sensitive heart, would stun the mind and
paralyse the energies. The vision would over-
whelm us.

What is the motive, then, for urgency in
sending the gospel to the heathen?

The same motive as we find at work in the
hearts of the first apostles. Not once in the
New Testament do we find these ardent mis-
sionaries introducing a bare mention of heathen

89

90 The Challenge to Missions

destinies as an argument for evangelising the
world. Their eyes never look that way. None
of their zeal comes visibly from that quarter.
It is not a question of future destinies at all
with them. What impels them is the sense of
the people's utter moral need and spiritual
darkness, their religious destitution, their " lying
in sin," and the burning desire to carry to all
men the blessed news of the Divine redemptive
love which has wrought such a transformation
in their own lives.

It is the same sense of the world's utter
moral need, sin, spiritual darkness, and religious
destitution, the same sense of unspeakable
obligations to Christ for new life and hope,
and the same eager desire to convey to all men
the grace which has brought us spiritual bless-
ing— it is this that must, and does, serve as a
sufficient motive for our missionary zeal. If
this fails to inspire us, it is a sinister sign that
we lack the very essence of the Christian mind,
the love which flamed in the apostles' hearts,
and that we have missed the true meaning
of salvation.

Our conception of salvation itself has been
changing at the very time when our theory of
the heathen has been changing, and the one
comes in aptly to interpret or correct the other.
The enlightenment which has been enlarging
our sympathies has in the same process been

Can the Motive Survive? 91

deepening our insight into the true nature of
salvation. Here enters our fourth principle,
that salvation is salvation from sin, not from
destinies. The real and urgent question is
not a matter of destinies at all, one way or
the other. It is one of present moral condition
and character. It is not what we are coming
to, but what we are becoming, that matters.
Destinies, good or bad, while momentous
enough, hang entirely on the character which
constitutes their quality. The actual problem
is, not the man's future, but the man.

Look at pagan peoples with the most God-
like eye, and there is enough in their condition
to appal our hearts, if we can see beneath the
surface of their natural content. However
large the mercy of Heaven, they most palpably
stand in dire need of being morally saved from
sin's degradation and spiritually enlightened
and enfranchised as the sons of God.

Properly we cannot speak of pagans being
either "saved" or *'lost" in the full Christian
sense ; for these words are polarised, charged
with a depth of moral significance which is the
creation of Christianity, and their meaning is
not rightly applicable outside Christian spheres.
But we can speak of them being sunk and
dark, needing the salvation that elevates and
enlightens.

The old idea about the heathen — that they

92 The Challenge to Missions

were consigned to hell — was false in its crude
form, yet it was profoundly true in the moral
impression it conveyed. Take hell as the
symbol of their moral need, of the measure-
less calamity of sin and inward degradation,
as the awful canvas on which is flamingly
projected before our imagination the unspeak-
able evilness of evil and the catastrophe it
involves. When men could not picture to
themselves the inward deterioration in which
lay the true " damnum " (" loss "), this vivid
vision of future destinies gave them the full
measure of it, conveying the right moral im-
pression. Because the old forecast of heathen
destinies is softened away, some are being
blinded to the deep moral destitution and
darkness in which millions lie. What we have
now to fear is the swing of the pendulum to
the opposite error — that "it's all right with
the heathen." And undoubtedly it will take
time to plant the new conception of salvation
victoriously in the average Christian mind ;
and meanwhile the missionary spirit of some
may cool. But the transition-time will pass,
and the higher motive will become as strong
a dynamic as the old one.

If we have Christ's compassionate heart, we
burn to save all, whether heathen at home or
heathen abroad, from their sins and moral
degradation, from the things which waste and

Can the Motive Survive? 93

destroy their manhood, to redeem them from
the power of the flesh and the world and all
that defiles. Knowing Christ precious to our-
selves and what He can do for all men, we
thirst to see all spiritualised and made new
creatures in Christ Jesus, to send them that
which will raise them in character and make
them full men completed in Christ, that which
will not only enlighten, free, gladden, bless,
and enrich their existence, but will elevate
their corporate social and domestic life
and establish the kingdom of God among
them.

Such is the true missionary motive, and
motive enough.

Even on a less tragic ground, why is it a
matter of urgent duty and concern on a
parent's part to teach his child the story of
Christ and train him in Christian truth and
life? The more modern theory of the dead
child's future — does it relax parental anxiety
to impart Christian light and teach him to
love and imitate Jesus ? What is the parent's
motive now? Simply the sharp sense of the
value of Christ to every human being, young
or old — the perception of the child's need and
peril if he does not get the saving power of
Christ upon him ; the sense of the native
worth and value of being a Christian in soul
and character; the desire to lift him out of

94 The Challenge to Missions

"the natural man" to "the measure of the
stature of the fulness of Christ."

If that motive be not strong enough to
inspire us with zeal for taking the blessing
of Christ to the heathen, then Christ has still
much work to do upon us to make us Christian
in mind and spiritual sympathy.

VII

CHEQUERED RESULTS

"Counting the Game"

95

vn

CHEQUERED RESULTS:

"Counting the Game"

What have laymen, personally acquainted
with foreign countries, to say of the effects
that missions have had upon the natives ? Is
the Church herself satisfied with the results
produced? When sea-going people, traders,
travellers, and civil servants deprecate or
decry the missionary's work, it is commonly
on the ground that it spoils the natives, that
to educate them is only to make them worse,
or that the converts are so few that they cost
so many hundred pounds per head !

Some of the best civilians have a more
favourable report to give. Indeed it is
generally the highest class of civilians, hold-
ing responsible positions, who declare that
missions are doing an immense amount of
direct or indirect good. Sir Claude Macdonald,
late British Minister at Pekin, formerly British
Agent at Zanzibar and on the Niger, Sir Chas.
Aitchison, Lieut-Governor of the Punjab, Sir
R. Temple, and other men of like position have
been steadfast supporters of mission work. Sir

G 97

qS The Challenge to Missions

Harry Johnston's tribute appeared but lately in
the secular press. And Lord Lawrence's words
are not forgotten : " Notwithstanding all that
English people have done to benefit India, the
missionaries have done more than all other
agencies combined."

Their verdict is not quoted as foreclosing
the case. But, as criticisms from mission
censors are so largely introduced in these
pages, it is fair to show that men of sane
and independent judgment, in the highest
quarters where they are likely to see the
work on the large scale and know its effects
by long residence, express an estimate of it
entirely different from the airy gossip current
in camps and treaty ports. Yet one must
deal with the average opinion that one en-
counters in moving about in the world.

First take briefly the question of numbers.

Dr Morrison, who has clearly been at school,
mirthfully reduces the outcome of the work to
fractions. " Expressed succinctly their harvest
may be described as amounting to a fraction
more than two Chinamen per missionary per
annum. If native helpers are added, the
aggregate body of converts amounts to nine-
tenths of a Chinaman per worker per annum." ^

Lord Curzon, more sedately, asserts that
the work is " not advancing with a rapidity

^ An Australian in China.

"Counting the Game" 99

in the least commensurate to the prodigious
outlay in money, self-sacrifice, and human
power." ^ So, then, it is not the missionaries
alone who, as Mr Michie puts it, "sum up
their success" as "sportsmen count their
game." If they do so, it is chiefly because
the Church at home, not unnaturally yet un-
fortunately, calls for statistics of advance,
and expects the missionary to produce his
yearly "tale of bricks." But it is the critic,
even more than the Church, that demands
results and "counts the game."

Lord Curzon himself, like Mr Michie,
shows that the test of progress does not lie
in the number of converts. " Much of their
work is necessarily devoid of immediate
results, and is incapable of being scientifically
registered in a memorandum. They sow
the seed, and if it does not fructify in
their day or before their eyes, it may well
be germinating for a future ear-time." He
pays a tribute to the missionary's "devotion
and self-sacrifice, his example of pious fortitude,
the influence of the education and culture thus
diffused in kindling the softer virtues and in
ameliorating the conditions of life ; the slow
but certain spread of Western knowledge ; the
visible products in organised philanthropy in
the shape of hospitals, medical dispensaries,

* Problems of the Far East,

loo The Challenge to Missions

orphanages, relief distribution, and schools ;
the occasional winning of genuine and noble-
hearted converts from the enemy's fold."

"You don't get an adequate return for your
money," says the man who looks on 4 per
cent, as poor interest for any investment,
whether sacred or secular. And a return he
and we are perfectly entitled to expect. But
how much does he allow for the laying of
the foundations required before a new order
of things can be built up? How much for
the slow progress of rubbing down prejudice
and distrust, for proving the apostle's dis-
interested motives, for lifting the heavy inertia
of age-long custom, for breaking the trammel-
ling yoke and bar of caste, and for mitigating
the force of rooted superstitions and vested
interests ? How much for making dictionaries
(as missionaries have been the first to do)
and for translating the Scriptures ?

And is the critic to count it as nothing in
the balance-sheet that Christian missions have
been opening up closed countries to civilising
influences and national development as well
as to trade? (It carries no weight with the
Christian mind, but it might with the com-
mercial censor, that missions have opened
many doors for trade, and have brought back
in commerce far more than they have cost.)

How much time, and how many lives, were

"Counting the Game" loi

spent in cutting down the ancient forests of
Britain, in taming and tilling the soil, in laying
roads and building bridges, and making our
island-home the rich and comely land it is?
A long taming, tilling, preparatory work of
a similar kind has to be done among native
races before the rich harvest of human good-
ness and enlightened piety can be reaped.
In the assessment of missionary results, how
much is allowed for such preparatory, civil-
ising, educational work? With all this in
view, can any fair mind reckon up the out-
come at so many converts per missionary per
annum, costing so many hundred pounds per
head, or expect more than a moderate ad-
vance meanwhile in the numbers won from
paganism ?

Yet, even in respect of numbers, the results
sufficiently attest the progress of the cause.
In one year alone (1899), excluding the
baptised catechumens, not less than 100,000
were added to the number of communicants.
The appalling fact remains indeed, that the
number added to the native population of
such a country as India by natural increase
is larger each year than the numbers won to
the Christian fold. But the multiplication of
the Christian community marches in a rising
ratio, and will ultimately overtake and out-
strip the native growth.

I02 The Challenge to Missions

The Imperial Census for India taken for
1 90 1 has been revealing the great strides made
by Christianity during the previous decade.
The return for the entire continent, with the
exception of the Bombay Presidency and
Burma (the statistics for which had not
appeared), shows that the number of professed
Christians had risen from 1,952,704 in 1891
to 2,501,808 in 1901 — had risen in fact by
550,000. In these returns European Christians
are included; but, according to Sir Charles
A. Elliott, late Lieut.-Governor of Bengal,^
they are practically stationary in numbers, the
same as in 1891. The addition of half a
million Christians, therefore, has been drawn
from among the natives. Within ten years
half a million natives of India have been won
to the open profession of Christianity. The
growth in numbers has been thirty per cent.,
and that is four times the growth of the
general population. It is not merely the large
increase in itself that gratifies and reassures ;
it is the rising ratio of increase, four times the
increase of the populace. And here, of course,
no account can be taken of those who during
the same period have become Christians in
secret, and the larger numbers who have
been brought within the Christian "sphere of
influence." (See Appendix B., p. 184).
^ Times i 3rd December 1901.

"Counting the Game" 103

The increase of course varies very greatly
in different countries. In some places it is
disappointingly small thus far. In Korea, on
the other hand, at Pyeng-Yang, there was only
a handful of Christians in the whole region
in 1895 ; by 1900 there were 2,500 communi-
cants, while the total number of adherents
was 10,000. Not counting the 500,000 Chinese
claimed by the Roman Catholic Church, there
are nearly 100,000 Christian communicants in
China. And the native Christian community
attached to this church membership — young
people in schools, catechumens, families, etc.
— is many times larger.

In Uganda within a single decade the number
of baptised Christians has risen, Bishop Tucker
states, from 300 to 30,000.

" Why, the captain assured me at tiffin that
there weren't half-a-dozen Christians in all
China ; and here in one meeting are more
than three hundred." This was said by a
passenger who allowed himself to be con-
ducted by a friend to a centre of mission
work.

It is now notorious that those hasty visitors
and travellers, and even white residents, who
declare that they have seen plenty of mission-
aries but few native Christians have never gone
to examine for themselves what the missions
are doing. The Christian natives are not on

I04 The Challenge to Missions

show in the streets : they are only a fraction of
the heathen community and not distinguish-
able among the million ; and of necessity the
work is usually quiet and unobtrusive. How
can the success of the campaign be known
to those who only touch at open ports, or run
through a country on business or for sight-
seeing purposes ? They depend for their
information mainly on the Philistine gossip
current at the clubs and the dinner-tables of
residents who live almost entirely apart from
the native's life and never investigate the work
done by missions. " A little laudable curiosity
and a braving of the smells and sounds of
native streets" would reveal to them that,
whatever the failures here and there, the
floating reports do no sort of justice to the
actual results.

It is from the lower and less educated classes,
we are reminded, that the converts are drawn.
Have any of those whom Oliver Wendell
Holmes called the "Brahmin classes" of the
community believed ? Are the literati found in
the native Church? And certainly, if Christianity
does not appeal to the enlightened, grave doubt
is raised — but not about missions, rather about
Christianity itself.

But (i) our missionary experience simply
reproduces Christ's own. " The common people

"Counting the Game" 105

heard Him gladly " ; and critics were able to
ask, " have any of the rulers or of the Pharisees
believed on Him ? " Yet some of the most
enlightened rulers, like Nicodemus, did believe
on Him, although restrained by caste-fears from
at once confessing Him. It is often the educated
who are the most closely encased in prejudice ;
and, if most of the Rabbis and Herodians of
India and China are the slowest to admit the
new light, it is only what happened in the first
days of Christianity. It is clear from the
Apostolic Epistles that, while some of the well-
born in Rome and Greece belonged to the
primitive Church, most of the first Christians
were of the commonalty, numbers of them
slaves.

(2) It is what seizes the great common
instincts of the people that proves its universal
truth. What captures the broad base of the
triangle shows the full width of its conquering
power. And early missions in the Roman
empire conquered the community by working
from the humbler strata upwards.

Besides (3) it is from the lower-middle (not
the lowest) classes — those very classes from
which most of the converts are drawn — that
the most virile life of the community is recruited.
"As the husbandman, driving his ploughshare
into the soil, brings the bottom strata to the
surface and turns the upper strata to the

io6 The Challenge to Missions

bottom, so in the upheavings of Providence the
lower classes of yesterday become the upper
classes of to-day."

It is what we find in the history of races.
Some ask, " Are not the rude African races
sure to be overborne and swept away by the
civilised ? " For one thing, at present these are
multiplying much more swiftly than the whites.
And just as the highly cultivated and luxurious
Romans were spent, and were out-lived by the
hardy Goths and Germanic races of the north,
so the ruder earth-children and hillsmen of the
modern world may have a large contribution to
make to the stock of the coming race. By the
same law the religion which conquers the
simpler, humbler class in the community may
be planting itself most securely in the genera-
tions to come.

But (4) numbers of the enlightened classes
do respond to mission Avork, markedly in some
countries if not so extensively in others.

In Japan, for example, in the year 1900 {cf.
The Chinese Recorder for 1900) Mr Loomis was
able to say, " The Minister for Foreign affairs
and the Secretary to the Prime Minister are
Christians. The honoured President of the
Lower House is a devoted member and elder
of the Presbyterian Church ; and there are
thirteen or fourteen other Christians in the
present Diet. Two battleships of the first class

"Counting the Game" 107

in the Japanese Navy are commanded by
Christian captains. There are three Christian
professors, and upwards of sixty members of
the Young Men's Christian Association, in the
Imperial University of Tokio. There are
thirty Christian Associations and eight hun-
dred and fifty members among the students
of Japan."

If in India fewer of the educated classes
become professed converts, it is partly because
of the restraints of caste — numbers of them
are known to be disciples in secret, afraid of
the awful ban of the out-caste. Yet a Madras
writer and philosopher, Mr S. Satthianadhan,
M.A., LL.M., has shown how Christianity is
being assimilated by India.

"What," he wrote, "is the influence of
Christianity on New India? We have first
and foremost a large and influential com-
munity that has severed itself entirely from
the ancient religion, and has accepted Christ
as its Saviour. Some of the keenest intellects
that India has produced, men like Professor
Ramachander, the author of * Maxima and
Minima,' Dr Krishna Mohun Banerjee, one
of the first Indians whom the Calcutta Uni-
versity honoured with the degree of Doctor
of Laws ; and Pandita Ramabai, a woman of
rare intellectual gifts, and well learned in
Sanskrit literature [he adds other names of

io8 The Challenge to Missions

equal importance], have found in the teachings
of Christ final rest and satisfaction.

" But the indirect influence of Christianity
in moulding the thoughts and aspirations of
the Indians is very considerable. The unique
personality of Christ is having, consciously or
unconsciously, a supreme attraction for even
those who are outwardly opposed to Christi-
anity. Some who have come under mission-
ary influences, even though still within the
visible pale of Brahmaism and Hinduism,
recognise the claims of Christ as the greatest
religious teacher and His right to their
allegiance, though they are not prepared to
take the step that means the severance of
family ties, social disgrace, and isolation.
The most telling testimony to the influence
of Christianity is to be found in the efforts
made to read into Hindu religious doctrines
the moral teachings of Christ." Of this in-
corporating process the Madras thinker gives
living examples. (See Appendix B., p. 184).

Baboo Keshub Chunder Sen — head of the
Brahmo Somaj, and never attached to the
Christian Church — asked: "Who rules India .^
What power is it that sweeps the destinies
of India at the present moment? ... If
India is encompassed on all sides by Christian
literature, Christian civilisation, and Christian
government, she must naturally endeavour to

** Counting the Game** 109

satisfy herself as to the nature of this great
power in the realm which is doing such
wonders in our midst. India knows not yet
this power, though already so much influenced
by it. She is unconsciously imbibing the
spirit of this new civilisation — succumbing to
its irresistible influence. Therefore India ought
to be informed as to the real character of the
course of this reforming influence — Christ. . . .
Christ, not the British Government, rules India."

It is by the diffusion of Christian ideas and
of civilising and humane influences, and the
general preparatory work already done, that
the progress of the cause is to be calculated ;
it is not to be measured by the numbers on
mission registers. Much of the expenditure
of life and labour is of the nature of an
investment ; the large amount of capital sunk
will bring its return in time to come.

J. Russell Lowell, American citizen of the
world and no partizan, may be allowed to
make the case acutely plain. When the keen
scrutiny of sceptics " has found a place on this
planet, ten miles square, where a decent man
can live in decency, comfort, and security, sup-
porting and educating his children unspoiled
and unpolluted, a place where age is reverenced,
infancy respected, womanhood honoured, and
human life held in due regard, — when sceptics
can find such a place, ten miles square, on this

no The Challenge to Missions

globe, where the Gospel of Christ has not gone
and cleared the way and laid the foundations,
and made decency and security possible, it will
then be in order for the sceptical literati to
move thither and ventilate their views. But
so long as these men are dependent on the
very religion which they discard for every
privilege they enjoy, they may well hesitate
a little to rob a Christian of his hope and
humanity of its faith in that Saviour who
alone has given to men that hope of Eternal
life which makes life tolerable and society
possible, and robs death of its terrors and
the grave of its gloom." ^ And this brave
argument may be extended to the cause which
carries the benefits of Christianity to pagan
races and can do for them what it has done
so amply for all of us.

1 Cf. the present author's In Relief of Doubt ^ p, 66. Also
Mr ^leredith Townsend's Asia and Europe^ chap, iii., a wise
valuation of the situation in India. See outline in Appendix
B., p. 184.

VIII

CHEQUERED RESULTS

"The Mission-made Man"

SX&

VIII

CHEQUERED RESULTS

"The Mission-made Man"

But are the natives improved by Christian
missions ? Are the results morally and socially
satisfactory? This, and not the matter of
numbers, is the serious question. And it must
be seriously and frankly answered. Let the
lay critic as seriously consider the whole
situation and do justice to the case. Readers
will bear in mind that some of the following
paragraphs deal more particularly with the
situation among African, Polynesian, and other
races just emerging out of semi-barbarism,
while others apply to conditions which exist
among the settled Asiatic races.

The late Miss Mary Kingsley — what piquant
travel books about West Africa she has left
us ! — said that " the missionary-made man is
the curse of the coast." ^ In India and the Far
East we are not allowed to forget the "rice
Christians" whose change of creed has in it
the hope of better wages. There are very

^ Travels in West Africa.

H "3

114 The Challenge to Missions

many among the lay community — numbers of
them personally Christians — who declare that
missions only upset and spoil the native, that
they prefer the raw heathen or natural coolie to
the mission "boy," the "red" to the "School"
Kaffir. And they have come across cases
sufficient to give them reason for what they
say.

Granted that too often these summary
verdicts are the result of light gossip among
unfriendly or easy men of the world, that
frequently they are second-hand and not drawn
from personal knowledge, mere echoes which
resound through treaty ports and foreign settle-
ments and are caught up by the casual visitor.
Something has to be discounted from the
opinion when it comes from a certain class of
European and American residents, who either
(i) have little serious interest in religion and
a traditional prejudice against missions, or (2)
show a contempt for the " blacks " which warps
their estimate of work among "niggers," or
(3) lead a gay or money-hunting life which
requires that the native be "kept in his place"
as a feeder for their pleasure or for their speedy
enrichment.

Yet this only explains a portion of the
criticism, much of which is offered in good
faith by men of credit.

"The Mission-made Man" 115

The scandal is caused by two classes of
natives who carry the mission brand.

(i) Some who have been educated at the
mission school or college swell with vanity or
independence, and are perhaps foolish enough
to think themselves too good for menial labour.
Without being bad, they alienate the sympathies
of the white employer.

(2) There are others who have been educated
without being morally touched. When they
have got the education they want, they scale
off all religious professions and seek only to
get some post or clerkship with the aid of
what they have learnt. Some turn out clever
rogues. Others go away and sink lower than
they were in a state of nature, adding foreigners'
vices to their own, perhaps completely " going
fan tee."

It is these unsatisfactory or peccant classes
with whom the shipmaster, the trader, and
the merchant come into contact. It is the
" wastrels " who usually gravitate to the ports
and become known to the foreigner ; the best
are often "up country." The critic generally
has the former in his eye, and they blind him
to the existence of others of a very different
type. Of the good, reliable Christian natives,
no worse, according to their stage of develop-
ment, if no better, than approved communi-

ii6 The Challenge to Missions

cants in our home churches, more will be said
later.

Miss Kingsley, after paying a high tribute
to the West African missionaries as generally
brave and noble-minded men and women,
says : —

" A really converted African is a very beauti-
ful form of Christian, but those Africans who
are the chief mainstay of missionary reports,
and who afford such material for the scoffer
thereat, have merely had the restraint of fear
removed from their minds in the mission
schools without the greater restraint of love
being put in its place." " He ' rips,' but he rips
carefully, terrified by his many fetish restric-
tions, if he is pagan ; but if he is in that partially
converted state you usually find him in when
trouble has been taken with his soul — then
he rips unrestrained." It is on this account,
she says, that "the missionary-made man is
the curse of the coast."

"When trouble has been taken with his
soul," the Asiatic may not " rip " — he is already
semi-civilised, and his case differs from that
of the African — but he may disappoint in his
own more self-seeking way, when he is not
converted to his finger-tips.

Such sinister cases — although very far from
representing native Christians generally — must

"The Mission-made Man" 117

be explained. And explained they can be, if
we take a wide enough horizon for our outlook.
We must ask such questions as these : —
(i) What length of time, how many genera
tions, are we to allow undeveloped
races for ascending through temporary
failures to the social and moral level to
which we have risen only after centuries
of slow evolution ?

(2) What but unsettlement can we expect

from races and individuals passing
through the transition from a lower
to a higher order of life?

(3) Are the cases complained of peculiarly

the result of mission work, and in no
way connected with the inrush of all
kinds of foreign influences ?

(4) Is mission work raising the character

and life of the majority of the converts

within the native Church ?
I. We must grant these raw^ undeveloped
races time for their evolution. It cannot but
take several generations before they assimilate
Christianity, get it into their blood and incor-
porate it in the habit and traditions of their
common life. They must have time for pain-
fully learning the tastes and laws of an
enlightened existence and settling steadily into
a higher moral and social order.

ii8 The Challenge to Missions

Do we forget how many centuries it has
taken us in Britain to emerge from barbarism
and acquire some measure of the Christian
mind and habit? More than a thousand years
passed, thirty or forty generations came and
went, before our race was extensively Christian-
ised in character and social custom.

St Jerome tells that when " a boy, living in
Gaul, he beheld the Scots, a people in Britain,
eating human flesh ; and though there were
plenty of cattle and sheep at their disposal, yet
they would prefer a ham of the herdsman or a
slice of the female breast as a luxury." The
first results produced among our barbaric
ancestors by Columba, Cuthbert, Augustine,
and other early missionaries — were they even
as good as those to be witnessed to-day in
Uganda or the South Seas ? We have reached
our present mixed state only after Christianity
has been at work on us for fifteen centuries.
Are we to expect untamed races now to come
to the same level of enlightenment at one swift
leap .? It is preposterous for critics to measure
the ultimate value of mission work by the
effects produced in one or two generations.

Miss Kingsley admits that the children of
the school, with all their shortcomings, are
better than the others outside. That in itself
is much, and is the pledge of more. Has there

^*The Mission-made Man*' 119

been some visible gain, some step taken upward
on the long stairway of ascent ? In spite of
bad cases, the majority of those who have come
under Christian influence have made a clear
advance upon their previous condition. That
is enough to certify the prophecy of faith — as
much as can be expected in one generation.
The world is still young. These dark child-
races are but beginners in life's career. They
have the capacity of future maturity, as much
as our own race had when Rome and Greece
looked down on it with contempt. We are
shortsighted judges if we pass sentence against
the process of elevation at its beginning because
of the blunderings of certain natives who, with
no Christian ancestry or Christian environment,
have failed to absorb Christian teaching.

2. " The natives are unsettled by the mis-
sionaryy spoilt by education." Even suppose this
more widely true than it is. Unsettlement is
inevitable during their time of transition. There
is no progress for a people except through a
stage of unsettlement and stumbling.

Are they too independent and self-import-
ant ? Their swollen independence, with all the
foolishness into which it leads them, may be
the rude uprising of unbalanced manhood.
They "strut" as though they were mighty;
but that strut is the boy's premature attempt

I20 The Challenge to Missions

to be a man, and, though it makes us smile,
it hints self-discovery and coming manhood.
Their mistakes in misusing their education and
liberties are the first erratic blunderings which
a raw people make in the use of their freedom,
the first unsteady steps on the way to a civilised
life.

"They are happier in nature's raw state."
Perhaps they are — in the sense of bovine con-
tentment, as a Russian mozijzk is happier in
his sluggish existence without a man's rights
than a free Briton, as the ignorant are happier
than the wise. But such happiness is no
measure of the worth and dignity of their life.
Do we refuse to educate a child because he is
happier when ignorant and young than when
he will be mature and wise ? Yet they are not
so happy as theorists assume : they live under
the terrorism of their superstitions.

Are some of them vain, superficial, unreliable,
upset by having high " notions " filling their
heads? No one — except possibly the fond
padre — wishes to gloss over their faults — and
even the missionary sees these with distress.
But the same thing is said of the freedmen of
the Southern States. The same argument was
urged against their emancipation. The same
charge was advanced — that they were happier
and more serviceable when they were slaves,

"The Mission-made Man'* 121

that education and freedom upset and spoilt
them, turned their heads and broke up the old,
peaceful relations. And there was truth in the
charge. Was emancipation an error, then,
because of the unsteadiness and blunderings of
the first and second generations of freedmen ?
Those may think so who live uncomfortably
close to them ; but we who stand detached are
able to take a larger, longer view. In the
course of generations the full benefit will be
reaped. The unsettlement and errors of the
transition time are inevitable ; and they are no
argument against freeing and educating the
Negro.

Here at home the same thing is said : the
lower classes are spoilt by being educated ;
they are too proud to do menial work — see the
difficulty of getting servants! And indeed the
disadvantages of educating the million are
patent. Possibly they are being too highly
educated in letters and too little trained in
industries and practical work. But the abuse
which the lower classes make of education is
only incidental to their general elevation. The
ultimate enlightenment of the masses is worth
the price which has to be paid during the
process.

If native races are unsettled and rendered
unsteady at first by foreign teaching and

122 The Challenge to Missions

missions, it is only the inevitable stage on the
way to their final maturity. The transition
time is always trying. The first effect of new
ideas everywhere is unsettlement. This is the
universal path of progress. We must take the
far look — say, across the same number of
centuries as we have had for our ascent — and
foresee better days. In Sir William Wilson
Hunter's words (The Old Missionary): "A
youth who starts life with such a wrench away
from the order of things around him as is
implied by conversion may have strange oscilla-
tions before he reaches true equilibrium or poise."

Many of the Negroes who revel in Christian
emotions have not yet ethicised their life. But
do we not find similar cases often enough
among ourselves? The last thing to be
Christianised in some men is their conscience
in matters of practical conduct.

The American, so the old story goes, asked
at Oxford how they got the College lawn
smooth as velvet. " You roll it, and cut it, and
roll it, and cut it, for two or three hundred
years, and then you get it like this," said the
gardener. If land newly taken in from the
prairie could not quickly be reduced to soft
lawn, as little can we expect to produce rich
Christian character out of raw races without a
long process of Christian cultivation. To change

**The Mission-made Man" 123

the metaphor, is the germ of the Christian life
set in the heart of native Christians ? We must
estimate the final outcome by what that germ
of goodness is capable of ultimately producing.

The mistake of the "Exeter Hall" idealist
is that he wishes the natives to be dealt with
at once as the white man's equal, to be fully
enfranchised in Church and State, and put on a
level with our own race. But they are child-
races, and must be treated as such. What
alienates the sympathy of many a layman is
the foolish talk of fond men who want to give
them the rights and social position for which
they cannot as yet be fully qualified. But it is
not the missionary usually who is guilty of this
fondling foolishness ; it is the theorist at home.
The missionary knows from practical and often
mortifying experience — witness the vagaries of
the " Ethiopian Church " of South Africa — that
they must continue under guidance and control
like children, until they have been trained to
use their new privileges and have matured as
full-grown men.

But that is no reason for keeping them
ignorant and Christless.

3. Is the missionary alone responsible for the
results ? It is a perilous and often a calamitous
time when the old " cake of custom " is broken,
when custom-law, the sway of chiefs and super-

124 The Challenge to Missions

stitions, and the settled tribal rule are destroyed.
The pagan order has, just as Miss Kingsley
described it, lost its restraining hold ; and the
new moral order has not yet mastered the
nature-folk and wrought itself into their fibre.
It is small wonder if there be unsteadiness,
blundering, and temporary failure, when there
is "one world dead, the other helpless to be
born." (See Appendix B., p. 184).

But even if missions were withdrawn, the
old pagan order of fetish fears and tribal law
could not possibly long remain. Railways,
commerce, and the whole mass of Western
civilisation will in any case proceed irresistibly
to break up the rule of caste and race-custom
and the superstitions of the unsophisticated.
The missionary is not the only foreigner among
them. By the confession of Dr Morrison and
Miss Kingsley, he is the best and most
humane, representative of foreign enlighten-
ment. Robert Louis Stevenson said the same re-
garding the missionaries of Samoa — and among
the finest tributes he ever paid were his paeans
over the missionary James Chalmers and the
heroism of a native Samoan preacher. If these
rude races or old-world nations are not morally
seized and uplifted by Christianity, the old
pagan order will fall to pieces all the same,
and there will be no new moral and spiritual

"The Mission-made Man" 125

force set at work to create a new and better
order with finer restraints and higher law and
custom.

We are urged not to destroy the native
simplicity of primitive peoples. (The man
who has seen them in the flesh indulges in a
smile when the bookish dreamer at home talks
at large about their simplicity as though it
were idyllic !) But their so-called " simplicity "
does not suffer so much from the missionary
as from foreign trade and civilisation ; the best
results are to be seen where he is farthest from
foreign corruption. In any event it could not
long be preserved even if he disappeared from
the scene. Our material civilisation is invadine
the preserves of all the primitive races of the
world, and nothing can arrest its march. There-
fore education — which should not be too high
for their actual requirements and should be well
balanced with manual, industrial training — and
all our moral and Christian forces must be set
at work among them, else they will either be-
come a direr curse to all who come into touch
with them, or they will racially perish.

The proper influence of well-conducted com-
merce is in many ways wholesome and helpful
in the spread of the kingdom of God. The
work of raising a rude native race cannot all
be done by missions and preachers. It needs

126 The Challenge to Missions

the merchant, the artizan, the capitalist each
to contribute something to the development of
the people's industrial and social life. Some
were disappointed when Livingstone, ceasing
to be a mere evangelist although to the last
a missionary, went forward as a pioneer into
Africa to open up the country and prepare
a way for commerce as well as missions. A
statesman as well as a preacher, he saw that
the people could never be elevated and en-
franchised in the human race without a full
civilisation being planted among them. Com-
merce opens up the country, develops its
resources, creates new wants which compel
the natives to leave their idle or hunting habits
and settle to steady work, and lays the material
basis for a new order of life.

Yet Manchester goods, railways, and the
like cannot socially and morally save them.
Commerce cannot make or mend character —
and often in its train corruption follows. At
any rate, for good and ill it pushes its way
to every square mile of the earth, and it is
everywhere breaking up the primitive "sim-
plicity" of native peoples.

The British Government through its schools
and colleges has supplied the best youth of
India with secular education ; and moral failure
is thus far confessedly the result It has turned

**The Mission-made Man" 127

out clever office-seekers, who have " notions "
put into their heads, in many cases prove un-
reliable, and think themselves too good for the
old menial, toilsome labour. Their old pagan
order and customs are upset — all the more
disastrously when no new religious power
accompanies the secular enlightenment to
balance the unsettlement it produces and
begin the long process of building up good
character.

Sir William Wilson Hunter, K.C.S.I.,
specialist in Indian affairs, in his exquisite
idyll, The Old Missionary^ says through his
typical hero : " The indigenous schools made
the native religions too much the staple of
instruction. Your Government schools take
credit for abstaining from religious teaching
of any sort, and in due time you will have
on your hands a race of young men who
have grown up in the public non-recognition
of a God. The indigenous schools educated
the working and trading classes for the natural
business of their lives. Your Government
schools spur on every clever small boy with
scholarships and money allowances, to try to
get into a bigger school, and so through many
bigger schools, with the stimulus of bigger
scholarships, to a University degree. In due
time you will have on your hands an over-

128 The Challenge to Missions

grown clerkly generation, whom you have
trained in their youth to depend on Govern-
ment allowances and to look to Government
service, but whose adult ambitions not all the
offices of the Government would satisfy. What
are you to do with this great clever class,
forced up under a foreign system, without
discipline, without contentment, and without
a God?" There is no inferential argument
here that Government ought to, or even can,
mix with its education the saving salt of
religious teaching.^ Sir William W. Hunter,
however, is an independent witness to the
fact that, not the missionary alone, but the
Government far more with its secular educa-
tion, is a disturbing agent which inevitably
breaks up the old order.

The transition must be gone through ; there
is nothing else for it under any policy, secularist
or Christian. The disturbance must be en-
dured ; it would not be abated if mission work
were to cease. And those take a very narrow
and shortsighted view of the case who boggle
at the present unsettlement and fail to look
far ahead and see what will result when
Christian enlightenment has done its slow,
cumulative work upon successive generations.

Many of the evils which catch the eye of the

1 V. Bishop Welldon in Empire Review, September 1901.

"The Mission-made Man" 129

critic are part of the demoralisation always
found where civilised and uncivilised races
meet and corrupt each other. All the world
over and in every century, the meeting-line of
different races, high and low, dark and white,
has been the scene of surging passions, bringing
peril to the weak. The white man's vices
flourish where he has lower races at his dis-
posal, and the men of the brown or the black
skin are apt to cast off ancestral restraints and
"rip."

Have we estimated how the liquor traffic
demoralises the natives and works round to
the detriment of the missionary cause? Miss
Kingsley did "not agree that the natives of the
Gold Coast would be better without spirits " —
she only thought apparently that they would
be better without the mission school ! But she
is out-voted overwhelmingly by witnesses of all
beliefs and of no belief I have seen the havoc
wrought by " Cape Smoke " sold to the Kaffir
at ninepence a bottle — natives mad with it.
The inflammable and unstable nature of the
natives is easily set ablaze by the fiery liquid.
This intoxicating curse, both directly and
indirectly, mars and impedes Christian work.
It accounts for some of those dark degenerates
who bear the brand of the mission school.

Concubinage, too, has something here to

I

I30 The Challenge to Missions

answer for. I have had an Englishman on the
China seas complacently avow the practice,
defend it, and assure me that it is quite the
usual thing for white men in the East. On the
contrary, one knows well that numbers of white
residents among alien races are as clean in
their lives and as honourable as the best of
us at home. Yet every layman who has mixed
freely with his kind is aware of the loose lives
lived by too many of his countrymen when
"East of Suez, where the best is like the
worst."

Such things as these are associated in the
native mind with "Christian" countries, and
they hamper the missionary's work, and do
damage to the good repute of the white man's
religion.

"These missionaries are a curse to the
country. They are spoiling it for the white
man." This was said lately by a man who
had gone up to Livingstonia to buy cattle for
the North Charterland Exploration Company,
after he had stolen the natives' stock, abused
women and shot men who resisted, and had
been overtaken, tried upon evidence before the
English resident, Mr Murray, and severely
condemned and heavily fined. An extreme
instance, of course, yet not without a parallel
in the Congo Free State where the Belgian

"The Mission-made Man" 131

officers take their will of the natives, in the
South Seas under the Kanaka labour system,
and sometimes under the British flag. There
are of course good traders as well as bad ; but
too many of them exploit the natives (no guile-
less innocents, certainly, but what of that?)
and use them in cruel ways that make every
true man's blood boil.

R. L. Stevenson, while arguing that the
missionary should do more to keep on friendly
terms with the trader and win partial support
from him, wrote from Samoa : " The missionary
is hampered, he is restricted, he is negated, by
the attitude of his fellow -whites, his fellow-
countrymen and his fellow- Christians, in the
same island." " It has been observed," the
journalistic mouthpiece of British opinion has
recently said, " with no little truth that the
continuous object-lesson of kindliness, truthful-
ness, and integrity which the missionary con-
veys in his daily dealings with his neighbours,
standing, as it often must do, in striking
contrast to the vices of the ruling class, is the
chief stone of missionary offence in the sight
of the average Mandarin " — and, it might have
been added, for the same reason the chief
missionary offence in the eyes of many white
traders, soldiers, and officials.

*'The missionary unsettles and spoils the

132 The Challenge to Missions

natives": in what light do many (not all) of
the men who say this look upon the natives?
Largely as "black labour" for the mines and
the plantations, for coaling ships and bringing
down rubber, or as carriers for travellers or
menial servants. They are wanted as human
"beasts of burden," or as providing markets
for our goods. In the eyes of numbers they
are "unspoilt" so long as they supply "cheap
labour," are subservient, and give no trouble.
What are "niggers" for if not to be serfs of
the white man's purpose? Perhaps they are
less subservient when taught in the mission
school than when "raw." But are they for
ever to be treated as having been created for
ox-like submission and ignorance? When a
ship-master, a trader, a planter, or an agent of
a chartered company regards them as existing
to be exploited by the European and American,
we know what value to attach to his judgment
that Christian work " spoils " them.

It is here again that we see how our secular,
social, commercial, and political life and action
and our Christian work are interrelated and
bound up together for better or for worse.
The progress of missions does not depend
alone on what the missionary is, does, or says.
What is the general influence of the repre-
sentatives of Europe and America in their

"The Mission-made Man" 133

relations with pagan peoples ? The legions of
Christendom, when abroad in the interests of
the civil service, the army, the navy, commerce,
diplomacy, and education — what sort of moral
forces do they carry with them, and do they
tell on the whole against or in favour of the
message of the Church's agent ? On that much
of his success depends.

From this comes the force of the argument
often advanced, that we have plenty still to do
before the people of our own land are Chris-
tianised. " You need not go to China and Peru
when there are so many close to your hand
who are as 'black' as you could wish." If,
indeed, we could first completely Christianise
our entire population and bring in the millen-
nium by concentrating all our forces at home,
the plea for this exclusive home policy would
have weight. But unhappily such a plan is
unworkable. The work at home and the work
abroad must go on abreast, and each helps the
other. All seas find the same level ; and, in
the close communication between nations in
modern times, the various races will rise or fall
together. Our moral conditions at home spread
their influence far over the world. If Europe
and America are not every way Christian, the
effect will be felt wherever Europe and America
exert their power.

134 The Challenge to Missions

The results of mission work among pagan
races, therefore, do not depend on the missionary
alone. They are affected by the entire v/eight,
good and bad, of the commercial, social, moral,
and political influence which white men bring
to bear upon those whom the Christian Church
seeks to Christianise.

Many of the sinister cases charged against
the mission school are not the direct product of
mission work, but are the waste-product of
native life disorganised by foreign civilisation.

Of this. Christian work is not the cause,
indeed, so much as it is the saving corrective,
the full benefit of which will only appear when
successive generations have gradually absorbed
the Christian life.

But may not the Best be the enemy of the
Good? The Hebrew race required to be
trained in Monotheism and the School of Law
and Kindergarten symbolism before being fit to
receive the spiritual revelation of Christ. Can
the uncivilised to-day dispense with this inter-
mediate stage of gradual education, and leap
from the lowest to the highest ground ? Would
not a religion inferior to Christianity, like
Mohammedanism with its simple monotheism
and code of rigid rules and penalties, serve
barbaric Polynesians and Africans better for
the first stage of their moral evolution ?

"The Mission-made Man" 135

But (i) it is impossible to keep any rude
race detached under such a legal schooling, and
ignorant of the Christian faith which is on the
march everywhere. (2) Africans who have ac-
cepted Mohammedanism have not been trained
and prepared thereby for the easier reception of
Christianity. On the contrary, it has arrested
the development of every race it has won. And
there is no other religion which is available for
the work of elementary drilling in legal ethics.
(3) The purely legal method has been tried
and has failed. Bishop Colenso made the
experiment in Natal. He withheld the full
Gospel from his Zulus and taught them the
law of commandments, training them in simple
morals and industry. When his preparatory
work was completed, his " School Kaffirs," set
free to go their own way, returned to their old
paganism again, reverting to type, as others
have "gone fantee." The full Christian faith
has proved itself the most powerful for the
moral development of immature races. It has
certainly to be taught them in simple, concrete
form by missionaries who have Moses' gift as
much as St John's. The reign of law has in
some measure to be retained alongside the
Gospel of love, as it is in the Christian education
of a child among ourselves. The transition for
such peoples is a somewhat perilous one.

136 The Challenge to Missions

But it has to be passed through on the slow
way to a higher life. There is nothing else for
it. Let two or three successive generations
absorb the Christian spirit, and it is seen that
the Best is the best for them as for us. Our
own barbaric ancestors proved it when they
received Christianity and were schooled and
elevated thereby. It is the one moral training
agency in the world which suits all grades of
men, making men as it saves them.

4. But are the majority of 7iative Christians
visibly improved by the work of 'missions ? That
is the paramount question.^ If most of the
native Church members are measurably better
in personal character and domestic life than
they were as heathen, better also than heathen
of the same class outside, the weak and foolish
specimens who have had mission training
supply no argument against the work as a
whole. It would be as preposterous to take
the fools and the religious rogues at home
who have misused their education and their
Sunday School nurture and build on them an
argument against the general effects and use
of current education and Christianity.

Let the "candid friend" of missionaries, Mr
Michie, give his evidence as to " the quality of

^ See Dr Campbell Gibson's calm and wise survey in Mission
Problems^ published since these pages were written.

*^The Mission-made Man" 137

the Chinese Christian converts." " Few as they
may be, when all told, and mixed as they
must be with spurious professors, it is a grati-
fying fact, which cannot be gainsaid, that
Christians of the truest type, men ready to
become martyrs, which is easy, and who lead
* helpful and honest ' lives, which is as hard as
the ascent from Avernus, crown the labours
of the missionaries, and have done so from
the very beginning. It is thus shown that
the Christian religion is not essentially un-
adapted to China, and that the Chinese
character is susceptible to its regenerating
power."

Numbers of the converts are indisputably
good and sterling Christians, proportionately
as consistent and trustworthy as the better
class of Christians at home. A few of them
have already the bright signal of the saint in
their faces and their tested lives. Others have
not the spiritual faculty highly developed, yet
are genuinely good.

Many of these — cases from every country
could be quoted in scores — have given clear,
sometimes even magnanimous, proofs of their
unselfish devotion and renewed life. They
have abandoned evil heathen practices. They
have been ostracised by their former comrades,
their very cattle put under the ban of the clan

138 The Challenge to Missions

or guild, and have borne the petty vexations
that gall the heart. They have endured per-
secutions, suffering the loss of their possessions,
and in the last extremity meeting death with
firm fidelity. What took place during the
tragic siege of Pekin and in many Provinces
of China sufficiently attests the statement.
The letter of thanks written by Mr Conger,
the United States Minister at the Chinese
capital, certifies their faithfulness and their
disregard of their own lives. Comparatively
few lapse in such "killing times." Living-
stone and Mackay of Uganda found the same
loyal devotion in Africa. In India many have
sacrificed family ties and become out-caste
{cf. p. 184).

They learn to give liberally of their means
for the spread of the Christian cause, in some
cases organising missions of their own and
maintaining them at their own cost. Numbers
of them are proportionately more generous
than the average Christian at home.

Lord Curzon, Mr. Freeman Mitford, and the
picturesque journalist remind us of those who
"find salvation for the sake of material ad-
vantages," for occupation and the foreigner's
wages. Lively young soldiers and civilians,
or blase " citizens of the world," who themselves
perhaps have no surplus of encumbering morals

"The Mission-made Man" 139

and no religion to speak of, are ready with
witty sallies at self-seeking "rice Christians."
That some should enter the fold from low
motives is only what might be expected. How
can the most careful missionary absolutely
prevent some such from creeping into the
Church ? Protestant missionaries do their best
to sift the motives of enquirers, subject doubt-
ful cases to a long probation, and impose
various other tests of sincerity. Are there not
some at home who associate themselves with
churches from low motives, for the sake of
trade-custom, or for social standing ? As a
matter of fact the "rice Christians" — profess-
ing to be Christians for the sake of their rice —
are comparatively few. And they do not dis-
credit the genuine majority.

" Nothing," writes Mr H. C. Thomson as an
independent lay observer, in his recent China
and the Powers (p. 271), " nothing has been so
remarkable during the recent revolt as the
extraordinary number of converts who have
suffered the most cruel martyrdom rather than
recant. Never again will it be possible to make
use of the old sneer that they are all *rice
Christians,' converts only for the subsistence
which they can obtain from the missions. The
heroic way in which they have gone to a horrible
death for conscience sake is the most convinc-

I40 The Challenge to Missions

ing testimony to the sincerity of their conversion
and to the noble work which those who have
been their teachers have, as a whole, done in
China."

Some, indeed, are weak and limp, " mixed "
in their faith, with rags of their old superstitions
still clinging to them. Yet they are palpably
honest up to their light, and are blundering
towards a worthy life.

The misdoings and defections of the weak
and half-converted are no worse than the lapses
of certain people in the early Christian Church
whom the New Testament describes as " spots "
and backsliders. St Peter had to write, "Let
none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief,
or as an evildoer." If some in modern mission
churches lapse temporarily into their old lying
or vicious habits, it is not so very amazing,
considering their previous lives, their present
surroundings, and the blood in their veins. At
Corinth, according to St Paul, equally great
offenders were found. Yet the early Christian
Church was none the less the most potent
agency for regenerating and uplifting men in
the pagan world of the time.

Miss Isabella Bird (Mrs Bishop), who saw
pagan lands and mission work from a detached
point of view, says, "It is a remarkable thing
how anxious they (the native Christians of

"The Mission-made Man" 141

China) are for purity, and how strong they are
against anything which is inconsistent." Even
those who err have their moral sensibilities
gradually quickened. The reclaimed acquire
a keener perception of sin.

In spite of imperfections, these mission-made
natives are stumblingly on the upward incline
towards full manhood and the Christian life.
They are in the birth-throes of entrance into
the divine Kingdom.

We plant Christ in their consciousness, sure
that He will carry forward His own work in
their experience, His Spirit steadying and train-
ing them in goodness. The Power which has
ruled our moral and spiritual development may
be relied on to achieve as great an outcome in
their experience after its own type.

That Christ-consciousness, too, will move in
their hearts, as it has in ours, to make the
Christian cause self-propagating among them.
Already numbers of them are fired with the
missionary spirit, and " pass it on." Our only
business is to light the sacred fire in their
hearts, guide them as apostles or bishops for
a time, and train some of themselves to make
the Christian campaign their own.

IX

THE MEN AND THEIR METHODS

143

IX
THE MEN AND THEIR METHODS

The target of the critic's shafts, when it is not
the " mission-made " native, is usually the
missionary himself, or his ways of working.
And some of those who have the best interests
of the cause at heart have pertinent questions
to put regarding the men and women sent out
and the lines of policy on which they conduct
their work. It is in respect of men and methods
that free expression of opinion, alike from
friends within and from critics without the
Church, must be held legitimate and proper.
The sacred cause in itself is inviolable, the
spread of Christ's kingdom imperative, and the
ultimate moral development of rude races must
be vindicated. But the missionaries are not
sacrosanct, and, when any one takes exception
to the policy which determines their modes of
working, he is not to be summarily dealt with
as though he were touching the ark of God.

In the eyes of many, the most urgent mis-
sionary question is the problem of men and
methods. It is not within the plan of this little
volume to enter into that discussion. It is

K ^45

146 The Challenge to Missions

enough to touch lightly upon certain practical
points raised by the average lay observer.

I. Dr Morrison has a passing tilt at the
comfortable residences of men who are supposed
to be making every sacrifice for the heathen.
That the missionary has "a good time" and
lives in comfort is the assurance one gets from
typical " birds of passage." They point to his
spacious house and his servants, and to the
bungalow on the hill to which he goes in the
hot season.

But (i) the cases differ in different places.
In the open ports and other centres where
foreign civilisation is established, there is no
occasion for the missionary living in uncomfort-
able quarters. The surprise of voyagers at
sight of his establishment comes from the
common romantic impression conveyed by
missionary literature of the old, crude sort,
the impression that everywhere indiscrimin-
ately the sacrifices and hardships are alike
severe. But in the interior and at many mission
outposts the hardships and sacrifices are heavy
enough, not measured by the cubic space of
the house — the house itself inevitably mean,
and other conditions of life, not understood at
home or by the passer-by, sufficiently taxing to
patience, offensive to white folks' sensibilities,
and perilous to family life.

Further, (2) often the mission building com-

The Men and their Methods 147

bines boarding-school premises with the mis-
sionary's house. The writer has stayed in such
a mission house in the East, where half the
spacious building was devoted to boarding-
school purposes.

(3) The health of all white men, missionaries
as well as civilians, in hot climates demands,
where obtainable, airy room-space and verandah
protection against the sun. It is this that
largely accounts for the spacious appearance
of some mission houses.

(4) The mission house in open ports and
central points has to accommodate passing mis-
sionaries on their way to the interior or remote
regions — and one could tell of lay travellers for
whom the missionary has brought out his best
and provided entertainment on a scale beyond
what he can ordinarily afford, and who have
gone their way and written about the luxury of
the missionary's life !

(5) There is no virtue in the ascetic life when
lived for its own sake. Poverty in the foreigner
does not impress the native — quite the contrary.
It is quite true that some men make themselves
more comfortable than the conditions justify;
a few may be found who feather their own
nests ; and mission property is sometimes con-
structed on an unduly grand scale. But these
cases are very far from being typical of the life
and homes of the vast majority of missionaries.

148 The Challenge to Missions

The Vicarage and the Manse at home are not
usually the meanest in the parish. And the
home Church may properly wish to establish
the missionary in the moderate comfort that is
available. In any case he has usually plenty of
disabilities and hardships — loneliness, loss of
kindred society for his family, discouragements
which he must consume alone, and the incessant
tax put upon his patience by the irresponsible,
slow, " wait-a-bit " ways of the natives with
whom he has to deal.

2. The thousands of male and female mission-
aries, as a matter of course, vary in calibre,
education, wisdom, aptitudes and tact — vary as
much as Christian ministers and workers at
home. If the incompetent, the over-zealous,
and the misguided are there, it is largely
because raw novices and new-caught zealots
have precipitated themselves upon the mission-
field, and because it has too often been thought
that distinct mental endowments are not so
requisite abroad as at home.

Lord Curzon has cause to animadvert on
"irresponsible itinerants" who are a law unto
themselves, and to say that "impulsive virtue
and raw enthusiasm are not necessarily the
best credentials for a missionary career."
Certain societies and movements in par-
ticular have something to answer for in this
respect.

The Men and their Methods 149

"On the ship bound for China," wrote Mr
Julian Ralph as hot-haste journalist, " I was
struck by the mediocre mental character of too
many of the men. They are often villagers
and men of the narrowest horizon." But even
mere " villagers " and " mediocre men " may do
laborious and useful service. Yet it is certain
that the permanent success and good repute of
the missionary cause can be greatly assisted by
the elimination of volunteers who have little to
recommend them beyond their earnest spirit.
The raw and callow, untrained in the guidance
of life, ignorant of human nature, with narrow
view of God and His treatment of the pagan
peoples, and with no room beside their "one
idea" for the march of civilisation, do indeed
win genuine converts and often show a heroic
evangelising spirit, but they are the civilian's
stumbling-block, and they are not the men to
grapple with the larger problems of paganism,
nor to deal wisely with the shrewd questions
of the heathen critic. Are they adequately
equipped if they have made no real acquaint-
ance with the mental attitude of the people
whose religions they seek to displace with
Christianity? Wise selection from the volun-
teers is imperative, and will contribute much to
the highest success of the mission cause. And
means should be taken, as Henry Drummond
so strongly urged after his visit to many

I50 The Challenge to Missions

mission fields, that each be sent to the country
for which he is naturally fitted.

The very best that the Church can find
are wanted — broad-minded, big-hearted, level-
headed men, able to grasp the larger issues of
the work as well as deal with the individual
soul, fired with a Christian earnestness which
burns on steadily without being consumed with
its own vehemence. There is need of states-
manship, generalship, scholarship, as well as of
evangelising activity. The career of a mis-
sionary in an ancient land offers the amplest
scope for the highest gifts. It is a career which
may well captivate any young man of spirit,
which will give him the fullest outlet for all
his powers, and which will satisfy his best
ambitions.

There are many such men on the field, men
who would have taken front rank in the home-
service of the Christian Church. One cannot
know the missionaries in any country without
receiving from the majority of them a strong
impression of their patient fidelity, level-headed
caution, and brave unacknowledged devotion.
Men who are as capable as the rest of their
brethren at home — one feels it an impertinence
to give them a character.

They have their own special temptations,
frankly described by Dr Wenyon. They are
their own masters as a rule, far from those to

The Men and their Methods 151

whom they are humanly responsible, and may
grow languorous in hot countries, or masterful
as do many white men living among dusky
races. They, like soldiers long in the field,
are liable to become "stale," weary-hearted
under the unrelieved pressure of hostile, im-
movable paganism — and the way in which this
immovable, contented paganism oppresses the
hearts of sensitive missionaries can scarcely be
conceived by the home-Christian in a religious
environment. Against such perils they have
to brace themselves — none the less although
they have Divine supports and a religious
mission — and the risks attending their depres-
sion should commend them to general sympathy
and be remembered by the intercessors at home.
But, despite all temptations, as a class their
lives are beyond cavil.

Captain Younghusband, the experienced
traveller in the Far East, wrote : " Missionaries
no more than other human beings are free from
mistakes of judgment. But I have before now
publicly testified to the noble and self-sacrificing
work of missionaries which I have seen with
my own eyes in the far interior of China. . . .
The most important and the most far-reaching
work in China is not done by our official repre-
sentatives, nor by our enterprising merchants,
but by that great body of Christian men — and
women too — who are giving their lives to impart

152 The Challenge to Missions

to the Chinese the accumulated knowledge of
the West." 1

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote : " I suppose
I am in the position of many other persons.
I had conceived a great prejudice against
missions in the South Seas, and I had no
sooner come there than that prejudice was at
first reduced, and then at last annihilated.
Those who deblatterate against missions have
only one thing to do, to come and see them
on the spot." They will, he says, see harm
done — " infallibly in all sublunary affairs." But
" they will see a great deal of good done ; they
will see a race being forwarded in many direc-
tions, and I believe, if they be honest persons,
they will cease to complain of mission work
and its effects." The earlier missionaries " broke
the tabus," and generally were too radical and
iconoclastic. The new class "think that it is
best to proceed by little and little, to spare so
far as it is possible native opinions and set
native habits of morality, to seek rather the
point of agreement than the points of differ-
ence." "The true art of the missionary, as
it seems to me — an outsider, the most lay of
laymen, and for that reason, on the old principle
that the bystander sees most of the game,
perhaps more than usually well able to judge
— is to profit by the vast amount of moral

1 Times, 19th Nov. 1901.

The Men and their Methods 153

force reservoired in every race, and to expand
and fit that power to new ideas and to new
possibilities of advancement."

The missionary errs, he thinks — his individual
opinion on this point is at least worth recording
— in looking askance on the white traders, who
are indeed of mixed character, but who, by
more considerate treatment, might be them-
selves made better and might also be raised
up " a brigade of half and half supporters " of
the work. But "those who have a taste for
hearing missions, Protestant or Catholic, decried,
must seek their pleasure elsewhere than in my
pages." ^

Dr Morrison, Miss Kingsley, and other typical
critics speak in like terms.

The bulk of missionaries, however, are above
the need of either testimonial or defence. Their
life and work speak for them. We only quote
these verdicts from outside as a means of satis-
fying readers who discount what the Church
says about the work.

3. On the graver questions of policy and
methods we have "many men many minds."
It would be vain to discuss the educational
policy V, evangelistic policy in India without
intimately knowing the conditions and going
thoroughly into the very serious and difficult
problem — and that is not for these pages. But

^ Life of R. L. Stevenson, ii. 193, and In the South Seas.

154 The Challenge to Missions

apparently native education has been too
scholastic and been carried too far.^

A "century of experiments" has passed,
and some points have become clear.

(i) It is Christianity in its primitive simplicity,
not the theological creeds of the West, that
the missionary has to deliver to the pagan
world. It is but a small "body of divinity"
that he has to carry with him — the body of
Christian essentials. Other races will secrete
their own interpretation of Christ's revelation.
Perhaps the Asiatic will penetrate more deeply
into its mystic meanings than has been possible
for the matter-of-fact European.

(2) The Bible must be set in its proper per-
spective, the Gospels and the Apostolic Epistles
in the forefront as alone indispensable. Ought
those portions of the older Scriptures over
which we ourselves still stumble to be trans-
lated at once, or to be imposed as on the same
level of authority as the Christian documents ?
Some parts of their Old Testament might be
drawn from the higher prophetic and pre-
paratory elements in their own old systems
of religion. Questions of Bible criticism, of
course, are not for them ; but we must so

^ On the question in South Africa see Dr Stewart's Experi-
ment of Native Education — brave warnings addressed to Kaffir
students at Lovedale. On the question in India the late Sir
William Wilson Hunter has something to say in The Old

Missionary.

The Men and their Methods 155

represent the Hebrew revelation to the native
Christians that they shall not have to pass
through the crisis of re-adjustment which has
been imposed on us by mistaken teaching in
the past.

(3) Decaying races are not to be neglected
because they may not survive the centuries or
dominate future history. The mission in the
New Hebrides, said Henry Drummond, has
no place in the evolutionary career of man-
kind. " It belongs to the Order of the Good
Samaritan. It is a mission of pure benevo-
lence." Our Lord had compassion, and has
taught us to have compassion, on the waste
and useless lives. And the races that are
likely to vanish need the gospel as much as
single individuals. Yet it must be the supreme
aim of missionary strategy to win those races
that bid fair to shape the history of future
generations.

(4) Industrial training, it is felt, must play
a larger part in the scheme of missions than
formerly. To educate raw races in their heads
and not in equal measure in their hands and
eyes — in husbandry and handicrafts — is to dis-
qualify them for the career which most of
them must follow. Habits of industry are
indispensable to their progress, and it is for
lack of such habits that numbers of them come
to grief. Lavish Nature has hitherto provided

156 The Challenge to Missions

easily for their needs ; competition and pressure
from white races will enter their arena and
compel them to work. In the direction of
industrial equipment, happily, numbers of mis-
sionary institutions are developing their educa-
tional scheme.

(5) Do not missionaries among half-barbaric
races place too much stress on getting the
people clothed? The "reds" in Africa are
healthier than the " School " natives (who carry
on their back their whole ill-matched outfit,
which when soaked with wet causes illness).
Yet it is in some measure true of Adamic
races, as it was of Adam and Eve, that, when
their eyes are opened to themselves in moral
consciousness, they know themselves naked and
are ashamed. That desire for covering means
a discovery of shame and therefore a new
instinct or finer sense of virtue. At the same
time, numbers of missionaries seem to think
that the natives are not properly Christianised
unless taught the foreigner's habits. This is
not included in the missionary aim.

(6) Policy and methods of work are deter-
mined in many cases when we determine what
is the missionary aim and final object.

Henry Drummond reported : " It is the
deliberate opinion of many who know China
intimately, who are missionaries themselves,
that half the preaching, especially the itiner-

The Men and their Methods 157

ating preaching, carried on throughout the
empire is absolutely useless." A certain
amount of itinerant preaching is imperative,
indeed, and indispensable for pioneering pur-
poses. But it will count for less or more
according to the ruling object which the
missionary has in view.

What is the ruling idea and aim that will
inspire the wisest missionary policy and dictate
the best methods? This question the next
chapter will seek to answer.

X

THE AIM
The Coming Kingdom

XS9

X

THE AIM:

The Coming Kingdom

Was Livingstone right in the ruling object he
had in view, in his missionary ideal? Those
who believe that the end of the present dispen-
sation, with the Second Coming of Christ, is at
hand do not believe in Livingstone's aim, which
may be called " national Christianisation." As
they believe the present world-order is soon to
pass away, their plan of campaign is to " gather
out " from the nations those who are Christ's
" own." We are to preach the Gospel " for a
witness," and, when all have heard it and had
their chance, then cometh the end.

" For a witness " : it would seem as though
the Gospel were to be proclaimed to all " for a
witness " against them, to the end that they
may be without excuse and God may be
technically in the right in condemning them.
Does not this give rather a sinister bearing to
mission work ?

This aim determines the whole of their mis-
sionary policy. It is the evangelist's business

T l6l

1 62 The Challenge to Missions

to rapidly evangelise everywhere, and his modus
operandi is to itinerate. He lays no large
foundations, because his scheme has no great
human future. He addresses himself to the
individual alone, and does not seek to establish
a Christian community-life. Mere " outgather-
ing" is his aim.

Many who labour with this as their sole
object are among the most devoted missionaries,
and they have their own harvest and reward.
They are contributing towards the great issue;
but that issue is larger than they know. And
their aim and methods of working have some
unfortunate effects.

No ; the Christian aim is to establish the
entire kingdom of God among all the nations
of the earth. It is to do the whole work of
Christianity in individual hearts and in the
national life. It is to do for Asia, Africa, the
West Indies, and the Pacific Islands everything
and all that Christ has been the means of doing
for our personal and social life — to achieve a
corporate as well as an individual salvation.
Among races now pagan there is to be the
same " outgathering " as there has been among
the Western races. Christ cannot get His own
out of Asia and Africa unless His full kingdom
is broad-based there in the Christian common-
weal. How many of ourselves would have
been "gathered out" from the world if the

The Aim 163

social life and national conditions of our land
had not been Christianised ?

The first work of the missionary is to win
individual converts to the faith and service of
Christ as Saviour and Lord ; and this effort
continues to the end. But, with equal step,
he must endeavour to lay broad foundations for
the social, educational, national, and economic
redemption and elevation of the people to
whom he is sent. Tne Empire of Christ has to
be planted in the community-life of the nations.
Only then can it put the people in a position
to receive the new spiritual life, and so win the
"great multitude which no man can number
out of all nations and kindreds^

We must prepare for permanency. If any
event beyond our calculation, if another Advent
of Christ (even supposing it to be of an external,
dramatic character), were to arrest the work in
mid-course, we should be best prepared for it
by doing the whole work of Christianity. If
this work of Christianising the communities of
men throughout their whole life is restrained
by the expectation of an immediate Second
Coming, that expectation is in the very act
raising another argument against itself Truth,
when rightly understood, does not cramp the
Christian aim nor limit the benefits which its
spokesmen carry with them.

Some who pray earnestly for the hastening

1 64 The Challenge to Missions

of the coming of Christ hold such a theory of
the course of prophetic events that their prayer
can only be answered by the hastening of the
increase of wickedness and apostacy. One
thing is sure, not the " times and seasons," but
that we can best help Christ to bless the world
by establishing His many-sided kingdom in the
entire life of mankind.

With this aim before us, our plans are laid,
not for " the casual sharpshooter bringing down
his man here and there," but for the slow,
lasting regeneration of the human race. Our
method of working is so determined as to lay
foundations for a huge structure, to sow seed
for future generations to reap. And our hearts
do not fail us in presence of slow progress and
the imperfections of the native converts. The
upward movement is but beginning. The world
moves slowly, but it moves. The kingdom of
Christ comes gradually, and " without observa-
tion." What God makes slowly he means to
last.

XI

THE RETURN-VALUE OF MISSIONS

xes

XI

THE RETURN-VALUE OF MISSIONS

The past century's experience of mission work
— not to speak of earlier times — has sufficiently
justified the faith of the pioneers. It required
audacious faith on their part to confront the
world's gigantic heathenism with nothing but
the gospel of Jesus in their hands and call it to
surrender. Was faith ever more daring than
when St Paul faced the Roman Empire and
Greek learning, and foresaw them yield to the
Son of Man ? Yet the answer of time confirmed
his faith.

To stand to-day in some Asiatic, African,
or Polynesian centre, surrounded by pagan
customs, pagan temples, and pagan apathy,
to be one among a few indistinguishable
Christians in presence of millions who are fast-
bound in the universal paganism, and to stand
up to it and believe that the gospel of Christ
can conquer and regenerate the whole — this
demands the faith that moves mountains. To
look on caste-bound Asiatics, and especially on
raw barbarians who are, in Kipling's language,

" Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child,"

167

1 68 The Challenge to Missions

and to find the capacity of full-grown manhood
in them, and foresee that out of that crude
material can be wrought the rich Christian
character — one's faith might well stagger at
the prophecy.

We have passed the experimental stage,
however, and that faith is sufficiently attested
by the witness of experience. It is only as
they cast their eyes over the work of ten or
twenty years that missionaries see much
measurable increase and improvement. Yet
from that small arc it is possible to infer what
curve and course the future is to make. There
are foretokens that what Coleridge called " the
miracle of Christendom " is to be followed by
the miracle of Asia and Africa, the miracle of
the world. The Gospel works. The world
goes round the sun. We have as much to go
upon for this faith as Newton had when he
inferred from local observation that the law of
gravitation controls the universe. We have our
Newtonian principle, in the faith that the
world will answer to the attraction of Christ's
gospel.

Livingstone said that Dr Moffat foresaw
homesteads and railways covering Africa and
steamboats plying on its lakes. His anticipation
is already some distance on its way to fulfilment.
From these homesteads, he said, the sound of
Christian worship would be heard ; and we

The Return-Value of Missions 169

have foretokens of that prophecy's fulfilment
also.

Dr Duff, " father of the faithful " though he
was, had not faith enough to believe that India's
womanhood could be enlightened. " Female
education in India, so far as I can see, is
hopeless. You might as well try to scale a
wall five hundred yards high as attempt to give
Christian education to either the women or the
girls of India." Yet already in Bengal alone
there are about 100,000 girls receiving education,
three-fourths of them an education under
Christian teachers.

The beneficent social work being wrought by
missions all over the world is itself alone an
answer to the critic and an attestation of faith.
Dr Dennis has crowded two volumes {Christian
Missions and Social Progress^ with the sum-
mary of the changes effected — in domestic life, in
the relief of sickness by medical missions, in the
enlightenment and elevation of native women
by lady missionaries and teachers, in the
reduction of children's sufferings, cruel customs,
oppression, and caste, and in the purifying of
the relations of the sexes in marriage and the
community — in short, in the whole social life of
the pagan world. It is here that men who have
no faith in the religious aims of missions are at
one with us — in cordial approval of the work
done by missionaries in ameliorating the con-

I70 The Challenge to Missions

ditions of pagan life. The visible miracle
cannot be gainsaid, even by the sceptic.

" All things grow sweet in Him.
He draws all things unto an order fair.
All fierce extremes that beat along time's shore
Like chidden waves grow mild,
And creep to kiss His feet ;
For He alone it is that brings
The fading flower of our humanity to perfect
blossoming."

The return-value of Christian missions is seen
in the evidence they give us of the world-wide
power and truth of Christianity. In the mission
field the Christian faith is being verified before
our eyes. Its universal appeal to the human
heart, its fitness for mankind under all con-
ditions, its moral power for the regeneration
and elevation of the race, and the redeemable-
ness of the heathen are being openly attested
anew in . the history of the world. Faith's
ventures are returning to certify our religion as
experimentally true.

Here we have living witness of the contem-
porary presence and activity of the Spirit ot
Christ. The Gospel works ; and it works
moral miracles within present observation. At
the very time when scepticism heralds the
downfall of Christianity, it is demonstrating its
vital force in the regeneration of races and men
in all nations.

The Return-Value of Missions 171

For proof of the dynamic power of Chris-
tianity in transforming continents our appeal
formerly was made to the victory it achieved
over Roman paganism in early centuries. But
its claims would be weak if we had to reach so
far back in history in order to adduce evidence
of its conquering power over the pagan world.
The same conflict with paganism is proceeding
now under the lead of the missionary legions,
and Christianity is repeating its early triumph
in the same gradual stages. A fresh and
modern apologia for Christianity is being
wrought out by mission work before our eyes.
If some do not see it — well, some did not see
the miracle even when it was performed visibly
by the Christ Himself in person. If the
Christian Church had taken the advice of the
early opponents of foreign missions, if we had
"eaten our morsel alone," we should have
lacked the greatest present-day witness to the
truth of our religion.

If we ever ceased to disseminate the gospel
while paganism survived, it would be because
we had lost faith in Christ and had nothing
vital to say to mankind. Our missionary
enthusiasm is largely the measure of our
spiritual life. " The love of Christ constraineth
us." We cannot lie close to Christ's heart
without hearing how it beats with the passion
for all races of men. Those to whom He is

172 The Challenge to Missions

much will seek to make all men sharers in the
boon He has brought into their own hearts and
lives. And the results of faith's endeavour
will return to confirm their faith and give Christ
the Saviour world-wide verification.

APPENDICES

173

APPENDIX A

{See Chapter II. pp. 88-86)

The Powers and the Priests in the East

First the missionary, then the consul, then
the gunboat — that is the pith of what many
a Chinaman may be heard to say. What
he resents most bitterly, and what we have
exposed in the text — the white priest's inter-
meddling with native courts, and foreign
encroachments on territory — important books
written by independent laymen, British and
American travellers and officials, as well as
by reliable missionaries, are continually certi-
fying afresh. Among these may be specially
named : China and the Powers^ by Mr H. C.
Thomson, author of a work on the Chitral
Expedition ; The Real Chinese Question^ by
Mr Chester Holcombe, Secretary of American
Legation at Pekin ; Overland to China, by Mr
A. R. Colquhoun ; and China in Convulsion, by
Mr Arthur H. Smith.

France has been protector of Roman Catholics
in the East ; it was a French priest who inserted
in the Chinese translation of the Treaty of i860
a fraudulent interpolation entitling missionaries
to reside and acquire property in the interior ;

17s

176 The Challenge to Missions

and it was under severe pressure from France
that in 1899 ^^i Imperial Decree was issued
conferring on Roman Catholic dignitaries a
recognised official status in China.

" The bishops," says Mr A. H. Smith, " adopt
the rank of a Chinese Governor, and wear a
button on their caps indicative of that fact,
travelling in a chair with the number of bearers
appropriate to that rank, with outriders and
attendants on foot, an umbrella of honour
borne in front, and a cannon discharged upon
their arrival and departure."

The same status was offered to the mission-
aries of the Reformed Churches, but they,
backed by the British Prime Minister, declined
the offer.

Mr A. R. Colquhoun, author of well-known
travel-books, writing as a lay investigator, says:

" The blood of the martyrs is in China the
seed of French aggrandisement. France uses
the missionaries and the native Christians as
agents-provocateurs \ and outrages and martyr-
doms are her political harvest. What the pre-
ponderance of her commerce does for England
the Catholic protectorate does for France, so
that the influence of their respective positions
vis-a-vis of the Chinese is nearly balanced;
but France makes ten times more capital out
of her religious material than Great Britian has
ever done out of her commercial. Under the
fostering care of the French Government the

Powers and Priests 177

Catholics have become a veritable impenum
in imperio^ disregarding local laws and customs,
domineering over their pagan neighbours, and
overriding the law of the land."

The irony of the situation is visible to shrewd
Chinamen — the sinister fact that France, which
protects Jesuit and other Romanist missions,
and displays so much zeal in backing up their
propaganda, has expelled these same Jesuits
from her own borders as a danger to the
Republic, and has herself rejected the religion
which she pushes forward in China. Their
leaders know that " the presence of a Roman
Catholic bishop in Annam was the thin end
of the wedge which has split that country in
twain and brought a part of it under the
domination of France." The Chinese conclude
— no wonder! — that Christianity is a useful
political weapon, the advance agent of territorial
aggression.

With tragic results Germany has latterly
secured that Roman Catholics in Shantung
shall be under German protection. This was
brought about through the agency of Bishop
Anzer. " He began," says Mr Thomson {China
and the Powers, p. 250), " to assume an offensive
and dictatorial tone towards the Tsung-li-Yamen
and to all the district governors, walking into
their courts as though a superior, and reporting
any official who did not cringe to him to his
official superior and ultimately to Pekin.

M

178 The Challenge to Missions

Finally, to put the climax to his proceedings,
he obtained permission to build a cathedral
in Yu-Chow-Fu, where Confucius lived and
where his shrine is, in the province of Shantung;
and this cathedral was actually begun, and its
building led to the murder of the two German
missionaries, which furnished the pretext for
the forcible seizure by Germany of the port
of Kiao-Chau." This, he asserts, was one of
those sparks which set the Boxer patriotic
movement in a flame and produced such deadly
disaster. (And the horrible cruelties of the
Allied Troops during the convulsion in North
China further deepened native repugnance for
the foreign religion.)

Tributes are paid by the same writers to
the devotion and self-denying labours of in-
dividual Roman Catholic missionaries ; but
even good men, though they were Protestant
and not Papal, could not save this policy from
working havoc. And some of the better men
among them are beginning to see that their
Church is paying too heavy a price for the
favour of political Powers.

Why was Japan fast closed against Chris-
tianity and all intercourse with foreigners for
centuries ? Xavier and his henchmen had won
tens of thousands of Japanese converts. But
the foreigners, following the usual Roman
Catholic policy, intrigued for political power
and laid their hands on the reins of govern-

Powers and Priests 179

ment. The nation — the story and traditional
scenes are well known to the author as a
former resident in Japan — rose up in wrath,
slew thousands of converts, and practically
annihilated Christianity in the land, thereupon
sealing the doors of their islands to all
foreigners for two hundred and fifty years.
The noble spirit of the devoted Xavier could
not have averted such an issue to such a policy.

What but similar revolt must follow when a
similar policy is pursued in China ?

Quite as acute is the Chinese resentment
when foreign priests intermeddle with the
courts of law on behalf of their converts.
"Broadly speaking, in Chinese courts there
is no such thing as justice." Are the mission-
aries to leave their native followers to be
devoured by the " tigers and wolves " of the
Yamens ? They are naturally tempted to side
with their own people. But, if they do, they
are enmeshed in a network of complications
and animosities. Even if the wrong has all
been on the pagan's side, there may have been
indiscretions on the convert's ; and, in any case,
"whether the stone hits the pitcher, or the
pitcher hits the stone, it goes ill with the
pitcher." With good reason the Reformed
Churches, taught by some bitter experience,
have for the most part refused to take up the
lawsuits of their native members.

The Roman Catholics, on the other hand,

i8o The Challenge to Missions

take advantage of their status as local magis-
trates to intervene in the courts when their
supporters are involved.

Let Mr A. R. Colquhoun state the facts.
"Whenever a Christian has a dispute with a
heathen, no matter what the subject in question
may be, the quarrel is promptly taken up by
the priest, who, if he cannot himself intimidate
the local officials and compel them to give right
to the Christian, represents the case as one of
persecution, when the French consul is appealed
to. Then is redress rigorously extorted, with-
out the least reference to the justice of the
demand." After citing a specific instance in
detail, Mr Colquhoun adds : " It is not sur-
prising that arbitrary proceedings like this
should cause the Christians to be feared and
hated, and we need not wonder at the occasional
murder of a priest when such feelings are spread
generally throughout the country."

The people know that the foreign priest has
this privilege; numbers of them appeal to
missionaries — Protestants included — to be ad-
mitted members of their churches, in view of
some threatened dispute or lawsuit : once they
are within the foreigner's fold the enemy will,
they imagine, be frightened off.

"Every Catholic headquarters," says Mr
A. H. Smith {China in Convulsion^ pp. 50, 51),
" is served by able Chinese, some of whom are
expert in Yamen affairs and act as lawyers for

Powers and Priests t8i

whoever has a case in hand. ... It is common
for those who are acting as advance agents of
the Catholic Church, in fresh woods and pastures
new, to let it be known that, whatsoever happens
to those who identify themselves with that
organisation, they will be protected in their
lawsuits."

Protestants in some regions issue notices
and tracts to prevent the expectation of such
help from them ; but, in spite of all, shady
citizens apply for entrance, and some falsely
use the name of the missionary for their
nefarious purposes.

As the policy of certain Powers and priests
is likely to continue the same and create trouble
in the future as it has done in the past, let the
public discriminate and justly apportion the
blame.

In order to avoid "offences," the Reformed
Churches should do everything to sever them-
selves from all political backing, to prove — even
though it cost a great price in means, the refusal
of indemnities, and personal freedom — that they
have no mercenary ends to serve and are
absolutely disinterested in their campaign.

There are certain "offences" which are in-
evitable. In addition to some mentioned
already, the incursion of Western commerce
disturbs native industries and trade. "Fire-
ships," telegraphs^ railways — of such disquieting
encroachments there can be no arrest.

1 82 The Challenge to Missions

It is also a grave offence in the eyes of the
authorities and the people that Christians
should decline to conform to the customs of
the country. Most missionaries and converts
stand out against the homage paid to departed
ancestors. Some argue that the custom means
little more than " paying one's respects " to the
dead : why not, then, " bow in the house of
Rimmon " to that extent ? The primitive
Christians in the Roman Empire had to con-
front the same question. Why not conform
just so far as to pay passing homage to the
Emperor's statue ? But, though the particular
point was small in itself, it stood for their
general separation from paganism and formed
the test of their religious consistency.

" The refusal of the Christians to perform
ceremonies which they regard as idolatrous at
the New Year season, at the spring festival
when the sacrifices are offered at the graves,
at weddings, and especially at funerals, renders
them liable to persecution, sometimes to the
extent of being driven from their homes and
expelled from the clan to which they belong "
{China in Convulsion, p. 34). But in all such
matters of conscience the animosity aroused is
inevitable in the nature of the case. It must
be endured in patience and courtesy, in the
expectation that the leavening power of
Christianity will gradually spread enlighten-
ment and overcome prejudice. Not on these

Powers and Priests 183

grounds chiefly can it be said that " the mis-
sionary is at the bottom of all the trouble."

" It cannot be too often repeated," writes
Mr Thomson — and Mr Chester Holcombe has
already been quoted in the same sense {supra
p. 33) — "that the feeling against the mission-
aries was caused, not by their tenets, nor by
the quiet exercise of their religion, but by the
use made of them politically by their different
Governments, and still more by their harmful
intermeddling on behalf of their converts in the
courts of law."

APPENDIX B

(Chapters VII. and VIII. pp. 102, 108, 124, 188)

Checks to Progress in India

Mr Meredith Townsend, of the Spectator,
in the course of a discriminating discussion of
the inter-relations between the West and the
East, in Asia and Europe, makes an interesting
estimate of the prospects of Christianity in
India and of the elements that hinder progress.

The supernatural elements and the com-
plex creed in Christianity, Mr Townsend says,
present no difficulty to the Hindu mind. With
superhuman manifestations of deity in human
form the Hindu is already familiar : "no miracle,
however stupendous, overstrains the capacity of
his faith." On the contrary, Christ is not so
completely the Hindu ideal because not so
visibly supernatural and because so like their
own human ideal of humility and self-sacrifice.

One serious obstacle to missionary progress
lies in the attempt generally made by the
workers from the West, not to make Christians
merely, but to Europeanise the Asiatic. Mis-
sionaries insist on " civilising " the Indian after
the manner of the West. They breed in him
the desire of imitation, wrench him away from
184

Checks to Progress in India 185

the whole system of things in which he has
been reared, create a hybrid caste, not quite
European, not quite Indian, with the originality
killed out of it. The missionary as a European
is divided from the people of India by race,
colour, and incurable differences of thought, of
habit, of taste, and of language. He never can
become an Indian. All this is inevitable. But
Christianity is capable of adapting itself to all
civilisations. And, as Mr Townsend implies,
no attempt should be made to create the same
division among native converts by Europe-
anising them. As has been argued in preceding
pages, Christianity must be planted in the
consciousness of the world-races, and, while
tended and guided by the Western missionary,
must be left to adapt itself to their racial
conditions and become self-propagating along
their own lines, even at the risk for a time of
aberrations in the adaptation of Christian
doctrines.

The convert, too, is required to " break caste "
irrevocably. Mr Townsend believes caste to
be " a form of socialism which has through ages
protected Hindu society from anarchy and
from the worst evils of industrial and competi-
tive life — an automatic poor-law to begin with,
and the strongest form of trades union." But
"caste in the Indian sense and Christianity
cannot co-exist." The break-up is inevitable.
The convert must eat and drink with men of

1 86 The Challenge to Missions

other castes, must abandon the seclusion of his
home and much of his authority over his wife
and children, and must give up many of his
rooted habits. It is not only his religion that
is changed ; everything is changed for him.
" One can hardly wonder that many, otherwise
ready, shrink from such a baptism of fire." It
is, as we know well, on this account that many
in India remain Christians in secret.

Sir Charles Aitchison, one of India's Lieu-
tenant-Governors, said : " I know of one of the
ruling princes of India who probably never saw
or spoke to a Christian missionary in his life.
After a long talk with me on religious matters,
he told me himself that he reads the Sanskrit
translation of our Bible and prays to Jesus
Christ every day for the pardon of his sins. . .
Statistics of conversion are no proper or
adequate test of missionary work."

Moreover, the missionary in India is often
ridiculed for saying that he has hearers who
are converts but not Christians. He is stating
the simple truth, says Mr Townsend. "The
Hindu mind can believe, and does believe, in
mutually destructive facts at one and the same
time. An astronomer who predicts eclipses ten
years ahead without a blunder believes all the
while that the eclipse is caused by some super-
natural dog swallowing the moon, and will beat
a drum to make the dog give up the prize."
He may be convinced of the truth of Christi-

Checks to Progress in India 187

anity, but the assent is not a transforming
spiritual faith, and leaves him nearly where he
was — a baffling puzzle and a disappointment
to the missionary.

These obstacles alone account for much
delay in the victorious progress of Christianity
and for facts that feed the critics.^

Caste, again, has been a buttress to the
native ; and the removal of the old buttresses
and tribal habits sometimes leaves the converts
unsteady. " And," says Mr Townsend, " the
second generation often shows signs of missing
the ancient buttresses of conduct. They are
the true anxieties of the missionaries, and it
is from them in nine cases out of ten that the
ill-repute of Indian Christians is derived ; but
European opinion about them is most unfair.
They are not converts but born Christians, like
any of our own artisans ; they have not gone
through a mental martyrdom, and they have to
be bred up without strong convictions, except
that Christianity is doubtless true, without the
defences which native opinion has organised for
ages, and in the midst of a heathen society in
which the white Christians declare their children
shall not live."

^ A Scot, it is said, was asked to support a society for the
Conversion of the Jews. He subscribed once, twice, and was
appHed to for the third time, when his impatience broke out.
"Confoond it, are thae Jews no' a' converted _;/^^ ? " Widen
the application, and is it not symbolically true of many with
reference to the progress of Christian missions ?

1 88 The Challenge to Missions

As to these imperfections in a small propor-
tion of the converts, the same writer wisely
adds: "Christianity is always imperfect in its
beginnings. The majority of Christians in
Constantine's time would have seemed to
modern missionaries mere worldlings ; the con-
verted Saxons were for centuries violent brutes ;
and the mass of Christians throughout the
world are even now no better than indifferents.
None the less is it true that the race which
embraces Christianity, even nominally, rises
with a bound out of its former position, and
contains in itself thenceforward the seed of a
nobler and more lasting life."

The inference is clear, as urged in preceding
pages. We must not compare native converts
newly emerged from paganism with the best
life found in Christian lands of the West, but
with the conditions which existed in our own
race when as yet the work of Christianity was
only commenced among us. It is only in the
course of generations, there as here, that the
harvest of the truth is reaped. As Mr Kidd
shows in his Principles of Western Civilisation^
the progressive struggles and movements of
to-day are always for the benefit, not of the
present generation, but of that " majority which
constitutes the long roll of the yet unborn
generations," and Christianity is a vital force
in that ultimate elevation of the world.

TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH

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