Missionaries in China

*s

MISSIONARIES

IN

CHINA.

MISSIONARIES

CHINA

BY

ALEXANDER MIOHIE

(TIENTSIN).

LONDON: EDWARD STANFORD,

26 & 27, COCKSPUK STEEET, CHARING CKOSS, S.W.
1891.

8v

34! 5

INTRODUCTION.

THE friends of the author of the following essay, to whose
care it has been intrusted for publication, consider that
a few introductory remarks regarding the events which
have been the immediate cause of its production may be
of use to English readers, whose information regarding the
recent riots in China must necessarily be slight and
vague. Knowledge of foreign countries, even those with
which we have constant communication and important
interests, is not so general as it ought to be, and
comparatively few persons in England comprehend how
closely this country is touched by any occurrence that
might lead to estrangement or rupture between England
and China.

The cotton weavers of England clothe multitudes of
Chinese, whilst in return the Chinese cultivator and
merchant find profitable customers amongst ourselves.
So it comes that working populations on opposite sides
of the globe, who know almost nothing of each other, are
constantly contributing to their mutual sustenance and
comfort. On the other hand, a large number of the best
of our people, filled with the unselfish desire of giving the
blessings of Christianity to the Chinese, support a staff
of missionaries, who, whatever opinion may be held
regarding their methods, are undoubtedly, as a class,
actuated by high and unselfish motives. Whatever, there
fore, tends to produce estrangement between the Chinese
and the English tends to diminish the wealth and material

vi INTRODUCTION.

comforts of both countries, and tends to retard, if not to
destroy, the spread in China of the form of religion which
has been associated with the highest development of
morality, self-sacrificing sentiment, and spiritual refine
ment, which the world has yet seen.

Those who are best acquainted with the relations of
Europeans to the Chinese are thus best able to realise the
gravity of the news which has come from China inter-
mittingly during the last few months. Even people who
know nothing of these relations were shocked to read
of brutal attacks of Chinese mobs on unoffending men and
women ; but those who can appreciate what is under the
surface must realise not only that acts of gross cruelty
have been perpetrated, but that the evidence goes only
too strongly to indicate that as regards a better under
standing of foreigners by the Chinese, the work of 'a
generation, with all its sacrifices, appears to have been
thrown away. Great as the disappointment must be to
those who wish best to the Chinese people, the loss to the
Chinese themselves is more serious, for it is clear that the
longer the estrangement lasts between the civilised world
and the Chinese, the longer must the progress of that
patient and laborious people remain at the mercy of a
bureaucracy, whose direct personal interests are furthered
by the exclusion of foreign thought and foreign inventions.

Unfortunately, the attacks on Christians and Christian
missions cannot be considered as exceptional or isolated.
After the cruel massacre at Tientsin, which occurred in
1870, little was heard for a time of attacks on mission
establishments. The reparation that was then exacted,
although considered by some to have been insufficient, was
evidently enough to overawe for a time the instigators of
these anti-foreign riots ; but the feeling that led to them had
not disappeared. A few years ago, at Chung King, in the
far west of China, the French Catholic mission houses
were destroyed, and Chinese Christians killed, there being

INTRODUCTION. vii

no motive for the outrages except the anti- Christian
sentiment of the Chinese gentry.

To pass over minor outrages, we come to the present
year— 1891, when we find a Eoman Catholic cathedral
burnt and the English consulate wrecked at Wuhu ; and
a Custom House officer and a missionary killed, and the
mission buildings destroyed at Wusueh in riots instigated
by fanatics. The virulence of this anti-Christian feeling
is shown by the fact that at Kiang Yin, on the Yangtze,
the mob disinterred the bodies of missionaries who had
been buried for two hundred years. At Wooseih, on the
Grand Canal near Soochow, a missionary establishment
was burnt down. At Ichang, three hundred miles above
Hankow, the Koman Catholic and Protestant establish
ments were destroyed, whilst points so distant as Foochow
in the South and Kirin, in Manchuria, have shown evidences
of the anti-Christian conspiracy. We read of attempts to
excite the populace at Foochow by virulent placards ; and
at Kirin, Dr. Greig, an able and devoted medical mission
ary, for whom grateful Chinese patients had erected a
dispensary, was treacherously attacked, most cruelly
treated, and seriously injured ; whilst, according to a
recent telegram, a Belgian priest and several Christians
have been put to death in Eastern Mongolia.

Sad as it is to read of these gross outrages on unoffend
ing people, the future appears still more ominous when
we consider the means by which the literati and gentry
lashed the passions of the poor and ignorant, but pacific,
populace into action. For many long months, illustrated
sheets, whose contents are of a nature to defy description,
were gratuitously given away by pawnbrokers (who in
China have always some official rank, and occupy a semi
official position), and were placarded on walls, under the
eyes of the mandarins who could have suppressed them in
a day. Gross caricatures of the figures which in Christen
dom are most reverenced, and association of the most sacred

VHi INTRODUCTION.

Christian themes with the vilest obscenities, persistently
brought to the notice of — sad to say — persons of both sexes
and all ages, must have injured, for a long time to come,
the capacity for reverencing the Christian faith ; whilst
the filthy anti-Christian songs which the children have
been taught to sing in the streets, and the foul pictures
associated with missionaries which have been brought
freely before them, is a proof of how lamentably these
ignorant people are in want of the better and higher ideal
at which all Christian communities aim. This association
of Christianity with ribaldry and foulness is one of the
least hopeful facts connected with the outrages.

There is no doubt that under the pressure of the Powers
whose subjects have been outraged (England being most
directly concerned) some of the guilty, and certainly some
of the mob, will be severely punished. Possibly, if the
pressure is sufficiently firm, some of the mandarins who
allowed the riots to take place may be more or less dis
graced ; and of course the proffered money compensation
will be accepted. Foreign Governments may, indeed,
take so comprehensive a view of the situation as to insist
on satisfaction of such a nature that the mandarins may
not allow riots of this kind to occur again for a generation.
But the suppression and prevention of outward disturb
ances cannot change the current of men's thoughts ; the
hatred of Christianity will remain, and the difficulty of
converting the Chinese to Christianity is enormously
increased. That Christian missionaries in China and
medical missionaries, now more handicapped than ever,
will continue to devote themselves to the Chinese, however
unwilling these are to receive them, may be taken for
granted ; but the problem of how best to live down and
overcome the prejudice which has been created, must give
occasion for much thought to reflective minds. One of
the tasks, and not the least difficult, to which their
energies must be applied, is to preach and extend

INTRODUCTION. ix

Christianity in such a way as to render misrepresenta
tion difficult, and the credence of slanderous lies im
possible.

It is largely as a contribution to the solution of this
problem that the writer of the following pages appears to
have composed his essay. He possesses eminent qualifi
cations for the task, having resided many years in various
parts of China, and having been in intimate associ
ation with all classes of Chinese and foreigners who are
found in that country. He writes with the advantage of a
full and ripe experience. Few who read what he has
written will doubt that he has chosen the right time to
open for discussion a subject which, in the nature and
magnitude of its interests, is of an importance which it is
impossible to over-rate.

LONDON, November 1891.

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION T

I.— POLITICAL 5

II.— RELIGIOUS 29

III,— MODUS VIVENDI 71

APPENDICES.

I. — ARTICLE IN ' LES MISSIONS CATHOLIQUES,' BY REV.

L. E, LOUVET 9<±

II. — MEMORIAL ON THE RECENT OUTRAGES ON THE

YANGTZE 97

III. — How AN ANTI-CHRISTIAN RIOT is ORGANISED . . 101
IV. — ABSTRACT OF MISSION STATISTICS 106

MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

FOR a full exposition of that branch of the great
Missionary question which particularly affects
China, the data either do not exist, or are not ac
cessible, and if they were, the task of collating
them would be an exceedingly laborious one, and
could only be achieved by some person possessing
special qualifications. The march of events, how
ever, does not wait for exhaustive treatises, and on
an obscure subject a little light is better than none
at all. Were it only to provoke comment, and con
tradiction even, such a fugitive essay as the present
may serve a useful purpose, for the subject is really
one of the most important of the day. Not mis
sionaries alone, nor statesmen, are interested in the
propagation of Christianity ; men of every shade
of opinion and with the most diverse sympathies
cannot help recognising, whether they approve it
or not, the dynamic force of a religion which splits
up nations as frost does the solid rock. Asa potent
factor, for good or ill, in the re-birth of the great
Asiatic peoples, the missionary movement com
mands the attention of every man and woman who,

2 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

by political, commercial, or merely humane incen
tives, is drawn into cogitations on the possible
destiny of these ancient races.

From the nature of the case the information on
the subject is almost entirely in the hands of the
Missionaries themselves. The evidence of the
natives, which would be invaluable, is not obtain
able, for when they do speak out they do not speak
frankly. The all important consideration, there
fore, how the overtures of the missionaries are
received by those to whom they are addressed, can
scarcely be got at by direct means, but only by in
ference — often of a very indirect character. Busy
as they may be, the working missionaries do spare
a little of their time for investigations into their
ways and means of progress ; and their periodical
Conferences, such as those held in Shanghai in
1877 and in 1890, the latter attended by upwards
of 400 missionaries, half of them being women,
bring together from all parts of the Chinese empire
the fruits of wide experience ; and they afford
opportunities for a healthy interchange of opinions
between men who have been labouring in many
different fields. It is, however, hardly to be ex
pected that the deliberations of the working mis
sionaries should extend to matters outside of a well
defined province. Their self searchings, earnest
enough so far as they go, are mostly narrowed
down to matters where the world at large either
cannot or does not care to follow them. Their

MISSION AMES IN CHINA. 3

deliberations, in fact, usually stop at the point where
the thoughtful public would like them to begin ;
matters which to the ordinary man seem essential
being either avoided altogether, or voted peremp
torily out of the discussion. Their aims they con
sider settled beyond controversy, their methods they
assume to be consecrated by the example and pre
cept of their Founder ; and, with these axiomatic
truths as a basis, they are in the habit of summing
up their success by the arithmetical formula by
which sportsmen count their game ; so many mis
sionaries in the field, so many baptisms. Not that
they disregard the quality of either their evan
gelists or converts. Very far from it; they apply
the most rigid tests to both ; only the matter once
settled, it is settled, and the numerical sign is then
all that is needed to express the value of their
work. It is, however, just those questions which
evangelists and theologians of all colours insist on
treating as closed that the rest of mankind are
most interested in keeping open ; and in that lies
the crux of the controversy which for an indefinite

***.... The lack of spiritual discernment on the part of
the great hulk of his converts. . . . The truths that are
lodged in their intellects, and which they accept as un
questionable verities, do not appear to move them deeply.
Their spiritual nature is not intensely quickened and greatly
expanded by 'the things of the Spiiit of God,' neither are
their moral activities powerfully energised by them. They
lack that divinely-illumined, soul- transforming apprehension
of spiritual truth," &c. — Eev. Griffith Jolm, Shanghai Con
ference, 1877.

B 2

4 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

time to come must divide the smaller from the
larger world of thought.

Those who are most honestly opposed to unre
stricted propagandism among anciently civilised
races are well aware that it cannot be stopped so
long as the fervour of religious passion which is
behind the movement shows no signs of abate
ment. They, however, watch the movement, not
without anxiety. For even if in Western Christen
dom, in its modern condition of comparative equi
librium, religion still constitutes one of the chief
difficulties of civil government, to what uncertain
ties must not the hot aggression of a strange
religion give rise among the teeming populations
of the East ! The remote or collateral effects of
their action disturb the repose, or, to do them more
justice, interrupt the labours, of the working mis
sionaries but little ; which is reason the more why
the public should seek to gain a clearer comprehen
sion of the question, and why the societies should
give earnest heed to their heavy responsibility in
equipping and commissioning so formidable an
army and sending it into fields so far from their
observation. In the following pages nothing more
than partial glimpses, more suggestive than
satisfying, are attempted; and the aim of the
writer will be fully attained if the thoughtful
reader is put upon further enquiry into a pregnant
subject.

I. POLITICAL.

UNDER the political aspect of the question may be
conveniently included the whole external relations
of mission work in China to governments, people,
and institutions. A few prominent features which
challenge the attention of the most hasty observer
are, however, all that need trouble us at present.

In the first place, the recognition of missionaries
was forced on China by the treaties made with
foreign powers whom China could not resist, and
recent occurrences show that those powers from
time to time interfere, with effect, for their pro
tection. In what light the missionaries regard
such interference is a question of secondary im
portance. Some we know to be professedly
opposed to " the arm of flesh " being stretched
out in their behalf; but when trouble comes upon
them there is a loud and pretty unanimous outcry
among missionaries for the avenging sword, and
considerable impatience is evinced when it is
slow in appearing.

Secondly: Toleration of Christian missionaries,
extorted by force from China, placed Christians on
a different platform from the other foreign reli
gions, Mohammedanism arid Buddhism, to which

() MISSIONARIES IX CHINA.

China of its own motion extended complete tolera
tion. Christianity is therefore inseparably associ
ated with the humiliation of the empire, a calamity
which is yet fresh in the memory of the living
generation.

Thirdly : the sole ground on which toleration
was claimed for Christianity was that it taught
men to he virtuous. Only in the German treaty,
made subsequently to the others, was this qualifi
cation omitted. The Chinese, however, see that if
Christianity teaches virtue it also does many other
things not specified in their treaties ; and the
people, circumstanced as they are — innately sus
picious and fearful of change — have some difficulty
in recognising in the actual Christianity of real
life the innocent disguise which theoretical Chris
tianity was made to wear when presented to them
at the point of the bayonet.

Fourthly : From whatever cause or combination
of causes, missionaries of every creed — and they
are varied enough — have aroused the detestation
of the people of China of all classes.

This last is a fact of supreme importance. The
missionaries —and small blame to them — would
fain explain it away by alleging that the hostility
evinced against them comes all from the literate
and official class, and that popular risings are insti
gated by that class alone, or, as in the great rising
of 1891, by secret societies organised in alliance
with them. It has long been a convenient fiction

POLITICAL.

whereby foreigners who are not missionaries con
sole themselves for the open-mouthed hatred of the
educated and ruling classes that the mass of the
people are, if not actively friendly, at least passively
so. It would, however, be a daring discrimination
for foreigners and strangers to make in any
country, that of drawing a line of demarcation
between the feelings of the articulate and of the
inarticulate sections of the people. Even where
"hereditary bondsmen" have for their spokesmen
only men belonging virtually to an aristocratic
order, it would not be safe for outsiders to assume
any wide disparity of sentiment — as regards exter
nal matters. And, considering the essentially
democratic basis of Chinese polity, and how the
educated class is recruited from the bourgeoisie, and
even from the peasantry, no one would come to
the conclusion a priori that the learned would be
likely to nourish feelings which were essentially
unpopular. Appearances, no doubt, often favour
the fond conceit of foreigners that the people
are with them. In moving about the country
foreigners are seldom molested ; they sometimes
even find sociable travelling companions among
the natives ; and in more or less temporary resi
dences in the interior, individuals, whether from
curiosity or good feeling, or both, make themselves
agreeable to strangers. Yet the universal tendency
for mobs to gather round stray foreigners, the
rough way they press upon travellers even into

8 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

the rooms of their inn, the volleys of foul epithets,
and even of clods and stones always ready to
descend on the slightest suggestion, seem to betray
a substratum of ill-feeling covered by a very thin
crust of civility. Children of three years in
country villages lisping opprobrious names the
first time they see a foreigner tell a tale which can
hardly be misunderstood as to the real chronic
feelings of the populace. To the credit of the
missionaries, it must be said that wherever they
settle they gain the affections of many of the
natives. It is admitted, however, that those
natives who conciliate the missionaries lose caste
among their own neighbours, a fact which indicates
with sufficient clearness the direction of the main
current of feeling. In short, the theory of the
friendliness of the Chinese people as distinguished
from the learned classes cannot bear the stress of
the evidence against it.

It is admitted that the enmity of the literati
only finds its ultimate concrete expression in
risings of the populace. But the people are
always and everywhere ready to rise at a
moment's notice. Could they possibly be worked
upon in this manner by the artificial infusion from
without of feelings which they did not share ? In
isolated cases such a thing might happen, but the
indefinite repetition of it would be impossible, for,
after all, the Chinaman is constitutionally passive ;
inertia, indeed, is his chief characteristic; and

POLITICAL. 9

overt aggressive action requires the stimulus of
overmastering feelings.

Tt must, therefore, we fear, be conceded that
hatred of missionaries is practically universal
throughout China, since there is no part of the
country where mobs cannot be set upon them with
the same certainty as a pack of hounds is put on the
trail of a fox. The converts and adherents form
around individual mission stations a thin margin
of neutral and even friendly sentiment, but
" China's Millions " are as a body dead against
them, and their native followers are the first
object of attack when the mobs rise. What is
more, the hostile feeling is obviously increasing in
intensity, and spreading with the spread of the
missionaries themselves.

This, then, is the dominant fact in the situation,
which demands strict investigation at the hands
of all missionary bodies and of all governments
who by force of arms maintain them. For if the
missionaries misunderstand the attitude of the
Chinese nation, they may be heaping tip obstacles
to the entrance of Christianity, not now only, but
for all future time ; and if foreign governments
misunderstand it they may be betrayed into a
course of action which will feed the fires of hate,
to_ the lasting damage of both Chinese and
foreigners.

Were it possible to get down to the fundamental
cause of the Chinese national hostility to foreign

10 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

missions, the achievement would be worthy of in
finite labour. Let us hope the attempt will one
day be seriously made by some competent hand.
On the mere surface of things, however, are several
concurrent causes the combination of which seems
sufficient to account, provisionally, for the phe
nomenon. The missionaries, speaking of them
generally, are not unnaturally disposed to evade
the enquiry, and to take shelter in certain biblical
platitudes (platitudes as so used) which represent
the hatred of the world as the natural inheritance
of the true Church. It is always interesting, and
often highly instructive, to discover in ancient
writings pictures of modern events, but the habit
of resorting to the Scriptures, as to a ready-made
clothes shop, for descriptions and explanations
of transactions which take place under our own
eyes must tend to mental degeneration and to the
suppression of the manly habit of candid open-
eyed observation. When the Chinese cite their
own classics in support of their attitude towards
Christianity the missionaries justly scoff at the
fallacy. Equally adverse to sound conclusions is
the anti-scientific temper which is induced in the
missionaries by the vicious practice of shunning
common terms for describing common things, and
of falling back on imperfectly understood phrases
which have been stereotyped for thousands of years.
Against the easy-going assumption of the mis
sionaries that when they are hated it is their

POLITICAL. 11

Master who is hated, there stands the broad histo
rical fact, in China, of toleration and patronage
extended to the two great foreign religions,
Mohammedanism and Buddhism. Nor can this be
explained away by the simple device of referring
these religions to diabolic invention. So far as
religion pure and simple is concerned the Chinese
bear the palm among all the nations of the earth
for toleration ; and the presumption is therefore
irresistibly strong that i£j&.n&ver the religious but
some other element in the missionary propaganda
that rouses the passions of the Chinese. Instead
of exciting them to wrath, indeed, the standing
wonder is that Christianity, being what it is, and
the condition of the average Chinese being what it
is, the common people do not hear it gladly, for
the promise of bliss to those doomed to the dismal
life of the Chinese masses, and who are ready to
believe anything, must, one would think, be like a
sunbeam lighting the recesses of a prison. This is
the strange thing that calls for explanation, not by
cut-and-dried dicta from the old Scriptures, but by
candid examination of the facts of the case, such
as will satisfy any well-balanced rnind. "While
waiting for such explanation the missionaries must
stand provisionally responsible for either- so mis
understanding their message, or so mismanaging the
delivery of it, as to render it virtually of no effect
over the larger portion of their field of operations.
The preliminary obstacle to the reception not

12 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

only of missionaries, but of foreigners and foreign
ideas of every kind, is that most intractable
sentiment of race hatred which is common to all
mankind. This has to be confronted like a natural
phenomenon as a constant factor in all interna
tional problems ; and of all peoples on the face of
the earth the English-speaking races have the least
reason to be surprised at finding it among the
Chinese. The contemptuous way the English
commonalty have of speaking of " nasty dirty
furriners " is evidence enough of the strength of
the race antipathy of the English ; and if more
specific testimony were wanting it would be fur
nished from the works of all modern travellers.
Sir Charles Dilke, in his " Problems of Greater
Britain" (Vol. I., p. 357), says: "The dislike of
the Australians for the Chinese is so strong and
so general that it is like the dislike of terriers for
rats. . . . Nothing will so rapidly bring together
an Australian crowd as the rumour that Chinamen
or rabbits are likely to be landed from a ship, and
one class of intruder is about as popular as the
other." Substituting ''foreign missionaries" for
"Chinamen" and for " Australian " "Chinese,"
the description would fairly describe the state of
feeling in China, only with the proviso that the
Chinese keep their feelings under better control
than Australians, Californians, or any other branch
of the white Christian family.

And the feeling in China is unhappily aggra-

POLITICAL. 13

vated by those very considerations of benefits
conferred winch, with the self-complacency al
most peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon forms of Chris
tianity, the missionary bodies expect to alleviate it.
China indeed cherishes a traditional hospitality to
strangers from the Four Seas, and is in this re
spect more liberal than most other states. But then
such strangers must come as guests and suitors,
looking up to the central nation as their protector.
To such the imperial bounty will ever be extended,
as to shipwrecked Loochooans or other derelict
persons. It is in no such guise that the Western
foreigners present themselves in China. They are
successful rebels against the Middle State, her
guests only by the right of the stronger. We say
we have many good qualities, also good gifts to
bestow on China, including the knowledge of
things in Heaven and earth of which the Chinese,
in their classical pride, are ignorant. Does such
a pretension as that gain us favour in their eyes?
Ought it to do so ? According to the invariable
working of the human mind the attainments of
which we boast, and the superfine moralities which
we profess with not a little braying of trumpet,
are the things most calculated to excite the hatred,
not unmixed with fear, of the people on whom we
have so brusquely intruded. And as a matter of
fact, all the State papers and other publications of
Chinese, when not dictated by foreigners, under
threats, or written to serve a special need, are as

14 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

the unloading of stores of burning hatred from the
breasts of their authors.

Such being the normal attitude of Chinese
officials and people towards foreigners in general
and missionaries in particular, the next thing to
consider is what inducements have been or can
be held out, or what means employed to break
down or reduce this great wall of opposition either
by individuals or by the different sections of
foreigners. Obviously the mercantile classes have
the best of this, as the benefits they confer on the
Chinese people are patent and need no recondite
explanation. Their influence, however, does not
penetrate below the surface of things, and is not
felt beyond their own immediate surroundings ; it
is barren and incapable of propagation.

The missionaries are so much less favourably
situated than the merchants in that they have no
raison d'etre intelligible to the Chinese, and conse
quently their presence everywhere breeds mystery.
Even in isolated cases where they meet with
personal kindness they are nevertheless objects of
suspicion. A lady of the China Inland Mission
relates in China's Millions for June, 1891, how
her party was graciously received by the wife of
a mandarin in one of their peregrinations in the
province of Sechuan. The mandarin himself was
in an adjoining room, whence he plied the mis
sionary ladies with questions, through his wife and
another native woman. " He wanted, of course, to

POLITICAL. 15

know why we had come? Were we going to
trade ? Had we brought anything to sell ? Who
had sent us ? Were we going to rent a house ?
How long were we going to stay ? Had our
Queen sent us to China ? " In her lively gos-
sipping manner Miss Williams here lets in a
strong side-light on the missionary position. The
catechism of her mandarin probably epitomises
the best thoughts of the Chinese regarding mis
sionaries.

It is a fact to the credit of the missionaries that
in many localities — indeed, more or less at every
place where they have settled — they have estab
lished confidence and " rubbed down prejudice," as
an old missionary summarised his own work of
twenty years in one city. And often, by means of
cures effected on wives of officials or other services
rendered, they gain a footing in the Yamens. In
this way relations of real friendship are extending
in many provinces. These, however, are, after all,
isolated cases which do not sensibly diminish the
mass of opposition. The good influence of the
missionaries is spreading — such, at least is the
natural inference from their published reports ;
but the important question is whether the adverse
influences are not increasing in a more rapid ratio.
Is the water in the ship's hold gaining on the
pumps? Every success, we may take for granted,
provokes fresh opposition, and the best opinion
seems to lean in the direction of the opposing wave

16 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

rising and threatening to overwhelm the whole
propaganda.

So composite is the missionary body that to
arrive at concrete truth in regard to it each of its
many members would have to be examined sepa
rately—an impossible task. As, however, it is
certain that the Chinese officials and people take no
account of the varieties of missionary, the different
sections of the force which dislike each other's ways
(only in a less degree than the Chinese themselves
do) being all classed in the lump, it will be suffi
cient also for our present purpose to take them en
bloc. The reputation of each section reacts on the
whole body.

One of the chief grounds of opposition to Christi
anity, one which grows naturally out of what has
been above advanced, is that the Catholic Church
has, ever since the Treaties of 1858-60, and even
since the French Treaty of 1844, been associated
with the aggressive policy of France ; a power
which has been suspected of cherishing designs
against China, arid which has employed the mis
sionaries as political and even military spies. The
conviction that this causes frequent outbreaks
against missions is growing among the Catholic
missionaries, who remark (see Appendix I.) that
they have suffered much more at the hands of the
Chinese since France openly took them under her
protection for her own purposes than when the;
enjoyed no protection from any foreign power.

POLITICAL. 17

And even French missionaries are coming to think
that they would be better off, and safer, were they
to be openly divorced from the military power of
France and every other country.

All these, however, are considerations which
would weigh mainly with the educated classes in
China, who are able to keep the run of contempo
rary history. But the Chinese populace is probably
as unable to grasp, as it would be unlikely to
spontaneously act upon, the mere political objec
tions to propagandisrn. If even, therefore, the
attitude of the literati .were rendered fully intel
ligible by such wide views of the situation, the
strong anti-missionary sentiment of the people
would still remain to be accounted for. The two
forces combined, the guiding spirit of the lettered
and the obedient muscles of the unlettered class,
are as necessary to the production of outrage as
the dual parentage of vertebrates. Without the
stimulus of pamphlets scattered broadcast, of pla
cards and harangues to prompt and direct the
movement, and without unanimity of feeling in
the mass to be moved, there would be no mob
violence against missionaries of a general and
far-spread character.

The modus operandi has come to be pretty well
understood. Certain able pens, some of whom are
known to belong to the governing classes, are
engaged compiling the most atrocious indictments
against the missionaries in general, in which they

c

18 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

not only travesty and grossly caricature the
doctrines and practices of Christianity, but charge
the missionaries of both sexes with crimes which
it requires a Chinese imagination to conceive.
Admittedly able as literary essays, these lampoons
are laden with matters which Zola himself would
blush to translate into any European language.
It may fairly be said that these publications,
"which are sold at the Government bookshops in
every city, reveal the unspeakable foulness of the
Chinese mind, while they fail to smirch the
garments of the objects of their attack. But that
is riot, unfortunately, the whole question. Sad as
it is to think so, the mass of the people believe all
the charges circulated against the missionaries.
Were it not so, the pamphleteers are too clever
to go on publishing them, for they know their
audience well. The authors may not in all cases
absolutely believe their own words, though the
human mind possesses such an amazing faculty
for believing what it wishes that it is possible
these literary assailants of foreign missionaries are
as sincere as was St. Paul when he deemed the
Christians of his day worthy of death by stoning.
There is, in fact, abundant evidence that the Chinese
officials do believe all these charges. No charges
of mere abstract immorality, however, would ever
incite any Eastern mob to the fever pitch of
virtuous violence ; and the attacks of the literati
would be as harmless as summer lightning were

POLITICAL. 19

they not barbed by accusations of another kind
which directly touch the life of the people at
large.

The missionaries are held up to popular odium
as kidnappers of children. The crime is so com
mon among the Chinese that the fear of it keeps
the villagers in a chronic state of alarm. Hence
the allegations against missionaries, already objects
of suspicion and aversion, are accepted with eager
credulity, needing no proof. The missionaries, it
may be said, are fully aware of all this.

It would serve no good purpose here to follow
in detail the various medical uses to which
foreigners are believed to put stolen children, and
the various organs and secretions of the body.
They are well known to all those who interest
themselves in China missions. No race has a
higher reverence for the human form, as such,
than the Chinese. All defects and deformities are
held in horror by them, and they will rather die
than part with a limb. In the case of early
mutilations for special purposes the parts are
religiously preserved to be eventually buried with
the body to which they belonged, so that in the
spirit world no blemish may appear. The alleged
mutilations by foreigners, therefore, enormously
heighten the gravamen of the charges of kid
napping. The belief that the foreign missionaries
are habitually guilty of such practices is universal
among the Chinese people, and is honestly enter-

c 2

20 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA,

tained ; even the learned are not free from the
same belief.

Against such accusations it is obviously useless
for missionaries to protest innocence ; the Oriental
mind is impervious to demonstration, which is
of course the unmanageable feature in the case.
Let no one make the mistake of pooh-poohing
these extravagances, but remember rather in
corroboration the object-lesson which was given in
India thirty-five years ago. Convictions were
then held by the people of Hindostan as ground
less as those now held by the people of China,
and official persons first pooh-poohed and then
attempted to stifle them. In vain, however, did
Government officers expostulate; the designing
men who were inciting the popular mind were
credited, because the belief on which they were
working was deep lodged in the hearts of the
people, and the result was one of the great
tragedies of history. Let not, therefore, the
inherent absurdity or incredible grossness of the
Chinese charges against missionaries blind anyone
to the plain fact that the Chinese sincerely believe
them all. Neither imperial edicts, provincial
proclamations, charges of dragoons, nor the heads
man's axe, are able to eradicate the conviction.
Provincial officials have been sometimes blamed
by foreigners for treating the popular outcry
seriously, and making enquiries instead of at
once stamping out the whole clamour as a

POLITICAL. 21

childish absurdity. The simple truth in such cases
is, the officials in question do implicitly believe
every word, a fact of which there have been many
proofs in their past intercourse with foreigners.

Before going on to other matters it may be
as well to glance at the possible share which the
missionaries themselves may have innocently had
in furnishing pretexts for such charges. Their
hospitals alone, where they treat patients free and
supply medicines, while they are a great boon to
the poor and sick, and are so highly appreciated
as to be always crowded with patients, furnish
a handle to the enemies of the missionaries to
revile them. The orphanages and schools of the
Catholic missions are no less objects of suspicion.
Miserable and moribund infants are imprudently
taken into these establishments. The mortality is
necessarily large, and whether the burial be intra-
or extra-mural it often attracts dangerous notice
from disaffected people, and in times of excitement
furnishes fuel to the fire. Indiscretions in con
nection with hospitals may at any time have
serious consequences. One of the worst outbreaks
ever recorded, that which occurred to the China
Inland Mission at Yangchow in 1868, is said to
have been started by the scientific zeal, carelessly
guarded, of a doctor,, in putting a human foetus into
a bottle, and leaving it exposed to the view of the
Chinese attendants. Such accidents are not the
cause of the trouble ; that lies deeper ; but they

2Z MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

may often be the occasion — the match will touch
the gunpowder already prepared.

Another distinct series of charges against
missionaries is that they bewitch the people, and
their houses and ground. When there are deaths
in a family or in a village, they are never, or
seldom, attributed to natural causes, but always to
malign influences of one sort or another. Mission
aries form a most convenient scape-goat, and in
spite of their free dispensaries, indeed often in
conseqence of them, they are suspected of giving
witch pills and of compassing evil designs against
the people. Where no deliberate evil intention is
charged the mere presence of the missionaries is
a sinister omen. Their houses in the interior also
play a very important part in the general scheme
of diablerie. It is generally known that the
Chinese, high and low, are slaves to a weird kind
of earth superstition, which is kept alive by
geomancers and other interested parties who are
employed in choosing sites for houses, graves^
&c. Their scheme for conciliating the good
influences of the spirits of earth and air, and
averting the bad, is of the most elaborate kind,
extending not only to such comparatively reason
able matters as the orientation of houses, gardens,
&c., but also to the placing of doors and windows^
elevation of roofs, &c., and to the relation of the
site to the contours of the surrounding ground, to-
running or standing water, and in numerable other

POLITICAL. 23

matters of a like kind. One of the common causes
of grievance among themselves refers to the spoil
ing of the feng shut or good luck of a house or a

^••^ ^"™ m m

grave by the erection of new buildings, and the
Chinese have their own way of warning off
aggressive neighbours as effective as the familiar
notice " Ancient Lights " so common in city im
provements in London. Even important Govern
ment concerns, such as railways, have to bow
before these popular deities, and are forced either
to make a detour or keep clear of a protected
neighbourhood altogether, according to the in
fluence and standing of the proprietors of the
threatened domain.

But as the missionaries spread themselves out
in the interior they naturally require houses, and
equally naturally aspire to commanding, aesthetic,
and salubrious sites. Hateful as the invader is,
however, per se, he becomes tenfold more so when
he is seen planting himself on every high hill and
under every green tree, erecting there beautiful
(in his own eyes) hut outlandish buildings which
J)ring_J114uck to the whole district. As regards
this superstition also there is not a shadow of
doubt of the perfect sincerity of the popular con
viction. The most learned are not exempt from
its influence — rather perhaps they are even greater
slaves to the professional geomancer than the poor
whose superstitions are less worth cultivating.
Long intercourse with foreigners seems not to

24 MISSION AEIES IN CHINA.

weaken the real hold of the doctrine, although it
may induce concealment, for shame. A case came
recently under notice of a thoroughly Anglicised
Chinese who had some cases of sickness in his
family for which he could not account until he had
consulted the oracle. The geomancer pointed out
in a foreigner's " compound " not far off a certain
temporary structure of mats, which he said domi
nated the luck of the house. Ashamed to confess
his belief in such things, the afflicted man dared not
ask the foreigner — a friend of his own, who would
willingly have done it — to remove his shed, but
prepared instead to abandon his commodious family
residence and seek less convenient quarters else
where. Eventually the feng shui man allowed him
to compromise by closing up his former entrances
and getting into the house by a back way. From
such an instance as this the strength of the geo-
mantic superstition may be inferred, and also the
unavoidable offence which must be constantly,
though unintentionally, given by foreign mission
aries establishing themselves in the interior. It
may be mentioned by way of illustrating the
universality of such beliefs that the seer in this
instance was not an ordinary fortune-teller, ex
ploiting a rich vein of credulity, but was himself
a man of rank and culture, a sort of Chinese Guy
Mannering, an amateur in occult science, which is
a favourite hobby of the wealthy and learned
Chinese.

POLITICAL. 25

The right to purchase land and build houses is
exercised under a clause in the Franco-Chinese
Treaty, of which missionaries of other nationalities
claim the benefit under the most-favoured-nation
clause of their own respective treaties. When it
is discovered that a piece of ground has been sold
to a foreign missionary, pressure is usually applied
to the seller to make him cancel ; the authorities
refuse to register the transfer on one pretext or
another ; but when the local official finally gives
way and issues the title deeds, there is peace for a
time. The people, however, do not acquiesce, and
on some convenient occasion, possibly after some
deaths, or in a time of scarcity, or when they have
been inflamed by agitators, mobs assemble and
burn and pillage the establishment, sometimes
maltreating the inmates, and sometimes not. Such
are the commonplaces of missionary experiences
in China.

What share avoidable aggressions or imprudent
procedure on the part of the missionaries themselves
may have in these constantly recurring agrarian
outrages it is impossible to say. We hear the
missionaries' version, but never the other side, and
no man is impartial in his own cause. Some
divisions of the missionary body have moderate
views on the subject and seem to consider that the
onus of avoiding disturbance rests on them, that
their tenure of property in the interior is of
doubtful legality, the French Treaty notwith-

26 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

standing, and they hold themselves ready to
retreat whenever circumstances require it. These
are the views on which the Church of England
missions under Bishop Scott, with some others, are
presumed to act, and though they do not escape all
the consequences of disputes with the other mis
sions, they seem to be troubled with very few of
their own.

It is impossible to follow up the proceedings
of missionaries in the interior, bat sometimes an
opportunity occurs at the Treaty ports of ob
serving their relations with native officials and
people. The question of house building has been
brought to an interesting phase recently in a place
where both sides of the transaction can be studied.
A missionary society some three years ago acquired
a small but desirable site on the main street of a
populous city, just within the wall, on which they
desired to erect a chapel. The funds were partly
provided by the general foreign community resi
dent at the port, and partly by the missionary
society, and the chapel was erected at the cost
of about two thousand dollars. Scarcely was it
opened, however, when trouble began to fall upon
the family of a rich and benevolent man ; sick
ness and death made their home in his house.
Suspicion fell on the new chapel, and an agita
tion was by-and-by set on foot with a view of
negotiating for its removal. The head of the
family is in real distress, for not only does he

POLITICAL. 27

fully believe himself in the malign influence of
the high building which overshadows him, but
the whole of his womankind, of three genera
tions, torment him with their constant wail
ing. As the only means of getting rid of the
offending building and its occupants was to buy
them out, the Chinese gentleman made over
tures to the missionary gentleman, to whom he
offered as " compensation for disturbance " a sum
of money more than seven times what the whole
land and building cost, and enough to purchase
a larger site and build a handsome chapel else
where. The missionary was as hard as adamant
in standing on his Treaty rights, and closed the
negotiations by demanding the sum of $30,000,
or fifteen times the value of his property.

The missionary is no doubt as strictly within
his legal rights as Shy lock thought he was in
his little negotiation with Antonio. But there
are cases when even legal rights may properly
give way to larger considerations. The position
of the Chinese gentleman in this case is peculiar.
His charities and good deeds have gained him the
love and reverence of the whole population, so
that if he held up his finger, as he is often urged
to do, the chapel would be demolished in two
hours. But he is a man of peace and forbearance.
Supposing, however, such a case to arise at a
distance from all disinterested foreign witnesses,
news of some shocking outrage would then be

28 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

given to the world, and one crime added to the
roll of persecution of the Church in China.

So far only the outward accidents of the mis
sionary position in China have been touched upon,
yet even these seem to furnish sufficient primd
facie ground for the hostile feelings with which
foreign missionaries are everywhere received in
the country. When we come to glance at the
point of contact between the foreign and native
religions, as such, still further grounds of hostility
will be disclosed. For when all suspicion as to his
motives shall have been removed ; when he shall
have learned to live on amicable terms with his
Chinese neighbours, and they to regard him not as
a danger, but as a reasonable friend ; when there
shall be no more local sources of irritation ; when,
in short, the missionary shall be treated on his
proper merits — what then will be his position
towards the Chinese? Will it not still be that
of a destroyer of their traditions, their morality,
their philosophy — in a word, of that on which
they build up their national and individual pride,
and of all that now sustains them in an orderly
and virtuous life ? And is it to be expected that
the Chinese will regard such radical destruction
—while as yet they do not comprehend what is to
be given them in exchange — with the cold gravity
of speculative philosophers ?

( 29 )

II. RELIGIOUS.

PROBABLY in no part of the world did Christianity
obtain an easier entrance than into the empire
of China, whether we consider its first appearance
there in the^sixteenth century, or its latest, under
the protection of foreign treaties, in the nineteenth.
And nowhere, on the face of the matter, was there
so inviting a field, either as regards its vast extent,
or the sober character and educational training of
the people. Yet the result of missionary effort
for three hundred years, arithmetically stated, is a
muster roll of but 500,000 Catholics (inclusive of
children) and under 50,000 Protestant converts
(exclusive of children), the latter of course being
the fruit of work during the present century. At
what a cost of money this numerical result has
been effected it might perhaps be possible to calcu
late, were it ever worth while to appraise spiritual
gain by a financial measure. But the cost in men
and women is incalculable. Those who have had
no experience of the deadening contact of masses
of the poorer Chinese, whose ideas, when they
have any, run in opposite directions to ours —
whose horizon is limited by their neighbour's
rice field, and whose chronology is marked by

30 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

recurring famines — can scarcely conceive the sacri
fice which is made of cultured men and women in
consigning them to a long life amid such depres
sing surroundings. And it lends emphasis to the
sacrifice, in common estimation, to consider that in
numerous instances the exile has divested himself
of wealth and social position as well as other
ingredients which the world deems most necessary
to the cup of human happiness. The physical
discomforts, fatigues, and privations incidental to
a missionary career appear to be the least part of
what has to be endured in the interior of China,
and it is indeed wonderful that so many of the
missionaries come through the ordeal with seem
ingly unimpaired intellectual vitality, and with the
moral sense so little blunted.

The reason no doubt is that the cause to which
such men and women consecrate their lives is for
them the highest goal of human endeavour. To
some of them their work is so exigent in its claims
as almost to exclude all other thoughts and even
ordinary recreation. Nothing short of a high
ideal could sustain them through their laborious

but apparently fruitless years. Their " mission "

speaking of a large section of them— is the delivery
of man from the wrath of God, which is to be
accomplished through the words which they
speak, and not otherwise. No wonder that the
missionaries should stagger under the weight of
such responsibility. Those who stand outside the

RELIGIOUS. 31

torrid zone of religious zeal may marvel to see a
few thousand common mortals voluntarily, indeed
eagerly, assuming a co-partnership in the eternal
purposes, and some may even stand aghast at
their daily urging the Almighty to greater ac
tivity in the despatch of His own work. Yet
what is to the world at large but the wild-fire of
fanaticism is to the parties themselves the one
assured reality of human life. This has to be
borne in mind in judging missionaries, who are
entitled to the common privilege of being gauged
by their own standard.

The progress and prospects of Christianity in
China are, however, matters which interest a
vastly wider circle than that of the missionary
bodies. The civilised world is justifiably curious
to know how the grand enterprise prospers ; it is
one of the practical public questions of the day ;
as the quality of the civilisation which is eventu
ally to cover the earth is the issue which is at
stake.

We have seen that the palpable result of
Christian missions in China has been to excite
virulent opposition throughout the country, coun
terbalanced by half a million converts. This
meagre success, as we have also seen, is to some
extent at least due to accidents of the external
relations of the propaganda, hindrances to the
spread of Christianity which are therefore in
their nature removable. Should it appear, how-

32

MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

ever, that underlying all these there are real hin
drances, either inherent in the Christian principles
themselves or inseparable from the missionaries'
manner of presenting them, or, again, due to
something peculiar in the circumstances of China,
the subject would naturally assume a graver
aspect.

Taking the last of these alternatives -first :. tihe_
^ moral condition of the Chinese people differs
greatly from that of every other people to whom
Christianity has addressed itself; a circumstance
which challenges the studious consideration of
those who aspire to influencing them. In the first
place, the Chinese are very free from religious
fanaticism ; since the Tang dynasty at all events,
say for the last thousand years, their soil has
never been reddened by the blood of martyrs to
opinion, nor have desolating religious wars dis
graced their annals — unless, indeed, the Taiping
rebellion of 1850-64 may be so classed, owing to
its leader having parodied Christian theology arid
drawn his inspiration from the Hebrew Scriptures.
The Chinese, though a religious people, in every
act of life worshipping the unseen, are probably
unique among religionists in that in their daily
life they follow the teachings of several religions
at once.

Such Catholicism of feeling might be attributed
to coldness of temperament (though hardly to re
ligious apathy) were there no better explanation

EELIGIOUS. 33

within reach. But the true reason which obtrudes
itself on our notice seems to be the all-pervading
influence of the Chinese philosophy. The grand
system of ethics, shaped if not created by the
sage Confucius, occupies in China a position un
like that of all other systems. The philosophies
of the West, from Pythagoras to Spencer, are
abstract and Utopian ; that of the Chinese is
popular and practical. They interest thinkers ;
this rules the common life of the masses, and has
done so continuously for several thousand years.
Confucius has indeed been blamed for providing
for all the relations of life so completely as to
leave no scope for new thought. But this is pro
bably to make too much of the man, and too little
of the people. The sayings of a sage could not
leaven the life of a whole race for two milleniums
unless he were one of the people, a true represen
tative man. Confucius himself disclaimed the
title of originator ; he was but a transmitter of
the thoughts which were prevalent before his day,
and in our modern way of speaking he was the
natural product of his age and race. The note
worthy thing is that the wisdom of the Ancients
has throughout the whole of their authentic
history, and never more than in the present
era, been to the Chinese the very life-blood of
their morality, personal, domestic, social and
political.

In presence of modern discussions as to the

34 MISSIONAKIES IN CHINA.

basis of ethics* it is important to remark that
the grand moral inheritance of the Chinese is
apparently quite independent of specific religious
sanction ; and it is perhaps this neutral character
which renders the Confucian ethics so valuable a
solvent of all religious acrimony. ; With this solid
ground- work of life, unassailable by faction, the
Chinese can afford to deal calmly with all religions,
their own aboriginal cults, Taoism with its
temples, priesthood and ritual, as well as the
systems imported from abroad. Confucianism is,
without doubt, the great moderating force, main
taining an even balance among rival creeds,
neutralising exclusive claims, and which would
also extend to all foreign religions the same
hospitality as it accords to the myths and mysteries
of indigenous evolution.

We say " would," for Christianity seems to re
main outside this comprehensive scheme of tole
ration, while foreign religions so like it to the
Chinese eye as Buddhism and Mohammedanism
are hospitably entertained, living on good terms
with each other and with aboriginal superstitions
under the Pax Sinensis. Why the broad charity
of Confucianism should have failed only to
embrace the supreme human embodiment of
Divine charity is one of those deep questions

" Your honesty is not to be based either on religion or
policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on it"
— Kuskin. .

RELIGIOUS. 35

which the soi-disant Christian world should set
itself diligently to answer. The significance of it
spreads over a wider area than is contained within
the confines of China.

The acts of the latter-day apostles, could they
be well examined, would no doubt throw some
light on this question. But only fragments of
these are accessible, and the light from them is
necessarily refracted through the missionary
prism. The Catholic missions being under or
ganised authority as regards both doctrine and
practice, some general conception of their attitude
towards the Chinese may be arrived at. Personal
idiosyncrasies are not wanting even among them,
and within the pale of the Church men the most
liberal and the most bigoted are to be found.
Eccentricities, however, are discouraged, and
there is an approximation to uniformity in the
work and teaching of the Catholic missionaries.
The Protestant missions, on the other hand,
though sectionally organised, allow infinite lati
tude to personal peculiarities in actual practice,
while in matters of abstract doctrine the denomi
nations seem to be exacting enough. The missions
are so scattered, moreover, as to be practically
inaccessible to investigators. It must be under
stood, therefore, that the general remarks which
follow rest on very incomplete data, and are
subject to large exceptions.

From the official reports of missionaries, from

D 2

36 MISSIONAEIES IN CHINA.

their contributions to their own periodicals, from
the diaries and personal letters which occasionally
obtain the like publicity, and from conversations
with individuals belonging to several sections, the
general deduction to be drawn is that their atti
tude towards Chinese ethics, philosophy, and
religion is that of war to the knife. In order to
build the Christian Church they require the site
to be cleared, and before securing friendly con
sideration for their own schemes they insist on
the destruction of what already exists. It is espe
cially necessary to qualify this general statement
by reference to the many important exceptions,
for there are not a few among the missionaries
who entertain sincere respect not only for Confu
cian philosophy but for the native and foreign
religions which flourish in China. And in this
connection, the great services which missionaries
have rendered to the cause of knowledge can
never be forgotten . It is to their labours that we
owe what we know of the Chinese language and
literature. Missionaries compiled the only dic
tionaries as yet in common use ; a missionary
translated the classics into English, laying the
whole world under perpetual obligation ; mission
aries have explained the Chinese religions ; and a
distinguished English missionary, when entering
the Temple of Heaven in Peking, put off his shoes
because the place was holy. A missionary has
quite recently contributed to descriptive anthro-

RELIGIOUS. 37

pology the first attempt at a systematic analysis
of the Chinese character, perhaps the first that has
been made of any national character. And, turn
ing towards the Chinese side, the missionaries
have the credit of awakening thought in the
country, and their great industry in circulating
useful and Christian knowledge in vernacular pub
lications of various sorts, though comparatively
barren of result in its main purpose, has spread
the light of Western civilisation far and wide in
the empire,

But although missionaries have written books
on the Chinese religions, and have honestly la
boured to do them justice, the fact remains that
the main body are too busy with their own work
to spare any serious thought for such subjects ;
and those who have studied them necessarily
approach them with foregone conclusions which
detract from the value of their deductions. At
one particular station there are fifteen missionaries
of different denominations, not more than two of
whom have taken any trouble to acquaint them
selves with Buddhism. Yet the business of their
lives is to supplant, among other things, that
religion !

Indifference to the opinions of others and dis
respect for their institutions are somewhat charac
teristic of the race from which Protestant mission
aries mostly come. The English-speaking peoples
are everywhere masterful and unaccommodating,

38 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

representatives of force in its various phases,
physical, nervous, and moral. They are often
feared, sometimes respected — at a distance. They
make good laws, and enforce them, but do not
often gain, as they deserve, the love of inferior, or
any other races. Constitutionally, they seem to
be incompetent for anything but a commanding
role; hence they are scarcely the ideal stuff of
which to make missionaries to races which inherit
adult civilisations. (With undeveloped races the
case is, of course, wholly different.) Through the
transparent robes of their humility may generally
be traced the imperious spirit, impatient of op
position and delay. Missionaries often try, sin
cerely enough, to live down to their people ; but
to wear the clothes of the poor and eat their food
may be nearer to formal condescension than to
true sympathy. The thing needful, the entering
freely into the spirit of the people, is of exceed
ingly rare attainment. Missionaries talk much,
and very naturally, of the good things they offer
to the Chinese, and the sacrifices they make for
them. But gratitude is not awakened in that
way, much less love. Natives instinctively fear
foreigners, et dona ferentes, and the more the gifts
are pressed on their attention the more suspicious
they naturally become.

The missionaries act naturally in laying hold
of the excrescences of Chinese superstitions and
practices, and applying to them their own criteria,

RELIGIOUS. 39

thereupon condemning them as base and damn
able ; in disparaging Confucius and his works ;
scoffing at the polytheistic Buddhists, and pouring
contempt on the monotheistic Mohammedans, with
indiscriminating scorn. When they have once
attached an " ism " to any of these things, its
doom is sealed, and Anathema is the only word
that remains to be spoken concerning it. The in
convenient morality of the Chinese, when it cannot
otherwise be disposed of, is referred, without
more ado, to the Father of Imposture. All this
may be natural ; but the effect of it is no less
natural.

There is, however, and notwithstanding the
a priori judgment of some missionaries, an irre
pressible instinct in man, whereby he is able
within certain limits to distinguish between good
and evil ; and the Chinese are not so devoid of the
moral sense * as not to appreciate what is good.
When, therefore, they hear things which they
revere — and which they know by experience to
be excellent and elevating — slighted by men and
women in broken and barbarous accents, the
latent hostility to foreigners and foreign ideas,

* " At the close of one of tlie services a man followed me
into the vestry and addressed me thus : — ' I have heard you
say that Christ can save a man from his sins. Can he save
me ? ' * What sins have you ? ' I asked. * Every sin you can
think of. ... I am an opium smoker, gambler, fornicator,
and everything that is bad.' " — Kev. G. John, at Shanghai
Conference, 1877.

40 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

which is a constant quantity in the Chinese mind,
is not unlikely to be awakened to inconvenient
activity.

What must strike any one on reading a series
of missionary records — such for instance as the
proceeding's of the Conferences held at Shanghai —
is the extreme subjectiveness of their utterances, in
word and writing, and the corresponding absence
of objectiveness. Their thoughts are full of them
selves, their doctrines, their organisation, their
methods, their efforts, their disappointments, their
piety, their charity, their humility and self-efface
ment ; while the condition of the Chinese mind
and conscience is passed over with some thread
bare commonplaces, as if no account need be taken
of that great factor in the problem ! The lack of
sympathetic imagination which Matthew Arnold
charged against his British Philistines seems to be
so general among the missionaries that it was left
for an ordained Chinaman at the last Conference
to implore his foreign brethren to have some con
sideration for the mental condition of the Chinese.
"Remember," he said, "we have forty genera
tions (? centuries) of physical inertia, heathenism,
and narrow education behind us," than which no
wiser or more apposite sentiment was uttered
during the whole proceedings. Deprecating the
aggressive method, the same speaker begged his
foreign colleagues to avoid in conversation or in
writing picking out all the worst phases of Chinese

RELIGIOUS. 41

character and passing over in silence what was
good.*

A courageous missionary, Mr. F. H. James,
presented to the Conference a paper on the Chinese
moral sects, for which he solicited the sympathy
of his brethren, and even urged that the ways of
these Chinese seekers after good should be studied
with a view to learning something from them,
and at least of meeting them "in a Christ- like
spirit." It was characteristic of the Conference
that the important subject of that paper failed to
elicit a single observation from the assembly,
while the whole of the day's sitting at which it
was read was occupied with profuse discussions on
" the missionary : his qualifications, mode of life,"
" lay agency," " historical review of missionary
methods," " preaching to the heathen," " itinera
tion," and a score or two of similar matters, all
interesting enough in themselves, though rather
like the smoke of the battle which obscures the
object of attack. Nor was this a peculiarity of
any one day's proceedings. The whole trans
actions of the Conference were marked by the
same characteristic. Every attempt to induce the
brethren to enter into the thoughts and feelings
of the natives either fell dead on the audience or

* "It is a common saying among them that Buddhism,
Taoism, and Confucianism agree in one. Yes, in a bowl of
rice with two chopsticks in it. This is the aspiration of every
class of the people both for the present and the future." —
Rev. T. P. Crawford, at Shanghai Conference, in 1877.

42 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

was stamped out of discussion by a mass vote ;
and there seems reason to conclude that this
particular phase of Philistinism governs the whole
missionary system. What, the missionaries seem
to argue, signifies this or that native belief or
aspiration or practice, when, whatever they may
be, the whole must be swept by our besom ? To
\f them Chinamen are but a mass of amorphous pulp
to be put into the moulds shaped for them in the
Western hemisphere. It was not, however, by
neglecting the topography of the enemy's country,
or even ignoring the personal qualities of the
hostile troops that Yon Moltke was successful in
his campaigns. A council of war which should
confine its deliberations to the state of its own
forces while treating the condition of the opposing
force as une quantite negligeable would soon find
its plans frustrated, and the flank of its army
turned.*

" We should become thoroughly acquainted with the
customs of the people, with their mode of thought, and with
their literature, that we may adapt our preaching to their
understanding, and illustrate the truth by allusions to familiar
things."— Rev. D. Z. Sheffield, at Shanghai Conference, 1877.
" We have learned that though a missionary in time past
might have spent his life imagining he was speaking the
native language and turning men to God, when he was doing
no such thing, being deceived by the peculiarities of his circum
stances and the difficulty o/ knowing what goes on 'in a Chinese
heart, home, and community, yet such room for mistake is
lessening. We have learned some lessons, and may be en
couraged to go on learning, so as to be able to teach."— Eev.
J. Sadler, The Messenger, 1889.

RELIGIOUS. 43

Supposing that the purely religious element,
with its supernatural sanction and unanswerable
appeals from the seen to the unseen, were elimi
nated from this problem, and that an attempt were
to be made by ordinary, rational, human means to
subvert the civilisation of the Chinese and sub
stitute that of Western Christendom, how would
the agents employed in such an enterprise pro
bably proceed ? Would they not endeavour to
discover some common ground whereon they
could meet those whom they sought to change,
and, avoiding rather than courting exasperating
conflicts with the extremest discrepancies between
the Eastern and Western developments, would
they not go back, if possible, to their point of
original divergence, and then by tracing the
causes and the course of the differentiation get
behind the present appearances of things, and gain
a practical comprehension of what they see, and a
sound basis of influence ? Would they not, in a
word, go to the root of the matter instead of
smiting the branches, recognising the necessity of
" putting yourself in his place " as a condition of
gaining lasting influence over any human soul ?
Is it the confirmed habit of taking their principles
of action too exclusively from the stereotyped verbal
dicta of ancient, and often misunderstood, authori
ties that leads the missionaries to read the motions
of the human mind so differently from other men ?

It is obvious that the moral systems of the

44 MISSIONAKIES IN CHINA.

extreme East and the extreme West have developed
in almost opposite directions. Crimes, for example,
which in Europe and America would be punished
by penal servitude do not in China even cause
shame ; while en revanche conduct which in
England would entail neither legal nor social
penalty would in China be punishable with death.
Suicide, which is so criminal in England as to bar
Christian burial and cause juries to forswear them
selves rather than return a true verdict, is publicly
and officially extolled in China as the highest
virtue. Results of moral evolution so disparate
are not to be understood by rudely contrasting
them and condemning off-hand the one extreme
from the standpoint of its opposite. One would
have to dig deep indeed into the foundations of
the social structures to reach the point where the
two civilisations would throw an intelligible light
on each other ; but it is by patient research and
laborious sap rather than by head-breaking on
slaughts on the outworks that the citadel of Chinese
ethics is most likely to be carried. Hasty demon
strations may tend rather to consolidate the
resistance than to overcome it.

Speaking generally, it is perhaps an open
question whether under any conditions the moral
improvement of mankind is furthered by denuncia
tion. The more approved method surely is to
build upon the existing foundation of what is good,
and by stimulating the higher to gradually induce

KELIGIOTJS. 45

the neglect and atrophy of the baser qualities
of the mind. Love succeeds where severity fails
in leading individuals into virtuous paths ; and
the principle applied to the Chinese of diligently
seeking out what is good in their hearts and in
their practice, and of grafting on to it that which
is of the same nature, but better, might result in
a peaceful and happy transmutation. Such, how
ever, is quite opposed to the system on which
missionaries, as a body, seem now to work. They
will hold no parley with " the enemy of souls."

To say, as in deed if not in words many of them
do, that there is absolutely no good in systems
which have sustained so great a people through
periods of time during which the mightiest
empires of the earth have risen, flourished, fallen,
and been resolved into their elements is surely to
do violence to obvious truth. And to assign all
the good which cannot be gainsaid to the insidious
devices of the Evil One is but a poor kind of
monkish subterfuge, an escape for minds driven
to the wall by fixed beliefs brought into open
contradiction with observed facts.

In turning away, therefore, from the native
virtues of the Chinese, the missionaries seem to
be surrendering the strongest vantage ground
they could occupy as a base for evangelising
operations.

The dominating principle of Chinese life, that
which rules the family and the nation, is univer-

46 MISSIONAEIES IN CHINA.

rX sally admitted to bejfilial piety.*, the systematised
reverence for living1 and dead parents. As to this
the sages did nothing more than put the seal of
their authority on a popular cult, which was
already in their days of immemorial antiquity, the
outward observances only having changed. There
is probably in all the world no stronger moral
principle, able as it is to command unlimited
sacrifices from every living man and woman — to
which the imperial service itself has to yield.
Nothing can stand in the way of filial duty,
whether it be to the living or the dead. It is one
of the wonders of the world, as it certainly is the
life of the Chinese nation. It deserves at least
reasonable study. It links the living Chinaman
to the whole past of his family and race, not by
bonds of nebulous tradition, but in what he feels
to be real living contact. It links him no less to
the future, in which he shall live as the past lives
in and about him. The custom of adoption, not
peculiar to China, is one of the provisions which
society has made to secure to every individual his
due participation in the life to come.

Volumes might be written on the pros and
cons of filial piety. The results are not all good
by any means. The imperiousness of the one
dominant principle seems to trample to extinction
other principles which we Westerns deem equally
important. Improvident marriages with their
consequences, poverty and infanticide, may be

EELIGIOUS. 47

carried to the adverse side of the account. Among
the most commonly observed social results of the
family solidarity, which is nothing but the constant
expression of the filial principle, may be mentioned
the continuous responsibility for family debts,
which stands in such wide opposition to Western
social ethics. A foreign house of business fails,
owing large debts to Chinese, let us say, among
others. The families of the debtors may be as rich
as Croesus, but it would be deemed an act of
quixotic generosity for a son or a brother to in
demnify the creditors. Conversely, a Chinese who
should fail in like circumstances would entail the
burden of his debt on his family and posterity.
Active individual enterprise is promoted by the one
principle, while caution and family supervision are
ensured by the other ; on which side lies the
ultimate balance of good and evil it would be hard
to estimate.

What then is the attitude of Christianity towards
this venerable, deep-rooted moral force ? Do the
missionaries seek to attach it to their service ? On ,
the contrary, they refuse to tolerate it on the face
of the earth,* and bluntly call on China to choose
forthwith between Christ and her ancestors : — and
she does.

* " I fear that if this motion is passed we are committed to
the statement that there is nothing connected with ancestral
worship which we can for a moment tolerate." — Rev. J. Ross,
Shanghai Conference, 1891. [The motion was passed.]

48 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

As regards all such matters the missionaries
seem to proceed on a regular and consistent plan.
They take up a subject as a chemist does a sub
stance in his laboratory, and they apply to it a
very limited range of verbal tests. As soon as
they find the blue precipitate corresponding to the
word " idolatry " in their vocabulary the analysis
is complete, and the phial is labelled and placed
in a glass case for the instruction of future neo
phytes. Word-worship is the perpetual bane of
the book-learned, who, like other men, become
assimilated to what they work in, and end by
putting the symbols in the place of the things
symbolised. Missionaries seem to suffer from two
forms of this disease of the learned. One is ex
hibited in an array of phrases transferred from
archaic Hebrew and Aramaic Greek to archaic,
but very beautiful English, which are in early
youth committed blindly to memory, and in adult
life worshipped, the little idols being kept
neatly ranged in rows in little cerebral shrines,
dusted and always ready to be brought out. The
other form is the worship of words in general
— logolatry.

Under the tyranny of this cultus a whole
generation of missionaries have expended their
strength in wearisome logomachy about the
Chinese terms used for the Supreme. The
Protestants could not, of course, employ the terms
already made familiar to the Chinese by the early

RELIGIOUS. 49

Catholic missions, because theirs was the god of
the hills, while ours was the god of the plains—
or for some equally valid reason. During the
thirty years' disputation it would be hard to say
how many new word-deities may have been added
to the Chinese Pantheon, but the dispute has ended
in smoke. With better knowledge most of the
Protestant missionaries are now unostentatiously
adopting the term which was used by the early
Jesuits. But what a sacrifice to mere words —
" husks " as the late Dr. Williamson ventured
to call them, to the scandal of his missionary
brethren.

Such a word-idol is this " idolatry," which, being
biblical, must be revered.* What is meant by it

* " Nor is it possible to estimate the harm which has been
done in matters of higher speculation and conduct, by loose
verbiage, though we may guess at it by observing the dislike
which people show to have any thing about their religion said
to them in simple words, — for then they understand it. ...

" Few passages of the book, which at least some part of the
nations at present most advanced in civilisation accept as an
expression of final truth, have been more distorted than those
bearing on idolatry. For the idolatry there denounced is
neither sculpture, nor veneration of sculpture. It is simply
the substitution of an * Eidolon,' phantasm or imagination of
Good, for that which is real and enduring, from the Highest
Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good
which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created
which he is said to have ' seen good ' in creating, are in
this their eternal goodness appointed always to be wor
shipped — i. e., to have goodness and worth ascribed to them,
from the heart." — Kuskin.

E

50 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

in our modern days is no doubt the worship of
something other than God — or, according to Mr.
Hudson Taylor, who thinks in Hebrew, " Jehovah "
— but as the missionaries perhaps know neither
what is, nor what is not, Grod, they take a good
deal upon them in pronouncing judgment in
matters which transcend their comprehension.
As was hinted by one of themselves, moreover,
to apply to Chinese, whose sin is fidelity to their
own traditions, a term coined to describe Hebrew
renegades, is very like uttering counterfeit money.
This word " idolatry " as used by missionaries is
little more than something to conjure with, and
Chinese ancestral "worship," as it is designated
by them, will probably long withstand attack by
paper swords of that kind. One learned member
of the Shanghai Conference, some way gone in
logolatry, formulated seventeen separate and com
pact verbal reasons for forbidding the "worship"
of Chinese ancestors !

The Mohammedans, purer monotheists than the
Christians, and being themselves Chinese, knowing
the Chinese mind, have found means of accommo
dation with Chinese ancestoral worship ; and so no
doubt would the Chinese Christians also, if the
missionaries would but trust a little to the natural
operation of Christian affections in their hearts
instead of affronting the whole nation by vehement
denunciation of what is literally dearer to them
than life ; foreclosing the subject against future

RELIGIOUS. 51

argument, and slamming the door against new
light.*

The worship is open to the observation of every
body in China. All Souls' day, or the Spirits'
Festival, occurs on the full of the seventh moon,
which fell this year on the 19th August. Im
mense processions of men, women, and children
on that day sally out of cities and villages dressed
in white mourning robes to offer sacrifices at their
family graves, and decorate them. Nor is the
service confined to the family spirits. Close to
the foreign settlement at one of the Treaty ports
is a noticeably well-kept grave which is frequently
visited by solitary Chinese. It is the tomb of
a physician famous no less for his medical skill
than for his benevolent character ; and it is
a regular practice of the people who live in the
locality to bring incense to the grave and consult
the spirit of the deceased worthy. On the annual
festival strings of visitors, mostly women, pay
their respects to the spirit of the good physician.
In this service reverence is no doubt mixed up
with expectation of favours, as is the case in all
religious systems whatsoever.

Of the missionaries' relations to Buddhism it
would be too long to tell. Nor is it necessary to

* "The title of his paper [Rev. Dr. Martin's 'Plea for
Toleration'] is one that cannot be discussed by any Pro
testant body." — Rev. J. Hudson Taylor, Shanghai Conference,
1890.

E 2

52 MISSIONAKIES IN CHINA.

say more than that it also, with all its super
stitions and its benevolences, its great history and
wonderful popularity, is simply abomination to be
fought against till it is destroyed. For is it not
also " idolatry " ? *

Coming to the more positive side of the mission
aries' teaching the evidence somewhat fails us, for
excepting at the seaports, and in the case of the
disciplined and regimented Catholics, the mission
aries who are spread over China do pretty much
what they individually like, and give such accounts
of their work as they think sufficient.

Much as the division of the Christian force into
so many separate factions is to be deplored, and
detrimental to the prospects of the missions as is
the transference of these relics of strife from their
native homes to the soil of China, it is not on the
missionaries but on the societies which send them
out that the blame, if any, rests. That it is a
great evil can hardly be doubted. Whenever
Chinese converts obtain a hearing on the subject,
they speak, with no ambiguity, of the immense loss
of force which Christianity sustains through these
divisions.

But there is perhaps a still more serious evil in
the vagaries of hundreds of irresponsible evange
lists who go about the country retailing the fig
ments of their own excited brains as the pure

" It is no sign of true religion to affront a false."— Rev.
Dean Butcher, Shanghai Conference, 1877.

EELIGIOUS. 53

gospel. They say that whatever the diversities
in their teaching may be they are at one with the
main body in essentials ; which is a mere begging
of the question. How do they know what classi
fication of " essentials " and " non-essentials " their
ignorant hearers may be making ? On these mis- 1
sionaries' own showing it is impossible to prevent
the poor uneducated people from making of the
whole thing a tangle of fetishism, nor do the
evangelists always resist to the uttermost the
tendency to make u medicine men " of them, which
shows itself frequently in their ignorant followers.
On all such matters, we repeat, we are dependent
on the parties interested for information as to their
doings, and as they are neither unbiassed, nor as a
rule persons whose judgment has been strengthened
by severe training, their statements have to be
received with some caution. The most eccentric
missionaries are naturally those, many of them
single women, belonging to Mr. Hudson Taylor's
China Inland Mission. They number 480,
more than one-third of the total force of Protestant
missionaries in China. They are drawn from
every sect in England, from Canada, Sweden, and
perhaps other countries ; and the territory of
China is systematically parcelled out among them
so as to obviate collision and to minimise the
outward aspect of their diversities of creed and
conduct. Members of other bodies may look
askance at the doings of the China Inland Mission

54 MISSIONAHIES IN CHINA.

as an English squire does at those of the Salvation
Army, but they cannot dissociate themselves from
them in the eyes of the Chinese, who make no
fine-drawn distinctions where foreigners are con
cerned. It is not in the power of any missionary
to limit his responsibility to his own personal
work ; he is bound in a moral partnership of
unlimited liability, and his results can never be
other than part of a general aggregate. He has
no choice between tacitly endorsing all that every
member of the missionary body does, and openly
repudiating what he disapproves. But even his
protests would not prevent his instruction being
interpreted by the proceedings of others profess
ing to teach the same doctrine.

The Inland missionaries are much given to
street preaching and " itinerating," in which their
unmarried women also take part, perambulating
the streets of towns looking for invitations to
enter houses. From their diaries and letters we
get occasional glimpses of what these indepen
dent evangelists teach the Chinese. A species
of thaumaturgy enters largely into their system.
They here meet the Chinese on their own ground
of spiritualism, and in cases of sickness or trouble,
the missionaries are ready to back the foreign
against the native Deity, after the manner of
Elijah with the prophets of Baal. In other words,
they live by prayer, not privately merely, but
often openly, and by way of challenging their

KELIGIOUS. 55

opponents. When a patient dies for whose re
covery special prayer has been made, and the
petitioners are self-pledged to a successful issue,
they do not look at the material cause of death,
but examine the mechanism of their prayer as
if it were an experiment in physics that had
miscarried. When they want a free passage in
a steamboat they pray for it over-night, and the
most hard-hearted shipping agent is unable to
deny the naively-pious request preferred at 10 a.m.
next day. Nothing of the most trivial kind y
happens to these good people but by miracle, that
is to say, by special and continuous interpositions
of the Almighty, with whose ideas they affect an
easy familiarity which to minds reverentially con
stituted is rather shocking. Hence perhaps the
very general prejudice against pietism which the
pietists are too prone to attribute to the secular
antagonism between good and evil, they having
never a moment's doubt on which side of the line
they stand ! There is, however, no gainsaying
the driving force of such epigrammatic convictions,
and if the professors could only show moderately
consistent success in drawing the fire from Heaven,
they would inevitably supersede all the Chinese
fortune-tellers, geomancers, doctors, and priests. /
Unluckily in the mere mundane vision of the
Chinese the poor Inland missionaries are seen to
be subject to all the common casualties of life //
just like other folks, and their appeal to unseen

56 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

compensations for earthly griefs satisfies only the
few who come within the incandescent sphere of
their direct personal attraction.

The discipline which the missionaries attempt
to enforce on their converts is, like their teaching,
varied. Nearly everywhere, among Protestants
Sabbatarianism is insisted upon, which to a China
man, isolated in the crowd and struggling for
a living, is a test of faith difficult to be imagined
by people whose birthright is a seventh-day rest.
There are, however, many missionaries who per
ceive the hardship, and are not convinced of the
authority for the obligation, and who consequently
relax somewhat the severe Sabbatarian regime.

There are some again who deny the Communion
to Chinese who drink or smoke, even common
tobacco ; and nearly, if not quite all, refuse the
Sacraments to those who touch opium. There is
not, of course, a shadow of authority scriptural,
patristic, or ecclesiastical, for any of these prohi
bitions ; nothing but the self-sufficing judgment
of the missionaries.* This opens a wide vista of
possible abuse in the future as the borders of
the Christian community become enlarged.

Nor is it Chinese vices properly so called which

" Sabbath observance, opium smoking, ancestral worship, &c.
... I think we should teach the native Christians from the
Scripture, and allow them to legislate on these points. Let
them be chiefly responsible. We are not called upon to
legislate."— Rev. Dr. Edkins, at Shanghai Conference, 1877.

RELIGIOUS. 57

alone incur the reprobation of the missionaries.
Societies whose bond of union is abstinence from
flesh, alcohol, opium, tobacco, and impurity, arid
whose members are held strictly to their rules, are
under the ban of the missionaries — always, let it
be understood, with most significant exceptions.*
They pronounce such kind of abstinence " idolatry,"
a verdict always ready to hand which saves
troublesome examination. The Chinese are, in
fact, worshipping their own virtue — which no
missionary ever does — and trusting to their own
efforts instead of — &c., &c.

One practice which seems to be most obnoxious
to the missionaries of certain sections is vegeta
rianism, which is rather common in China. This,
it appears, is one of the subtlest wiles of the Devil,
to make the Chinese simulate goodness even before
the arrival of the missionaries, and accordingly
the victims of this deadly delusion must be saved,
from their vegetarian diet at least, if not entirely
from the vegetarian superstition. A single breach
of the vow is all that is required to destroy the
accumulated merit of half a life-time ; and the
missionaries naively relate the snares they set for

* " These sections of the population [the religious sects]
are of the highest importance. They seem the only people
in the empire alive to any sense of spiritual realities, * the
only living sinners in the empire,' as I once called them. . .
They have many affinities to divine truth, and are earnestly
groping after more light."— Rev. Dr. Williamson, at Shang-
hai Conference, 1890.

58 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

these pseudo-virtuous people to entrap them into
transgression. The breaking of an egg, innocent
as it looks, is sometimes the means blessed to this
end ; and we read of wily old converts laying
earnest siege to new inquirers in order that by
some means they may be seduced into eating pork
in their company — a sort of equivalent of " taking
the shilling."

Such are some specimens of the excrescences
of the new Christianity which is being planted in
China. These lie on the surface of the missionary
periodicals, but probably an independent inquirer
among their stations in the interior would discover
a world of other matters, novel to him, which
have become too commonplace for the missionaries
themselves to think of recording.

The various schemes of theology, which are
taught to the Chinese, Japanese, and other Eastern
peoples would require a separate treatise, and much
more information than is at present available to
the public to elucidate. It may be stated, gene
rally, that modern biblical criticism is simply
ignored, as well as the widening tendency of the
modern churches in matters of set doctrine. Men
who landed in China 30 or 40 years ago, with a com
plete outfit of cut-and-dried opinions, have natu
rally been too busy to change them, unless they
happen to possess the rare faculty for assimilating
new ideas, which even the Chinese life itself suggests
to some open minds. Thackeray tells us of a

BELIGIOUS, 59

certain German gentleman who passed his youth
in the English army in the Georgian era, and who
when found by a traveller fifty years later buried
in his native principality, spoke a dialect of English
which consisted mainly of oaths, grown out of date
in good society, but which were found bottled up
and seemingly quite fresh in the memory of this
veteran. Theology in partibus seems to be in a
somewhat similar case, and it is curious sometimes
to come across in the Far East antiquated samples
of creeds which are disappearing in the lands
of their origin, just as one finds in old Dutch
houses specimens of the Chinese porcelain of the
seventeenth century. While even the cast-iron
theologians of the Free Church of Scotland and
the stern Presbyterians of America are seeking
ways of escape from the rigid fetters in which
the famous Westminster divines have bound them
these 200 years and more, and are actually making
concessions to unbaptised infants, Calvinism in
its naked form is being diligently inculcated on
Chinese arid Japanese, as if it were the ultimate
and indisputable truth. A zealous evangelist
of those parts in conversation lately frankly
made this confession : — The Almighty [may the
irreverence be forgiven !] having got into a legal
difficulty with mankind, devised a plan by which
the penalty due should be imposed on another who
was innocent of offence. By this means the human
raco was to be saved, or at least rendered salvable.

60 MISSIONAK1ES IN CHINA.

Other complications, liowever, prevented the con
summation of the Divine scheme, and in fact only
a select few were ever really intended to partici
pate in the so-dearly-purchased redemption. In
order, however, that the condemned, by far the
larger portion of mankind, might be technically
put in the wrong, they were to be given a chance
of hearing the Gospel, which they were fore
doomed to reject ; and their final condemnation
was thereby rendered more terrible than if there
had been no scheme of redemption at all, or they
had never heard of it. But the important thing
was that God should be justified, and even get
glory !

So little have these hide-bound creeds advanced
in a century that Burns's caricature of them is as
applicable as when he wrote :

" 0 Thou wha in the Heavens dost dwell,
Wha as it pleases best thysel',
Sends ane to Heaven and ten to Hell

A' for thy glory :
An' no for ony gude or ill

They've done afore Thee ! "

A lady, fresh perhaps from some theological
seminary, propounds for " Chinese women " —
women who, on the testimony of another experi
enced and keen-witted missionary lady, are unable
to grasp the simplest abstract idea — a scheme
of divinity so elaborate that if the salvation of our
bishops were made conditional on their mastering

RELIGIOUS. 61

\

it, the majority of their lordships would have
sorrowfully to accept the alternative.

The crop of doctrinal anomalies exhibited in
a country where each individual utters recklessly
whatever comes into his head, without check either
from higher authority or from public opinion —
that of the natives being of course disregarded — is,
as might be expected, a rank jungle growth the
extent of which can never be known. Hints may
occasionally be gathered from the printed papers
circulated by missionaries among the heathen of
a very chaos of creeds, without so much as a sect
to stand sponsor for them. One man, for example,
issues a leaflet which laboriously proves that the
cosmos was not created by God, as is commonly
believed, but by Jesus. Christian worship is, by
the same unreason, shown to be directed to Jesus,
and not to God, an essential distinction being made
between them. It is not surprising, after this, to
find the corollary of justification by faith worked
for all it is worth by some of the irresponsible
apostles, ridden by a kind of quack logic, who lay
it down plainly to the Chinese that Christians
need not be moral, as they have only to be
lieve !

What the general effect on the Chinese of these
varied and eccentric teachings may be we have no
means of knowing. But it is obvious to enquire
whether, though Christianity may nominally gain
by the untrammelled zeal of zealots of all kinds,

62 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

it must not eventually pay the penalty of being
found out as an imposition ?

In matters of material improvement the Chinese
and Japanese are not treated so. They are not
first given wooden ships, muzzle-loading guns, or
the Ptolemaic system of the heavens, but the
result of the very latest discoveries in every branch
of science ; the latest excursions into the regions
of thought, and the newest things in sociology.
Why should they be so largely denied the like
advantages in the sphere of religion ?

It requires, perhaps, some other eye than that
of a working missionary to perceive the danger
to the future of Christianity from a too rigid
adherence to wordy things which are beginning
to fall away from the religion of the West like
withered leaves that have served their temporary
purpose. The light of literature will not be
stayed in the Far East any more than it has been
in India, and when the Chinese discover, as their
Japanese neighbours are already doing, and as the
Indians did before them, that the thing which was
given them as Christianity would not stand the
light which was brought to bear upon it, they will
be apt to throw it over, and accept the teaching
of the missionaries with the religious ingredient
carefully filtered out. As regards the old countries
of Christendom, there is much to be said for the
gradual and guarded infusion of expanding views
of truth, lest the new wine should crack the old

RELIGIOUS. 63

skins ; and the officers of religion in those countries
may be pardoned for maintaining forms even after
they have lost some of their meaning. But the
like excuse does not cover the introduction into
new countries of doctrinal forms which, if not
already obsolete elsewhere, are fast becoming so.

The missionaries come to uproot the religions of
the Chinese in order to offer them something
infinitely better, but between the people's apprecia
tion of that something better and their present
apprehension of the destructive force that menaces
them there is a very wide gulf, in the passage of
which the best hopes of the friends of China may
founder. It behoves the missionaries to look well
to it that at least no worn-oat simulacrum of
Christianity is offered, to the prejudice of a purer
presentment of it which may follow.

Perhaps what is really vital in Christianity,
that which has kept it alive through every variety
of form, and carried it even through seas of crime
perpetrated in its name, has never yet been pre
sented in a pure form anywhere. Perhaps the
constitution of human nature will always prevent
the true essence from being isolated from its
grosser concomitants ; but at any rate the higher
ideal which is coming more clearly into view in
Christendom might be more aimed at than it has
yet been in China. And as one would not go into
action carrying lumber which must be thrown
away at the first encounter, so missionaries might

64 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

with permanent profit to their sacred cause
consider how much of their old (and new) religious
furniture it is necessary for them to bring into the
China campaign.

A real difficulty begins to be felt also with
regard to the Bible itself. The book, as such, is
held in such superstitious regard by the text-
ridden masses that the most strenuous efforts have
been made to circulate its contents everywhere,
and more especially in literary China. Where the
missionaries could not penetrate the book could be
sent, and where they might provoke opposition
by their bodily presence the Scriptures might
be quietly studied in chambers with much hope
of future harvest. Till lately not a doubt was
breathed as to the absolute wisdom of this pro
cedure, but the unloosing of one tongue led to the
unloosing of many, and at the last Conference in
Shanghai the propriety of the indiscriminate circu
lation of the Bible, without note or comment, was
freely canvassed. It was an unpleasant discovery,
after thirty years of work at high pressure, to find
that when the harvest was looked for, tares — nay
brambles and baleful weeds — instead of wheat had
covered the ground. Of the possibility of such a
result the blasphemous uses to which the Tai-ping
Eebels turned the Old and New Testaments might
have afforded the missionaries some warning. But
they seem to have gone on wholly unaware what
effect the Bible was producing on the minds of the

RELIGIOUS. 65

thousands into whose hands it had been put.
They simply did their plain duty and left the
consequences to take care of themselves,, or,
as they prefer to phrase it, the results were in
God's hands. The more thoughtful heads — and
it required some courage for them to say so — now
recognise that the Bible is not a proper book to be
indiscriminately read by people quite unprepared
for its teachings, and out of sympathy with its
spirit. They have seen that the foulest attacks
made against Christianity by the Chinese literati
are loaded to the muzzle with missiles from the
Bible, which is a perfect arsenal of weapons to
be used against the missionary cause. The seed
which is wafted far and wide on the wind cannot
be controlled, nor can the soil into which it falls be
either selected or tended. The hard things in the
Bible which stagger thoughtful youths at home,
though familiarised with them from earliest infancy,
produce startling effects on the minds of those who
have no teacher to explain and no mother to
cover them with the gentle authority of her love.

How little some of the missionaries feel the
need of smoothing down the less digestible por
tions of the Old Testament may be seen from
their selecting some of the hardest passages for
special advertisement. Their tracts, for example,
which are intended to be read by Chinese who
have never heard a foreigner's voice, are coarsely
illustrated by such scenes as Jonah being

F

68 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

If it be remarked by some readers that scant
appreciation has been in these pages expressed
either of the men engaged, or in the work of the
missions, the reply is that a panegyric would have
been easy and pleasant to write, since the
materials for it abound. But there is a time for
everything, and it seemed more to the present
purpose to endeavour to discover how far the anti-
Christian feeling in China might fairly be traced
to the proceedings of Christian missionaries.
Again, it may be objected, and with good reason,
that the present essay is but the criticism of a
dilettante on the serious work of serious men ; to
which the only answer is that as an urchin sitting
on a gate may see when the hounds are at fault,
and as staff-officers in the field may sometimes get
hints from country-folk who are innocent of
strategy, so may those who are wiser than the
writer extract some useful intelligence even from
the lucubrations of a layman.

Yet, to prevent misconstruction, a word ought
perhaps still to be said concerning the quality of
the Chinese Christian converts. Few as they may
be, when all told, arid mixed as they must be with
spurious professors, it is a gratifying 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

RELIGIOUS. 69

the very beginning. It is thus shown that the
Christian religion is not essentially unadapted to
China, and that the Chinese character is suscep
tible to its regenerating power. The road to the
Chinese conscience, therefore, having once been
found, the prospect of an abundant entrance there
to might be considered hopeful, were it not for
such drawbacks as those which have been above
referred to. The danger is that while one is
attracted, ten, nay a hundred, others may be
repelled without arousing misgivings in the mis
sionary mind ; so that even present successes may
be purchased at the cost of heavy future reverses.
Such possibilities the ordinary working missionary,
intent at all hazards on gathering in his own
sheaves, can hardly be expected to entertain. The
more need, therefore, that those who are interested
in the subject, but are under no strain to produce
a daily tale of bricks, should venture on the wider
survey, and get the clearest view possible of the
general drift of the movement.

Among the " hindrances" which figure so largely
in missionary discussions it seems scarcely yet to
have occurred to any one that the chief of all
hindrances to the spread of Christianity in China is
the missionaries themselves. Wise old Dr. Nevius
dared to say, in full Conference, that " the Bible-
sellers, so far from paving the way for the mis-,
sionary may, on the contrary, obstruct it ; " and it
would be producing the line of thought but one

66 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

swallowed by the great fish, and Jael in the act
of driving her tent-peg through the temples of her
sleeping guest. These things of course present
no real difficulty to the acceptance of the Chinese,
who are perfectly ready to swallow Jonah and the
whale too, if the fish be big enough. The physio
logical problem which the prophet had to solve
during the next few days is mere child's play
beside the thousand and one wonders which fill
the imaginations of every Oriental people. Nor
is the treachery of Jael calculated to shock Chinese
notions of honest reprisal. But whether Chris
tianity is much assisted by such rough forms of
introduction is quite another question.

The effect of the mere translation is probably
difficult enough to appraise accurately, but there
need be no difficulty in perceiving — what, how
ever, has had to be brought home to the mission
aries by the rudest proofs — that men of a strange
race, predisposed to be hostile, and not over-nice
in their imaginations, were not at all certain
to find edification either in the biographies or
the anacreontics of the Bible. To refer only to
one instance : What is an educated heathen likely
to make of the evidence of the central truth of
Christianity, the miraculous birth, as presented to
him for the first time in the New Testament?
What the Chinese literati do make of it the mis
sionaries know very well, and have known for a
long time, though few dare speak out.

RELIGIOUS. 67

It so happens that, impure as the Chinese'
imagination may be, the whole body of their
classical literature does not contain a single pas-j
sage which needs to be slurred over or explained
away, and which may not be read in its full
natural sense by youth or maiden. And to people
nurtured on a literature so immaculate in these
respects there are things in the Bible which are
calculated to create a prejudice against its teach
ings, even in well-disposed minds.

The question was argued out at the Shanghai
Conference, but it would be useless to follow the
discussion in detail. One argument may be worth
quoting for its typical significance. It was that
of Dr. Wright, delegate of the British and Foreign
Bible Society, and it amounted to this, that to
doubt the propriety of forcing the whole Bible on
the Chinese was to question the infallibility of
Wycliffe and Luther! — perhaps of the B. and
F. B. S. itself.

Committees are now discussing new versions,
and Bible Societies are in friendly rivalry respect
ing them, while perhaps the wiser scheme qf
restricting the circulation and keeping it under
greater supervision has not received adequate
consideration. The Roman Catholics in China, as
elsewhere, have shown great circumspection in the
issue of the Scriptures. They consider that
strong meat is not for babes, whether in the West
or East.

F 2

70 MISSIONAEIES IN CHINA.

stage further to suggest that the missionary, in his
turn, may also be obstructing. Will the corning
generation, while profiting by the arduous labours
of their predecessors, be able also to clear the
obstacles created for them by the generation
which is passing away ? That is a serious and
also a practical question.

May not the missionaries who are apt to trace
the hand of Providence in everything* recognise
something of it even in this — that the Christianisa-
tion of China is waiting for men of simple faith,
little concerned about themselves or their systems,
ready to honour the good wherever found, who
will leave the windmills called " strongholds of
Satan" severely alone, and unobtrusively seek
entrance to the hearts of living men — waiting in
short for the time when Christianity can be intro
duced to the great Chinese people in a form that
will be permanent in proportion as it is pure ?

* " China is the most diffioult missionary field in the world,
and therefore, to human calculation, the most hopeless.
This, I think, is the reason why God, when rekindling the
missionary spirit in His Church, allowed China to be so
long closed against missionary effort/' — Rev. Dr. Talmage,
at Shanghai Conference, 1877.

( 71 )

III. MODUS VIVENDI.

To recapitulate : —

I. — The missionaries are placed and maintained
in China by foreign force coercing the
Chinese Government.

II. — The Government of China, humiliated before
its subjects by the Treaties imposed on it, is
made further odious by protecting, under ex
ternal pressure, the foreign missions, against
the sense of the people.

III. — The propaganda has, over the whole country,
aroused the hatred of the people, and the
feeling shows no outward sign of abate
ment.

IV. — Proselytising success has been hindered by
these causes, as well as by the combative
form under which the foreign religion itself
has been presented.
What then is the outlook ?

For the Chinese Government : perpetual foreign
coercion.

For the Chinese nation : an incessant ferment
of angry passions, and a continuous education in
ferocity against Christianity.

For the foreign missionaries : pillage and mas-

72 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

sacre at intervals followed by pecuniary indemnifi
cation, an indefinite struggle with the hatred of a
whole nation ; compensated by a certain number
of genuine converts to their faith.

There may be fanatical and one-idea'd mission
aries who glory in the prospect of strife, and
count persecution the crowning testimony to their
fidelity. But the moderate men, constituting (it
may be hoped) the larger proportion, know better.
They make an honest distinction between martyr
dom and suffering for mere folly and recklessness.
And to such it must be a matter of sad reflec
tion, at the end of thirty years of active mis
sionary work in the interior of China, that the
people should be up in arms against them, and
that the prospects of propagandism are actually
worse now than they were at the beginning of
that period.

As all the parties concerned in this question
are sharing, in their different ways, in the misery
of the present situation, they might all, one would
think, be disposed to consider any means available
for the amelioration of the evils that press upon
them. As regards the two principal parties to
the conflict, the missionaries and the Chinese
officials and people, matters have been allowed to
go too far to hope for any voluntary reconcilia
tion between them. For were even the provoking
cause removed the cooling process in racial or
national animosities is slow, and subject to re-

MODUS VIVENDI. 73

actions. Nothing short of a miracle indeed could
be expected to undo in a century the bitterness
which has been fomenting for a generation. But
the provoking cause cannot be removed. The
missionaries cannot cease their operations, even
during a truce, and the irritation which their
mere presence excites must therefore be kept up,
with what fresh exacerbation of feeling the history
of the next twenty years will perhaps show.

Any hope of relieving the tension is more likely
to be found in the deliberations of the different
governments than either in modification of the
tactics of the propaganda or in change in the
sentiments of the people. And the foreign govern
ments have every inducement to seek some safer
modus vivendi than exists at present. Formerly,
indeed, some of them might be interested in mis
sionary troubles as affording them convenient
occasions to intervene for their own purposes ; but
the quasi-protectorate of Christians, which never
had a true legal basis, has in these later days been
virtually dissolved, and its political value lost, by
being shared in by all the Powers.

It may be assumed, therefore, that the Western
Powers would unanimously desire to see the
missionary question so disposed of as that it might
never again become a subject of even diplomatic
correspondence ; while to the Chinese Government
it would be worth millions of money to have this
dangerous rock taken out of the way.

74 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

As we have seen, the two aspects of Christianity
—not affecting its principles, but merely incidental
to its form of presentation — which render it
odious to the Chinese are : its foreign agents,
and its maintenance by foreign arms. The one
cannot be got rid of, unless indeed the Chinese
were to show the same interest in Christianity as
they once did in Buddhism, and send their own
missionaries to the West to bring in the new re
ligion. The other, being a creation of the foreign
treaties, may by treaty be undone.

Were the alliance of the Christian missions
with the military power of the West to be brought
to an end a chief root of bitterness would doubtless
be extracted from the Chinese mind, and a basis
might then be established for gradually improving
the relations between the people and the foreign
missions. And though at first sight this might
seem to imply an abandonment of teachers and
converts to the fury of their enemies, yet the
altered status would not be without its compensa
tions to both classes.

If the scheme of protection which is based on
existing treaties could be relied upon to be always
maintained in effective operation there would be
no need for seeking any other. Were any one or
more of the Western Powers consistent in their
armed support of missions, never relaxing their
pressure on the Chinese Government ; and were
the Chinese Government on its part possessed in

MODUS VIVENDI. 75

reality of its full nominal authority over all sec
tions of its people, it is conceivable that the literati
and provincial mobs might be first over-awed,
then subdued, and finally conciliated. For there
is nothing like utter and unmistakable defeat for

o

securing the good will of the Chinese. In all
cases where foreign force has been actually re
sorted to it has been perfectly successful in estab
lishing peace. The English raid on the turbulent
and piratical villages near Swatow about twenty-
five years ago, though scarcely justified on its
legal merits, not only gave a peace to the neigh
bourhood which has endured to this day, but it
has converted a population of brigands and mur
derers into orderly and prosperous citizens; and
in short has civilised a large district which, the
native authorities were never able properly to
control. The firmness shown in 1868 in dealing
with certain outrages on missionaries at Yangchow
by the British Consul, the late Sir W. Medhurst,
backed by that gallant old seaman, Sir Harry
Keppel, converted that from being the most
dangerous into one of the safest of mission
stations. There has been no exception to the
rule, that the strong hand has never failed to give
peace and disperse ill-feeling.

The drawback to that mode of procedure is its
spasmodic and uncertain operation. Once in
twenty years perhaps the Western Powers may
gird themselves up for a forcible remonstrance

76 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

with China, but this phase of the business is like a
storm which slowly gathers to a head, and either
bursts or passes, leaving the scene much as it was
before. How often in a century is it reasonable
to hope that England, France, and Germany, to
say nothing of Russia and the United States, could
be brought to take concerted action, as they have
done recently, in China ? A war in Europe, for
example, caused the worst outrage ever perpetrated
by the Chinese on foreigners, the Tientsin massacre
of 1870, to be passed over with scarcely any notice
by the Powers concerned. And what is to happen
in the long intervals of inaction, when the Western
governments forget the very existence of China ?
The removal of pressure which immediately follows
each demonstration affords, by the natural law of
reaction, fresh encouragement to the disaffected,
and from the day ai'ter one settlement of grievances
is concluded a new accumulation begins, if not in
the identical spots where reparation may have
been exacted, in a hundred other places. It will
be extremely interesting to observe in the next
few years the attitude of the populations in the
Yangtze valley who have been mulcted to pay the
cost of their recent riotings.

The action of Western governments is liable,
moreover, to be weakened by other considerations
besides the effects of mere apathy or pre-occupa-
tion. While vindicating or desiring to vindicate
the rights of their own nationals they are liable to

MODUS VIVENDI. 77

be visited by qualms of doubt as to the propriety
of their proceedings in particular cases as they
arise. They know their data to be incomplete,
and mixed and contradictory accounts reach them
as to the relations between the Chinese Imperial
Government arid its subordinate governments, and
between these latter and the literati and people.
It has been observed also on critical occasions
during the past quarter of a century that the
Western governments are accessible to the private
representations of persons speaking with authority
(though not always with responsibility) on Chinese
matters, while the reports of their own accredited
agents are comparatively neglected. It is not,
therefore, difficult to imagine how, before deciding
on forcible measures in any particular case, the
resolution of foreign governments may be in
danger of being paralysed by misgivings of
various kinds.

And there are unquestionably real difficulties
on the Chinese side also. It is easy to point to
treaties and demand their strict fulfilment ; easy
also to point out the inconsistency or duplicity of a
government whose public proclamations pass un
heeded in the country. Duplicity is the universal
resource of the weak in dealing with the strong.
But statesmen who feel the difficulties of good and
just government pressing on themselves must also
take account of the difficulties which are peculiar
to the governments with which they have dealings ;

78 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

and the history of foreign intercourse with China,
while it proves the efficacy of force, shows also
that force has been resorted to on occasions when
perhaps a better acquaintance with the true state
of the case might have obviated it.

In the recent crisis, if indeed it can be properly
considered as past, the difficulties of the central
Government were of no imaginary kind. Sudden
explosions at numerous points covering an im
mense tract of country called for great circumspec
tion ; careful sifting of reports from all sides was
necessary in order to get a practical appreciation
of the forces at work, and their direction. Rash
ill-informed action might have had dangerous
results. It was not necessarily the connection of
foreigners with the riots that caused the hesitation,
for the instinctive caution of the Chinese Govern
ment is shown quite as much in matters of purely
domestic concern. The governments, imperial and
provincial, are weak enough, or wise enough, to
court their proletariat, and it is not uncommon to
see the most powerful rulers cowed by popular
demonstrations, even of very moderate calibre.
There were special reasons for circumspection in
dealing with the outbreaks of May, for as has
since been shown, the focus of the insubordination
was the turbulent province of Hunan, and it so
happened that the troops and the officers at the
disposal of the Government on the Yangtze were
all drawn from that province. An insurrection of

MODUS VIVENDI. 79

the people, or mutiny of the troops, would have
served the ends of the Western governments as
little as those of the Chinese Government itself.

Hunan prides itself on being the cradle of
patriotism, and the impregnable citadel of conser
vatism in China. It has given to the State some
of its greatest men, and has supplied the army with
its best soldiers. The province has for these and
| other reasons, and by force of character, exercised
; almost a dominant influence in the counsels of the
empire. It has been a tradition that none but a
native of Hunan could be Viceroy of Nanking,
because the troops and crews of gunboats, &c.,
employed within the provinces under that govern
ment, being Hunanese, would not obey a stranger.
The rule was broken through this year, in the
appointment of a non-Hunanese to the acting vice-
royalty of the lower Yangtze, and the recent out
breaks are believed to be some of the consequences.
The attitude of the Hunanese towards foreigners
has always been one of the fiercest hostility. They
refuse to receive any foreign inventions even, and
have defied the Government itself to erect a tele
graph line through the province. Taking him all
round, probably the greatest statesman China has
produced in this century was Tseng Kwo-fan, the
father of the late Marquis Tseng, of an old Hunan
family. It will illustrate at once the truculent
bearing of the Hunanese towards foreigners, and
the supremacy of the populace in China, to relate

80 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

what happened to that most popular of all the
high officials of his day or since. Tseng Kwo-
fan, then Yiceroy of Chihli, was ordered by the
Imperial Government to proceed to Tientsin — his
own provincial capital being Pao-ting-Fu, four
days' journey into the interior — to investigate the
causes of the Tientsin massacre of 21st June, 1870.
He reported, awarded certain reparation, found a
number of people guilty of murder, and beheaded
them. Foreigners did not think the settlement
altogether adequate, and in particular they were
convinced that the true ringleaders were let off
because they wTere influential, while certain indi
viduals of no reputation were delivered in their
stead for execution. The Hunanese took a dif
ferent view, and to mark their contempt for their
great fellow-provincial's truckling to foreigners,
they struck his name off the roll of the Hunan
Club in Peking, defaced his tablet there, and did
him further dishonour. The Yiceroy felt all this
acutely, but though he spared neither money nor
other conciliatory appliances it was only after a
length of time and with the greatest difficulty that
he succeeded in wiping out the outward signs of
his disgrace. It may be further mentioned in this
connection that the late Marquis Tseng himself,
when he returned from Europe, dared not visit his
ancestral home because he was held by his country
men to have been defiled by his residence among
foreigners, and was apprehensive of a rough recep-

MODUS VIVENDI. 81

Ition in his native province. The populace did
actually burn down his house to stigmatise his
defection from the anti-foreign traditions of Hunan.
Other provinces are only in a less degree, and less
aggressively, anti-foreign than Hunan itself. The
sacred province, however, considers it has special
grounds for its pre-eminence in anti-foreign feeling
in the capture and exile of the Canton Yiceroy,
Yeh, by the English in 1858, he being a distin
guished native of Hunan. But was it not rather
the foreign hatred which he had imbibed there
with his mother's milk that led Yeh into the
course of conduct which precipitated his fall ?

These defiant populations might be reduced to
discipline, and even tamed into amiability, by a
moderate use of force, as was the no less unruly
population of Canton under the firm hand of Sir
Harry Parkes, who governed that city after its
capture by foreign troops in 1858. But the
decisive stroke and the firm hand are just what
are usually wanting to the Chinese Government,
whose fixed policy in all matters concerning the
people is a temporising one. Nothing probably
would have been more convenient to the Grovern-
ment during the recent crisis than that some
foreign power should have taken the law into its
own hands, quelled the riots and punished the
rioters. A raid on Hunan at the present moment
would be a god-send to the poor Yiceroy, whose
authority has been openly trampled on. He could

G

82 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

then turn to his people and say : " This is what
comes of your turbulence, and now I shall have to
come arid take the foreign devils off your back,"
whereby great kudos would have come to him,
whereas now he has to pull his own chestnuts off
the hob by Imperial command.

It is, perhaps, an open question whether, con
sidering the timid and dilatory disposition of the
Chinese Government, and the way the evil-disposed
people have of taking advantage of it, the hands
of the Government are not strengthened by the
pressure put upon them by foreigners to compel
them to keep order in their own country. As
a hypothetical parallel let us once more recall
the case of the Government of India in 1856—7.
Supposing that the excitement of the population
of Hindostan had been directed not against the
Government, but against some third party which
the Government was bound by treaty to protect, is
it not conceivable that, spurred by the demands
of such third party, or even by a sheer sense of
obligation, Lord Canning might have brushed aside
the Calcutta Secretaries, the Hallidays, Beadons,
and all the obfuscated old colonels, and adopted
such drastic measures as would have stamped out
the conflagration in its earlier stages, and so saved
the mutiny ? As often as not the luckiest things
men or nations do are the things that are forced
upon them. Such a hypothesis, far fetched as
applied to British India, has a true bearing on

MODUS VIVENDI. 83

the circumstances of China, for side by side with
the aversion to foreigners there is manifestly a
spirit of active disaffection towards the Govern
ment itself, among the disbanded soldiery, dis
appointed scholars, and the needy classes gene
rally ; and both animosities are served by the
same outbreaks. By the disabling of one limb
of the coalition through the timely coercion of
foreign powers, the combined movement would
be crippled. This is a view of the matter, how
ever, which has only a speculative interest, as no
such considerately calculated action will ever be
taken.

It is generally easy after the event to discern
what ought to or might have been done, but in
the obscurity of a crisis errors are only too likely
to be made in every country ; and where it is such
a complex case as that of one or more Powers
employing irresistible force to compel another to
coerce its own people, with a very imperfect com
prehension of the conditions of the problem, the
disposition to evade or postpone action will be on
all ordinary occasions overpowering ; and thus the
protection due to the foreign residents * in China
is always liable to be rendered nugatory in the
very attempt to translate it into practice.

..The protection of missionaries in China, against
the national will, by the strong arm, whether of

* The Chinese animosity is not confined to missionaries,
although they, as pioneers, chiefly bear the brunt of it.

G 2

84 MISSION AEIES IN CHINA.

foreign powers or of the native Government, being
thus shown to be at the best uncertain and in
adequate, the question naturally arises whether
the status of the missions admits of such modifi
cations as would make it possible for the Govern
ment to do justice to them without encountering
the secret opposition of its own people.

From consideration of the difficulty, so often
proved, of following a consistent and dignified
line of policy, under existing circumstances, we
opine that the Western Powers would be inclined
to welcome any solution of this perennial mis
sionary question which would relieve them from
the responsibility of protecting the missionaries in
China, a duty which they can only fulfil in a
capricious and defective manner. Arid if the right
which has been exercised is not one clearly laid
down by any treaty provision it would be the
more easy to modify existing relations by some
new definition. In exchange for the withdrawal
of the heavy hand of the Western Powers China
would no doubt be willing to grant substantial
concessions, extending even to the taking of Chris
tianity under the shelter of the Imperial wing;
as is virtually done with the other two foreign
religions ; and to the offering of satisfactory
guarantees for the safety of the missionaries as
well as of their native followers. Dr. Edkins
indeed considers (see paper read at the last
Shanghai Conference) that Christianity is already

MODUS VIVENDI. 85

openly acknowledged by the State, and is nomi
nally one of the established religions. Nor could
any Edict of Nantes be more satisfactory as a
charter of toleration than the Memorial to the
Throne of the Tsung-li Yamen published in the
Peking Gazette of 26th July, 1891, and the Imperial
Rescript on that Memorial (see Appendix II.).
The question then recurs, with accumulating
urgency, what is it that hinders the theoretical
from becoming practical ?

This enquiry always brings us back to the
causes of the popular ill-will, and how far these
causes are removable ; for if such as are removable
were actually removed there would be, as observed
already, a way opened for discussing the deeper
elements of the question. It might be possible,
for example, by some general agreement among
the missionaries, so to regulate such transactions
as the acquisition of property, the building of
churches in the interior, and other matters of a
sumptuary nature as that some approach to con
ciliation might be made. These questions could
be treated without touching any of those purely
religious issues regarding which the missionaries
are justifiably tenacious. And were these outside
matters fairly removed from the arena of contro
versy an approach might be made to those more
delicate questions, such as the conduct of schools,
hospitals, &c., which touch both sides so tenderly.
So long as things go on as at present suspicion

86 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

will never be allayed as to the uses to which
foreigners put such institutions.

An essential condition of a good working under
standing between missionaries and the Chinese
people would be the placing of the whole mis
sionary establishments under official .supervision.
Personal visitation would have to be made obliga
tory on the local magistrates as part of their official
routine, and they would be called upon to make
regular reports to the chief authorities of their
respective provinces. In this manner the utmost
publicity would be given to missionary operations ;
no one would need to ask who are these people,
and what do they do ? and the familiar " half
brick " which is kept ready to throw at strangers
might gradually fall out of use. The Christian
religion might thus obtain a real status in the
country as well as enjoy the official recognition
of the Government. Naturally, all inflammatory
placards and calumnious brochures would have to
be rigorously suppressed (as they have occasionally
been before) and a general principle of give-and-
take be introduced which would spread like oil
over the angry waves.

A serious proposal to place foreign missionaries
on a smooth working basis was made twenty years
ago, and by the Chinese Government itself — almost
the only example of true initiative with which it
can be credited. The Tientsin massacre of June,
1870, and the disagreeable consequences which

MODUS VIVENDI. 87

followed, impressed the Emperor's Ministers with
the necessity of doing something to prevent future
occurrences of the same kind ; and the most liberal,
fair, and open-minded Minister that has ever been
in the Foreign Board, "Wenseang, who was then in
power, drew up for the consideration of the foreign
governments the famous " Missionary Circular " of
1871.* It consisted of an elaborate and mode
rately expressed review of the whole position,
followed by eight rules for the government of
missionary relations with the people and officials
in the provinces. The rules referred to (1) the
management of orphanages, which it was pro
posed either to close altogether, or to place under
severe restrictions ; (2) the mixed attendance of
women and men at public worship which, being
contrary to Chinese propriety, scandalised the
people ; (3) the legal status of missionaries in the
interior and the evil consequences of the imperia
in imperio wtdch had resulted through the mis
sionaries separating themselves, and even their
native converts, from the jurisdiction of the local
authorities; (4) the restriction of proceedings in
the case of riots to the persons actively partici
pating in the same ; (5) the clear definitions of
passports so that missionaries should not be able to
move about at will leaving no trace ; (6) the need
of strict examination into the character and ante
cedents of converts ; (7) the etiquette to be observed
* Blue Book, " China No. 3, 1871. '

88 MISSIONAKIES IN CHINA.

by missionaries in intercourse with officials, the
missionaries not to arrogate official style ; and (8)
the reclamation of alleged sites of ancient churches
to be stopped, great injustice having been done to
Chinese through being obliged to surrender pro
perties which they had honestly bought and paid for.

All these suggested rules were illustrated by
specific instances of the evils resulting from the
absence of such rules, and the whole document was
based on the earnest desire of the Government that
the foreign and native Christians should live in
friendship with their Chinese neighbours.

The communication was not enthusiastically
received by any of the foreign governments,
although the good intentions of the Chinese
Government were frankly acknowledged ; and
several of the charges made, in all good faith,
against the missionaries were resented as untrue.
The Tsungli Yamen no doubt failed to completely
grasp the situation, and indeed the Ministers ex
pressly stated that their circular only covered a
small part of the ground, but at the same time, as the
one honest attempt yet made to arrive at a modus
vivendi it deserves honourable mention on the
present occasion.

Fresh proposals in somewhat the same sense
have been made by the Chinese Government
during the recent discussions respecting redress
for the outrages on the Yangtze in 1891; but
the foreign diplomatic representatives naturally

MODUS VIVENDI. 89

refused to entertain any suggestions of the sort
until complete satisfaction had been given for
these outrages.

The time may yet come, however, for consider
ing some scheme of reconciliation between the
opposing parties. And as the Circular of 1871
was addressed primarily to the missionaries of the
Church of Rome — as the Governments of Great
Britain and the United States were prompt to
discover — so any hope of even a partial trial of a
new agreement must still rest mainly on the
Roman Catholic missions. They possess a soli
darity which Protestant missions lack ; they are
under a strict regime ; they have superiors whom
they must obey and who can speak for them ; and
above all they possess in the present head of their
Church the most far-sighted, the most liberal, and
the most Christian- spirited Pontiff that has ever
sat in the chair of St. Peter ; who has shown him
self at once tender and courageous ; and is deeply
solicitous for the welfare of the Church, expressly
including in that definition Christians of every
sect throughout the world.

Nor is the feeling of a coming change in the
status of the missions altogether new to the
Catholic fathers. The subject has in fact been
a good deal discussed during the last few years,
since the imperfect protectorate claimed by France
was seen to be crumbling into dust. One mis
sionary at least has expressed himself in no

90 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

ambiguous terms on this point (see Appendix I.).
The rapprochement between the Vatican and the
Imperial court in 1886 on the occasion of the
expropriation of the P'ei-tang Cathedral in Peking,
opened the way to ulterior negotiations, and
showed that there was no insuperable .obstacle on
either side to a purely ecclesiastical representation
of the Catholic missions in Peking taking the
place of a halting and half-hearted political one.
Whether the views then exchanged have gathered
consistency during the subsequent interval of in
cubation we are not aware, but the incidents of
the present year have no doubt served to bring
the question to the recollection of those interested.

From the point of view of living on neigh
bourly terms with the natives also the Catholic
missions possess some clear advantages over their
Protestant rivals. For one thing they are no
longer such eager proselytisers as they were, but
in several provinces at least, live in settled com
munities of Christians, where having planted
churches, many of them already venerable, they
now water, and watch for the increase.

In the matter of landowning, on the other
hand, they are probably greater offenders than
the Protestants. The Catholic fathers have not
only an eye to the best sites — witness the Cathe
drals at Canton and Pekin, the " Hills " near
Shanghai and many other places — but they enter
moreover into investments in real estate as a

MODUS VIVENDI. 91

means of providing revenue — chiefly, however, at
the Treaty ports. Their procureurs are excellent
managers, and among their tenantry they are the
most popular of landlords. So by their admirable
economies they are able to supplement the sub
sidies of their missions, and whereas the Protestant
missions draw their whole supplies from their
mother countries the Catholics extract a good pro
portion of theirs from the soil on which they
labour. It might be that some regulation could
be applied to this branch of husbandry should it
be anywhere found to offend the prejudices of tne
people.

Were the Protestant missions an organised body
like the Romanists, the problem of a general re
conciliation would lose some of its most intractable
characters. For they could then speak and be
spoken to, which is not possible under actual
conditions. Each one of their thousand is as good
as another, and, in his own eyes, perhaps better ;
and the societies themselves retain so much of
the unregenerate man as to nourish a very human
jealousy of each other. Signs are, however,
beginning to be observed of both individuals and
societies becoming alive to the serious evils of the
schismatical spirit ; the periodical conferences at
Shanghai seem to be the heralds of a closer com
rnunion, and in Japan the necessities of the
position have prompted a wider federation among
sects and societies than has ever yet been at-

92 MISSIONARIES IN CHINA.

tempted in China. The sense of disorganisa
tion has indeed pressed so strongly on some of
the more progressive missionaries that, throw
ing over the traditions of their fathers, they
have declared openly for Episcopacy as the
true and scriptural form of Church government.
So effective a teacher is experience, when
illuminated by common-sense and fortified by
moral courage, that Mr. Gilbert Reid, born arid
bred Presbyterian, has been able to prove to his
own satisfaction that Episcopacy is the very con
stitution which, the missionary body in China
requires. The need of a recognised head of the
various Protestant missions has been often felt, and
on one occasion at least Her Majesty's Govern
ment was obliged to attempt communication with
them through the Bishop of Hongkong. It is
of course a far cry from the tentative academical
discussion of such advanced views to their actual
adoption in practice ; and it is at least premature
to consider seriously the episcopalisation of the
China missionaries, still more so their being ever
marshalled under one Pope. But the immense
waste of power, as well as the unregulated diver
sity of the doctrines taught, which is caused by the
present system of promiscuous individualism, must
continue to weigh upon the minds of great num
bers of the missionaries. And as there are many
earnest hearts and able heads in the camp, who
knows but that, under the irresistible leading of

MODUS VIVENDI. 93

events, they may make discoveries as to the perma
nent interest of Christ's Church in China (especially
when in constant proximity to conflagration) which
will make even the cripples among them take up
their beds and walk ?

Whatever may be the future order, however,
the present state of things is equally intolerable
to all the parties concerned, and is fraught with
far-reaching disaster.

September, 1891.

APPENDIX I.

Eev. L. E. Lou vet, of the Missions Etrangeres, wrote
in Les Missions Catholiques, 26th June, 1891 : *

" In this nineteenth century great efforts are being made
for the conversion of China. From five the number of
missionaries has increased to thirty — that of Christians
has risen to more than half a million. Are we at last
then to see the sunlight of Gospel truth shine on this
great empire ? Alas ! after ninety years of striving, the
situation from a religious point of view appears to be
more involved than ever.

" It is of no use to hide the fact : China obstinately
rejects Christianity. The haughty men of letters are
more rancorous than ever ; every year incendiary placards
call the people to the extermination of the foreign devils ;
and the day is approaching when this fine Church of
China, that has cost so much trouble to the Catholic
Apostolate, will be utterly destroyed, in the blood of her
apostles and her children.

" Whence conies this obstinate determination to reject
Christianity ? It is not religious fanaticism, for no people
are so far gone as the Chinese in scepticism and indiffer
ence. One may be a disciple of Confucius or of Lao-tze,
Mussulman or Buddhist, the Chinese Government does
not regard it. It is only against the Christian religion it
seeks to defend itself. It sees all Europe following on the
heels of the Apostles of Christ, Europe with her ideas,
her civilisation, and with that it will have absolutely

* This was, of course, written long before the outbreaks of 1891.

APPENDIX. 95

nothing to do, being, rightly or wrongly, satisfied with the
ways of its fathers.

" The question, therefore, has much more of a political
than a religious character, or rather it is almost entirely
political. On the day when intelligent China shall be
persuaded that it is possible to be Chinese and Christian
at the same time — above all, on the day when she shall
see a native ecclesiastic at the head of the Church in
China, Christianity will obtain liberty in this great
empire of 400 million souls, whose conversion will carry
with it that of the Far East.

" The efforts of the missionaries should therefore be
directed towards separating their cause entirely from all
political interests. From this point of view I cannot for
my own part but deplore the intervention of European
governments. Nothing could in itself indeed be more
legitimate, but at the same time nothing could be more
dangerous or more likely to arouse the national pride and
the hatred of the intellectual and learned classes. In
truth, even from the special point of view of the safety
of the missionaries, what have we gained by the provisions
of the treaties ? During the first forty years of the
present century three missionaries only were put to death
for the faith, after judicial sentence, viz., the Ven.
Dufresse, Vicar-Apostolic of Sechuan, in 1814 ; the Ven.
Clet and the Blessed Perboyre, Lazarists, in Hupei, in
1820 and 1840. Since the Treaties of 1844 and 1860 not
a single death sentence has been judically pronounced,
it is true, but more than twenty missionaries have fallen
by the hands of assassins hired by the mandarins. These
were : in 1856, the Ven. Chapdelaine; in 1862, the Ven.
Neel ; in 1865, 1869, 1873, MM. Mabileau, Kigaud, and
Hue, in. Sechuan ; in 1874, M. Baptifau in Yunnan ; in
1885, M. Terasse in Yunnan. Did the treaties prevent
the horrible Tientsin massacre in June, 1870, the murder
of our Consul, of all the French residents, of two

96 APPENDIX.

Lazarists, and nine Sisters of Charity ? Nearly every
year Christian communities are destroyed, churches
sacked, missionaries killed or maimed, Christians put
to death. And when France protests against such out
rages she is answered by an insolent memorandum (1871)
filled with calumnies against the missionaries and their
works; and the chief of the embassy sent to Paris to
excuse the massacres of Tientsin is the very man who
directed them, and whose hands are still stained with the
blood of our countrymen !

"Of course I give full credit to the zeal of our Consuls
and Ministers. In almost every case they have given us
hearty and loyal support, even those who, not possessing
the joy of being Christians themselves, appeared unpre
pared by their antecedents to defend in China the religion
they had persecuted at home. Nearly always sectarian
hatred has been forgotten in national honour, and he who
expelled the Jesuits from France proclaimed himself
their friend and protector in Peking.

" It is not therefore the zeal of our diplomatic agents
that I find wanting. I am only concerned to show their
impotence.

"Kightly or wrongly, China will not have European
civilisation which, in combination with Christianity, is to
them simply the invasion of Europe.

" Let us then distinctly separate the religious from the
political question.

"Needless to add that this is a strictly individual
opinion, for I have no authority to speak for the missions,
and I am well aware that among the missionaries opinion
on this subject is divided. But being thoroughly con
vinced in my own mind I thought I might, without
inconvenience, avail myself of the liberty granted by the
Church to every one to publish and defend, in modera
tion, any honest conviction."

APPENDIX II.

MEMORIAL TO THE THRONE BY THE TSUNG-LI YAMEN

RESPECTING THE RECENT OUTRAGES ON THE

YANGTZE, 26TH JULY, 1891.

The Prince and Ministers of the Tsung-li Yamen re
verently submit a Memorial to the Throne in which, with
the view of ensuring the tranquility of the country and
the prevention of future trouble, they humbly beg that
His Majesty may be pleased to issue stringent instructions
to the Viceroys and Governors of the various provinces
directing them to take prompt measures for dealing with
the missionary cases which have been occurring with such
persistent frequency.

On learning, during the fourth moon of the present
year, that the missionary establishments at Wuhu had
been demolished, the Yamen telegraphed at once to the
Superintendent of Trade for the South asking him to send
a gunboat to maintain order and afford protection, and
desiring him to depute an officer to investigate the cir
cumstances on the spot. Anonymous placards having
been posted and false rumours circulated simultaneously
at Anch'ingfu, Shanghai, and other places, the Superin
tendent was likewise requested to direct all his sub
ordinates to redouble their precautions. Later on the
Southern Superintendent of Trade and the Governor of
Anhui reported by telegraph that the Wuhu affair had its
origin in false rumours that were spread about female mis
sionary doctors kidnapping young children. The popular
suspicion could not be allayed until a crowd collected
and a riot took place which resulted in the missionary

H

98 APPENDIX.

premises being burnt down by the mob. Two of the
ringleaders were subsequently arrested and summarily
decapitated by way of warning. The district had resumed
its normal peaceful condition. After a very short interval,
however, the burning of the missionary establishment at
Tanyang took place, and this was followed by the destruc
tion of similar premises at Wusiieh, in Hupeh, the
particulars of which have not yet been fully ascertained,
although it is reported that two foreigners were murdered.
In addition to the above there have been serious riots at
Nanking and Kiukiang, but fortunately the Imperial
troops had taken effectual precautions and immediately
suppressed the disturbance.

All this continual trouble has had a very disquieting
effect amongst both Chinese and foreigners. In investi
gating the cause of the present state of things, it will be
found that it arises from the great number of disbanded
soldiers and of the criminal classes connected with secret
societies who are to be found everywhere in the provinces
bordering upon the Yangtze. The movement is one with
which the well-disposed portion of the population has
nothing to do, and its object is to influence the minds of
the people by the dissemination of placards and to make
use of the opportunity to create certain trouble.

The religion of the West has for its object the inculca
tion of virtue, and in Western countries it is everywhere
practised. Its origin dates a long time past, and on the
establishment of commercial intercourse between China
and Foreign Powers, a clause was inserted in the Treaties
to the effect that "persons professing or teaching the
Christian religion should enjoy full protection of their
persons and property and be allowed free exercise of their
religion." The hospitals and orphanages maintained by
the missionaries all evince a spirit of benevolent enterprise.
Of late years when distress has befallen any portion of
the Empire, missionaries and others have never failed to

APPENDIX. 99

eorne forward to assist the sufferers by subscribing money
and distributing relief. For their cheerful readiness to
do good and the pleasure they take in works of charity
they assuredly deserve high commendation. Even grant
ing that amongst the converts there are bad as well as
good people, still they are all equally Chinese subjects,
amenable to the jurisdiction of their own authorities, and
the missionary cannot claim the right of interfering in any
disputes or lawsuits that may arise. There is no reason,
therefore, why the people and the converts should not
live together in peace and harmony. Yet mischief-makers
are continually fabricating baseless stories which they
industriously propagate until the suspicions of the people
are aroused, and then lawless villains seize the opportunity
to create trouble with a view to obtaining plunder. If
immediate steps are not taken to prevent outbreaks of
this kind, both the Chinese and the foreign mercantile
community will, it is to be feared, have no assurance of
safety in the future, and the very important interests
involved cannot fail to be seriously prejudiced.

The Yamen would therefore pray that the Manchu
General-in-Chief, the Viceroy, and Governors of all the
provinces may be directed by Imperial edict to issue pro
clamations clearly expounding to the people that they
must on no account lend a ready ear to such false reports
and wantonly cause trouble. People who issue anonymous
placards and invent stories to inflame the feelings of the
people should, it is submitted, be at once arrested and
severely punished. It is the duty of the local authorities
to afford protection at all times to the persons and property
of foreign merchants and foreign missionaries, and no re
laxation in this respect should be permitted. Should the
precautionary measures be lacking in stringency or the
protection afforded prove inadequate to avert disturbance,
the local authorities should be denounced in accordance
with the facts of the case.

II 2

100 APPENDIX.

With regard to the various riots which form the subject
of this memorial, and excluding the Wuhu case, the ring
leaders in which have already suffered the full penalty of
the law, it is essential that the Viceroys of the Two Kiang
and of Hu Kuang, and the Governors of Kiangsu, Anhui,
and Hupeh should receive prompt instructions to effect
the arrest of the principal criminals, and have them
severely punished as a warning for the future. The
Manchu Generals-in-Chief, Viceroys, and Governors
should be directed to take steps for settling all outstanding
cases without delay, and should not allow their subordinates
to shrink from the difficulty of the task and interpose
delays.

The Yamen reverently submit this memorial to the
Sacred Glance and humbly solicit His Majesty's commands
respecting the suggestions they have ventured to offer.

( 101 )

APPENDIX III.

How AN ANTI-CHEISTIAN RIOT is ORGANISED.
(Described by a Chinese Scholar.)

[Extract from an article in North China Daily News,
September 16th, signed " F."J

In connection with this testimony of a foreigner to the
origin of an anti-missionary riot, I wish now to call special
attention to the account of a similar riot, or rather of a
very much worse one, given in the Chinese Blue Books
by a Chinaman from a Chinese standpoint. The writer
himself was behind the scenes and tells us just how every
thing was managed, who were the responsible persons
and what part each of them played in the game. This
account will be found in the chapter on " The expulsion
of Christianity from Kiangsi and Hunan," mentioned in
my last paper. It appears to be extracted from the
* Chinese and Foreign Kecord.' That book is, I believe,
published anonymously, but the author speaks of himself
as an actor in some of the scenes he relates, and from
what he says of the part he played, he must have been
some sort of responsible official in Kiangsi.

He tells us that in 1862 a French priest having asked
for a passport to enable him to travel, went to Hunan.
The Eoman Catholics of Changsha and Hsiangtan hearing
that he was coming, were delighted, but the gentry when
they heard of it were disgusted. They issued placards
and held a consultation in regard to expelling the Roman
Catholics. [The placards stated that] if anyone let houses
to the priests the houses were to be burnt ; if anyone

102 APPENDIX.

entered the sect, his name was to be struck off the register
of his clan and his children were to be forbidden for ever
to enter the examinations. All this was to be done prin
cipally because these priests use the name of preaching
to cover their designs of immorality and to establish
orphanages for disgraceful purposes, which things the
gentry graphically and fully described, sending the de
scription on to Kiangsi. When Lo Ngan-t'ang, a foreign
priest, came with his passport to the provincial capital of
Nanchang, in Kiangsi, he was detained, and proceeded no
further. The examinations were about to be held, and
the leading gentry of Nanchang met together in full force
iu the Yu-chang college. There were present Hia T'ing-
kti, an official in the Hanlin Yuan who was on furlough,
Liu Yii-sin, an ex-provincial judge of the province of
Kansu, and others. They took the Hunan placard and,
raising a subscription, got a printer within 24 hours to
print off some tens of thousands of copies, and with them
they covered all the walls in the principal thoroughfares
of the city, both within and without. When the French
man heard of it he went to see the mandarins. It
happened to be immediately after the accession of the
Emperor T'ung Chi [and some changes were taking place
amongst the high officials]. The new Governor Shen
Pao-cheng had not yet arrived. The Treasurer of the
province, Li Pu-t'ang, who had just been promoted to this
office and who had charge of the Governor's seals, refused
to see the Frenchman, on the ground that the Governor
himself would arrive in five days. When Shen Pao-cheng
came the priest went to him with his complaint, but he
would not see him. Then he tried to pay the Governor a
visit of ceremony, but with no better success, whereat he
was disappointed. It being the time of the examinations
the Literary Chancellor was also in Nanchang. On the
17th day of the second month I [i. e. the writer of this
narrative] was examining the essays of the candidates in

APPENDIX. 103

the prefect's yamen when about midday the prefect Wang
Hia-hien and a servant of the district Magistrate came
in hastily to tell me that placards had been posted up
everywhere saying that next day at noon the Koman
Catholic church would be wrecked, and they said if the
people were stirred up there would be a riot which would
cause inconvenience not only to the responsible local
mandarins, but to the minor officials also. I said " What
is to be done ? " They both replied, " Hia Ting-ku the
Hanlin can give what orders he likes in the college, and
although he may not have planned (the riot) he can stop
it." I replied " He has been drinking all day and now his
door is shut and he will not see visi tors, but my son knows
a good many of his servants, and I will tell him to go and
see how things are." So I went back to my lodging and
told my son to go at once on horseback to the place,
but just as he was starting a messenger came from the
French priest Lo, and another named Fang, saying that
the orphanage had been looted. His master, he said, was
safe and had gone away through the Fucheu gate of the
city, but the girls from the orphanage were missing, and
it looked as if the trouble might extend to the church
outside the city, and he wished to know if we would pro
tect him. I at once went with the district magistrate
Chang to the yamen of the prefect where there were two
other district magistrates. We then went together to
the Kwai-tsz-hang (the street in Nanchang where the
church and orphanage of the mission were situated). In
addition to destroying the orphanage the mob had also
torn down some tens of houses in which the converts lived.
It was already getting dark and the city gate had been
shut, so we went back to inform the Governor of what
had happened. When he heard it he sighed and said,
" These foreigners have troubled me for a long time, and
now quite unexpectedly our people have taken the matter
in hand and paid them out. Although we shall be blamed

104 APPENDIX.

for mismanaging things, I will take the responsibility upon
myself. Don't talk of searching for the offenders and
apprehending them. I will report the facts (to Peking)
and ask that I may be severely dealt with, and no enquiries
will be made about the doings of the local mandarins and
of their assistants." On the 18th of the month, i.e. next
day, the old Koman Catholic church outside the city was
destroyed, and a boat in which the missionaries were, was
destroyed also — both by night. The French priests Lo
and Fang got away in different directions. The former
went to Fucheu and found shelter on the road at the house
of a convert named Ch'en. . . . The people sought for him
and coul'd not find him, but they destroyed several houses
belonging to the Ch'en family.

The sequel to this disgraceful story, itself even yet more
disgraceful, must be told in connection with the machina
tions of the literati to discredit the orphanage work of the
missionaries and to cause even the very name of orphanage
to excite the fury of the people, as a red rag flourished
about before the eyes of a bull is said to infuriate to mad
ness a beast that, if left alone, would be perfectly harmless.
By the foregoing passage, translated from the Blue Books
Supplement, two things are made perfectly clear : firstly,
that both in Hunan and also in Kiangsi, it was not the
common people, but the '* educated " classes who first
manifested the anti-foreign feeling and desired to expel
the foreigner with violence. What we call " the common
people " the Chinese rulers always call " the stupid people."
Now these " stupid people " if left alone are generally
stupid enough to leave the foreigner alone, but when once
their superiors take them in hand and see how much they
can teach them in a short time about foreign men and
foreign things, there seems to be no limit to their powers
of receptivity. They can believe anything, however
absurd and however vile, and when worked up to a white
heat by means of placards and handbills, and assured of

APPENDIX. 105

plunder, with immunity from all danger of being punished
for stealing, they are ready for anything. Secondly, it is
clear that the most guilty persons in the transactions con
nected with the expulsion of Christians from Kiangsi in
1862, were not even the irresponsible " gentry," but the
officials themselves.

( 106 )

APPENDIX IV.

Abstract of Mission Statistics in China Proper :

Catholics : 530 Foreign Missionaries.

„ 525,000 Native Christians.

Protestants : 589 Men.

391 Wives.
316 Single Women.

1,296 Foreign Missionaries.
37,287 Native Christians.

CATHOLIC MISSIONS AND STATISTICS.

The following table shows the names and nationalities
of Catholic missions in China and its dependencies, the
number of native Christians and foreign missionaries.
From this table, compiled from a work published at Rome
by the Congregation de Propaganda Fide in 1887, it will
be seen that of the eighteen provinces of China, Mongolia,
Manchuria, Tibet, and Corea, thirteen are in the hands
of French missions, four in those of Italians, two in those
of Belgians, one in those of a Spanish mission, while one
province, Hunan, is divided between an Italian and a
Spanish mission, and one, Shantung, between an Italian
and a German one.

The Catholic missions working in China are : Spanish
Dominicans and Austin Friars (Augustiniani) ; Italian
Franciscans (Franciscales and Franciscales Eeformati)
and the Foreign Missions at Milan; German, from the
College at Steyl ; Belgian, the Congregation Immaculati
Cordis Beatre Virginis Maria? at Scheutveld ; French, the

APPENDIX.

107

Jesuits, the Lazarists (Congregation Missionis), the Foreign
Missions of Paris (Seminaire des Missions Etrangeres).

According to the nationality of the missions there
would be 82 Italian, 28 Spanish, 14 German, 29 Belgian,
and 400 French missionaries, but it is well known that
between these latter there are a good many priests be
longing to other nationalities than the French one.

Province or Locality.

Mission.

Nationality.

No. of Native
Christians,
Catechumens
excepted.

No. of
Foreign'
Mission
aries.

Amoy (Formoso)

Dominicans

Spanish

3,685

9

Shansi

Franciscans

Italian

14,980

7

/North

55 ...

?j

16,016

12

Shantung |gou^n ^

College at Steyl

German

823

14

Shensi

Franciscans

Italian

21,300

15

Fukien

Dominicans

Spanish

32,400

15

p—GES:: ::

Foreign Missions of Milan

Italian

55

1,235
5,000

3

6

Hong-kong

55 55

55

6,800

7

?-"•{£*:: ::

Austin Friars
Franciscans

Spanish
Italian

100
5,000

4
4

North-west ..

55

6,192

8

Hupei East

„ . . . • • .

55

13,005

14

South-west ..

55

4,109

6

Kansu

Congregation Imin. Cordis

B. M. V. of Scheutveld

Belgian

1,500

5

Kiangnan

Jesuits

French

103,815

83

(North

Lazarists

>?

3,211

5

Kiangsi<East ..

55

55

10,861

10

| South

3 753

3

Kuangsi

Foreign Missions of Paris

55

1,013

11

Kuangtung

28,668

39

Kueicliow

16,892

26

(North-east

38,800

24

Sechuan<East ..

55

26,079

31

(South

18,000

23

Chekiang

Lazarists

7,480

9

North .. ..

n

32,761

19

Chibli South-east ..

Jesuits

34,530

37

South-west . .

Lazarists

26,244

10

Yunnan .'.

Foreign Missions of Paris

11,207

12

Manchuria

55

12,530

26

iEast.. ..

Congregation Imm. Cordis

Middle ..

B. M. V. of Scheutveld

Belgian

55

5,500
9,000

7
14

South-west

55 55

3,000

3

Tibet..

Foreign Missions of Paris

French

991

13

Corea

55 5)

»5

13,642

10

539,215

553

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