ADDRESS OF REV. JAMES BRAND, D.D.
Mr. President: At one of the former meetings of this Association, one speaker, in pleading for China, proposed that the audience go with him, in imagination, to the Chinese quarter in San Francisco, in order that from a personal inspection of the thrift, economy and order manifested there he might get an argument for Christian sympathy and support in Chinese education. They did so and the argument was good. At the same meeting, another speaker, pleading the same cause, proposed to the audience to go with him to a more sacred place than the Chinese quarter, namely, the battle-fields of the war, that he might gather from the memory and suggestions of those hallowed places an argument for the maintenance of the national and Christian principles contended for in that war, and hence an argument for the Christian treatment of the Chinese.
Now, in getting the purchase for another argument for the same unhappy people, I propose that you go for a few moments with me to a more sacred place still than either the Chinese quarter or the battle-fields of the war. I mean that upper room where, eighteen centuries ago, occurred that last, long interview between Christ and his disciples, before the crucifixion. Let us reverently step in there and stand behind that little circle of the eleven. Let us catch the spirit and the suggestions of that tender and holy scene. The Divine One is speaking his last words to those men who are soon to go forth and undertake the conversion of the world. What is his most weighty thought? It is that which was expressed in his closing prayer: “As thou hast sent me into the world even so have I sent them into the world;” that is, the mission of Christian men in the world was to be the same as His own. It was to be a mission of vicarious suffering and service for all the world. Men were dying in their sins in all countries. The nations were sitting in the shadow of death. Generations were tramping on, each in the track of the others, to hopeless doom. They did not know God’s redeeming love. It is this spectacle of humanity rushing on to a hopeless eternity, that puts that solemn and intense tone into the Saviour’s voice as He talks and prays. They were to be men like Christ. They were to go into all the world, bearing the love of God.
This is what the world needs. This world of faith in force, and faith in diplomacy, and faith in partisan politics; this world of faith in intellectual skill; this world of brain power, elaborating expedients; this world of self-seeking refinement; these nations that are under the shadow of death are all sending up through the gloom of their moral miseries the inarticulate cry to God for just this Christlike mission of loving men, to the world. This, then, is the warrant; this is the groundwork of my plea for China. It is not that the Chinese are very worthy, or that our nation ought to be very consistent with its fundamental principles, but it is that 400,000,000 souls need a Saviour from sin, and we, whose mission is identical with Christ’s, have something to do in the case. This applies, of course, to all nations as well as the Chinese, but I plead for a special application of the principle to China on two grounds:
I. Because of the vastness and need of China and the peculiar relation it now sustains to ourselves. What have we done for her people? We have shut our door in their face. We have said no poor laboring man of China shall feed his children on our shore for ten years to come. Three hundred and thirty thousand of them will have gone into eternity before these ten black years shall have expired! Do we not hear the echo of that tender voice from that upper room, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto these, ye have done it unto me”?
II. I plead for China because of the wrongs she has suffered at nominally Christian hands, and especially at the hands of the United States Government.
The anti-Chinese bill is a violation of treaty, a violation of the spirit of impartial justice to foreigners, a violation of our own interest, because opposed to the spirit of Christ, which when resisted always reacts. It was carried through, like the opium trade, for present personal advantage on a small scale. It is the child of partisan politics, born out of a fear lest other foreign laborers, finding themselves underbidden by the more economical Chinese, might raise an outcry, and disturb the equilibrium of party power. Hence, to gain votes, one party will sacrifice national policy and Christian principle, and the other will do the same rather than lose votes. Thus China must be affronted, and Christianity dishonored before the world. It is not, however, the American people as such who have done this thing—thank God for that! Whenever the national conscience has spoken at all on the subject, it has spoken against it. This anti-Chinese legislation is the adoption, in America, of the old barbaric cast-off policy of exclusion, which China herself has pursued for centuries toward other nations. China is going forward: we have gone back.
Now what is to be the result in this case? It must be reaction. There must come reaction against American commerce, losing more than it gains, reaction against American integrity as to treaty stipulations, awakening Chinese distrust and hate, casting a blight upon Western civilization and, worst of all, defeating American Christianity.
The great American nation has divided at the Chinese quarter. Say what you will, that Chinese quarter in San Francisco has become the great moral divortium or water-shed of America where Christian and anti-Christian sentiment divide. On one side the Chinese workman is mobbed, excluded; on the other he is educated and led to Christ. On the one side men act for party ends and call the Chinaman a “heathen dog;” on the other they recognize him with all his infirmities as a man for whom Christ died, and call him brother. This is a tremendous responsibility we assume when we thus prejudice a fifth part of the human family against the religion of Christ.
Now, then, if we make special pleas for the Indian because we have manifestly wronged him and ought to make amends; if we are under special obligation to the freedman because we have sinned against him, or because he may become an important link between our Christianity and perishing Africa, why is not the same argument good for the Chinese on the Pacific coast? Surely, in God’s sight, these ten black years ought to be ten very bright years for the Christian schools for Chinamen in California. China ought to have at the end of that time a larger force of native missionaries trained up on the Pacific slope than all the Christian workers employed in that great empire to-day. The truth is, we are all taking one side or the other of this question. In deciding which it shall be let us keep in mind the noble sentiment of Henry Richard. Speaking on the opium question in the House of Commons, he said, “I am not ashamed to say that I am one of those who believe that there is a God who ruleth in the kingdom of men, and that it is not safe for a community, any more than an individual, recklessly and habitually to affront those great principles of truth and justice and humanity, on which, I believe, He governs the world. And we may be quite sure of this, that, in spite of our pride of place and power, in spite of our vast possessions and enormous resources, in spite of our boasted force by land and sea, if we come into conflict with that Power we shall be crushed like an egg-shell against the granite rock.”
Better still, let us listen again for the serious tone of the Divine prayer in that upper room. “I pray for them; I pray not for the world, but for them which thou hast given me, for they are thine. And now I am no more in the world but these are in the world. Holy Father, keep them!” While the shadow of to-morrow’s cross was already darkening his path, his thought was not for himself but for them. “These are in the world,” and to be in it, to work, to choose, to suffer in it—“in the world,” and so are tempted to use the world’s tactics, tempted to lose sight of their great commission and to become callous to the world’s needs—“in the world,” and so they have to settle momentous questions—“in the world,” having to meet its pains, its storms, its falsehood, its curse, its fascinations, and so, may lose sight of the claims of thy kingdom of love: Holy Father, keep them! Keep them!