THE NEW LAW AND OUR WORK.
We are mortified that our Government has reversed the traditions and the precedents which have made our country a home for people from all parts of the world. The political parties bidding for the prize of the Pacific Coast have humiliated our nation in the eyes of all the others. It were a ludicrous spectacle, if it were not so sad, the great nation of the West receiving at this Atlantic port in a single month 90,000 immigrants of half a dozen nationalities and yet shuddering in its Congressional Halls over the 105,000 almond-eyed people who in the last score of years have landed at our Pacific harbor. It is a grotesque object lesson which we are now exhibiting at the Golden Gate—our ministers of Government standing there and watching for any stray vessel ready to send back the few Chinamen, who, following the star in the east of Christian civilization, have ventured over the waters to compare with it their pagan religion. Fifty millions of Christian people seem afraid to bring their system into competition with the effete superstitions of a hundred thousand heathen sojourners. We have been praying that the walls of opposition might be broken down and the doors opened to the Gospel among the nations; and now when China is the answer to that prayer, saying “Come to us” with your glad tidings, and let some of us go over to eat of the tree of life in your land, we close the port, we slam the door in their faces.
And how does this new law bear upon our work on the Pacific coast? Will this cutting off of the supply preclude all enlargement of the school and mission process? May it even call for a curtailment of our present operations? By no means. We have as a stock on hand, these hundred thousand people, and we should push our evangelizing appliances to their utmost capacity, so as to do the most possible for the soul-welfare of those who are left under our influence, not only for their own good but preeminently that they may be prepared to receive and to help to Christianize those who shall yet follow them, and then, also, to carry with them on their ever-intended return to the land of their fathers the blessings of the gospel of Christ. It may be that this enforced quiet and isolation shall become a mighty factor in this scheme for Christianizing the Mongolians who are already upon our shores. And so with this sea of prohibition before us, we hear the voice saying, “Go forward.”
Then the politicians’ law is for only ten years. Meantime it may appear to the interest of one party or the other to repeal the restricting edict. The conscience, the principle of the nation, will be at work. Demands for labor in subduing and developing that majestic Farther West will yet be heard. Before we are aware of it, the floodgates may be raised and a great tide of immigration may set in from the neighboring country over the Western sea. So, in any event, we must be on the alert, doing in this line the full measure of work that God brings to our hand.