Changing China

by William Gascoyne-Cecil; Lady Florence Mary Cecil

CHAPTER XX

THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA

At the great Shanghai Conference we always spoke of the "Church in China," implying thereby that there was to be one Christian body in the Chinese empire. This ideal is lofty and not impossible. There is a reasonable expectation that the great intellectual movement in China will render the Chinese very ready to accept new ideas, and the rate of conversion in China gives one reasonable hope that the new ideas may be Christian and not those of Western materialism. If China becomes Christian there will no doubt be a great tendency to accept the unity of Christianity as an essential doctrine. As a race they clearly tend towards union as much as the Anglo-Saxon race tends towards disunion. The British empire has been held together by its fear of its enemies; the Chinese empire has been held together through their natural love of union, which is the dominant characteristic of the race. Remove the enemies of the British empire and she will naturally divide, but force the Chinese empire apart and she will naturally return to one body. Chinese Christianity will, if it is truly Chinese, tend to one body. This truth, which I think would have been allowed by the whole Shanghai Conference, opens up a train of thought which is full of foreboding and yet of hope.

One obvious criticism of what was said of the Church in China was kept largely out of sight at the Shanghai Conference, namely, that as the Roman Communion far outnumbers the whole of the non-Roman Communions put together, the Church in China, therefore, if it is to consist of all Christians, will be something very different to what the majority of those present at that Conference would like. Some men maintain that the Chinese love of unity will not go so far as to compel the union between Protestant and Catholic, and that in China the schism which has rent Christianity in twain in Europe will be continued. I would ask those who think thus if they think this is desirable even if it is possible. Once foreign influence and support has been removed, would not such a division soon produce a state of great friction, resulting probably in the destruction of the smaller body. But it is most improbable; a race which has habitually put together Taoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism will have no difficulty at all in uniting Romanism and Protestantism. I do not mean to say that Rome will conquer; it does not seem likely. The power of the Romans is great when they are preaching our common Christianity, but their peculiar doctrine of the pre-eminence of Rome is most unattractive to the Chinaman. After all, Rome is a very small place to a man who lives in China. Think how little we know of ancient Chinese history, and realise how little China knows of the history of our civilisation. Home at the present day is to the Chinaman merely the capital of Germany's weakest ally. The reasoning of the universality of the Roman Church, always faulty, seems almost ridiculous in China. The Chinaman on one side is conversant with America, on the other side she is in touch with India, while on the north she has a frontier which stretches for thousands and thousands of miles between her and the great Orthodox Church of Russia. One's eyes naturally turn to this immense line of frontier between Confucianism and Christianity, and one wonders how any Chinaman can possibly think of Rome as the one Catholic Church. If the Roman Church, with its foreign domination and its tacit acceptance of the fact that only members of the Italian nation can receive Divine authority to guide the Church on earth, is unattractive to the mind of the man who lives in the Far East, on the other hand its ornate and dignified services must be most attractive to a race whose national philosophy puts pre-eminent weight on dignity and decorum in dress and demeanour. If the Roman Church could give up her Latin services, could frankly become a national Church which owed no obedience to any Pontiff outside China, one would regret the possibility but one would have to allow the probability of her complete domination over the Chinese empire. Again one's eyes turn to the northern frontier, and one asks oneself whether that great Orthodox Church, the dignity of whose services is without parallel, and which frankly accepts the national Church as a reasonable Christian position, will not one day be a large factor in the future missionary work in China. After what we had seen and heard at the Centenary Conference, and after we had realised the great extent of the Roman work, we felt that till one understood why the Russian Church conducted no missionary work one could not understand the whole missionary problem; for when the Russian Church does undertake such work, her geographical position must render her important.

The whole of this question is of the greatest interest to the student of missions, but especially to an Anglican. The great value of the Anglican position has always seemed that, to use an election phrase, we offer a platform on which all those who call themselves Christian might possibly unite. The great rent which divides Protestant from Catholic seems not only to make it impossible for Latin Christians to unite with the Teuton Protestant Churches, but also renders it hard for the latter to unite with the great Churches of Eastern Europe. Of course all this has only an academic interest in England, but in China with its rapidly growing Christianity and an intellectual revolution surging forward to unknown possibilities, all this is of vital interest. What will Chinese Christianity be? Is it to be an ornate Christianity to which the converts of Rome and possibly the converts of the Orthodox Church will adhere, an ornate Church sullied no doubt with the faults of her parents, a Church possibly attractive to the Buddhist, for he will not need to traverse any great distance in thought to enter her portals; or is it to be a great Protestant Church, cold and bare, vigorous and energetic, a Church in which the uniform of the Teuton mind will sit badly on the Chinese convert, a Church which may in many things represent truly the will of our mutual Master, but a Church which leaves the Oriental cold and miserable, while it practically tears from our Bible those endless chapters on the decoration of Temple and Tabernacle, those constant commands to an exact and ordered ritual.

I write with what the Germans call "objectivity"; the Teuton within me dislikes ritual; but the Chinaman is no Teuton, and the Chinaman loves ritual as much as any man on earth. No one who has been received by a Chinese Viceroy in his Yamen can have the very slightest doubt on this subject. If the Protestant bodies hope to force on the Chinese a non-ornate form of Christianity, they will be doing exactly what the Italian Church did to the Northern races, and which produced the great upheaval of the Reformation. The Reformation was essentially the rebellion of the Teuton mind against a forced acceptance of the Italian view of Christianity. To force on the Chinese converts a Christianity shorn of all ritual and display will produce in years to come some similar upheaval. There is yet a third possibility. The Anglican position affords the means of avoiding such an upheaval, and of permitting a union of all Christians on the basis of an ornate service and evangelical Christianity. For while it permits a service equal in dignity to that of Rome or of Russia, it insists equally with the bodies who pride themselves on the name of Protestant on the supreme value of the Bible.

The very hope I have that Christianity will conquer China makes me fearful for the future. The age of persecution is past, the blood of the martyrs has been shed, and the seed of a Church freely sown. But after the age of persecution comes the age of heresy, and to preserve Christianity in China from future dangers, not only is union necessary, but a well-ordered Church bound by creeds, respecting tradition, which shall embrace all those Christians by whomsoever they have been converted who love the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great danger I fear for the future Church in China is one of Eastern and not Western origin. I do not fear the domination of Rome. I doubt that the Protestant Communions will succeed in ultimately persuading the Chinese to worship God in a bare building and without vestments.

China and Japan will, if they are conquered by Christianity, be neither Protestant nor Catholic any more than we are Nestorian or Eutychian. Their divisions, their dangers, their struggles, will arise from a wholly different set of circumstances. I fear the dangers will come from an effort to incorporate Buddhism and Christianity in one religion. This is all the more probable as it has doubtless happened before. Nestorianism and Buddhism are the probable parents of the present Chinese Lamaism. It is, however, not given for us to see into the future, but we can look back into the past, and we can see that our predecessors in the faith nearly invariably made the mistake of supposing that the old dangers were going to recur, and of therefore depending on the old measures of defence.

The future Church in the Far East must fight her own battles. She must solve her own problems. All we can do is to hand over to her the truth in all its fulness, and teach her to look for divine guidance, to forget such words as Protestant, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and Anglican; to learn merely the word "Christian" and the word "Love." If Far Eastern Christianity will have its battles to fight, it will have also its message to give to the West, "that they without us should not be made perfect." It may be that the message of the East to the West will be that as God is One, so must His followers be; that strong and mighty as is the West, there is in her an element of the very greatest weakness; that the discord that reigns between Christian and Christian, between race and race, between class and class, is not the will of the Creator, but is the result of the national sins of the white races. The Far East, with its greater power of unity, may illumine the West with a higher conception of this great virtue, and the world may be a far holier and happier place when the yellow race has preached to the world the great doctrine of peace on earth and goodwill to men.