CHAPTER XXV
THE NEED OF A UNIVERSITY EXPLAINED
The great danger that threatens mission schools, a danger which is increasing every year, is that the best pupils of these schools have to go to Universities in search of Western knowledge where they are exposed to the insidious attacks of Western materialism.
The teachers have at present no alternative; they have to send the best and brightest of their pupils somewhere to complete their education. It would be unfair on a boy to refuse to send him on, and if he is to receive a higher education, where can he get it but at some place where the atmosphere is distinctly anti-Christian.
There is in the East no place with a neutral atmosphere as there is in the West. In the West most people have had some Christian training, or at least they comprehend Christian ethics. So in a Western institution, even if the education be wholly secular, a Christian does not find everything antipathetic to his faith. But in the East the vast majority are non-Christian, and consequently the moral and intellectual atmosphere is hostile and antipathetic to a Christian. Here if an institution is non-religious it is probably not hostile to religion. In the East if an institution is non-religious it is probably anti-Christian. At present the only University in action is that of Tokio, though we are promised others, and its ill effects have been so obvious that the Chinese Government have ordered a wholesale withdrawal of pupils from its unhealthy influence.
As we have already pointed out, Western civilisation is magnificent but it is destructive, and when taught without any constructive religious teaching it inevitably tends to destroy all spiritual ideas and too often also to pervert the moral ideals of the race. As the pupil goes through the mission school he learns within its walls to shake himself free from the haunting fear of demons which besets every Chinaman; he has slowly realised that God is holy, good and loving, and has either accepted Christianity or stands on the threshold of the formal acceptance; he has reached the end of the curriculum of the school or college and his brilliancy demands a higher education. Attracted by the reputation of Tokio, he goes to its University, and there he finds himself in an atmosphere where all the destructive thought of Europe grows rankly; the good God in whom he has learned to believe in the mission school follows in the track of the demons of his youth, and he is left believing in a world founded by blind chance, where ethics are things of service to restrain your neighbour but folly to follow yourself. "Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," is the lesson which is not perhaps taught in so many words, but which none the less is forced into his mind; his views become those of Falstaff; all that is fine, all that is noble, flees from his life; though he no longer believes in the God of Love, he does not return to the belief in the demons of his youth; there is nothing in his world beyond getting rich or gratifying the flesh and laughing at those people who believe in higher ideals. He has been acquainted with and has learnt to loathe from his youth up the philosophy of Yang Choo. He has, for instance, despised such a sentence as this: "The people of high antiquity knew both the shortness of life and how suddenly and completely it might be closed by death, and therefore they obeyed every suggestion of the movements of their hearts, refusing not what was natural for them to like, nor seeking to avoid any pleasure that occurred to them, they paid no heed to the incitement of fame; they enjoyed themselves according to their nature; they did not resist the common tendency of all things to self-enjoyment; they cared not to be famous after death. They managed to keep clear of punishment; as to fame and praise, being first or last, long life or short life, these things did not come into their calculations." And now he finds that the philosophy of Yang Choo is as he supposes the newest thought of the great rich successful Western world; as he returns to his home and spreads abroad the poisonous doctrines that he has imbibed, the missionary wonders whether, after all, it would not have been better to have left the man to his primitive demonology.
The American mission bodies saw this danger from the first, and have already set up great educational establishments which to a certain extent supply this need. That great institution Bishop Graves' College at Jessfield, the Boone College at Wuchang, the British College at Weihsien, and Methodist Universities at Soochow and Peking, are all examples of good work. But they do not, any of them, bring the student up to what we call University standard, or what I understand is called in America the post-graduate course; what is felt is, that there is need of an institution in which the highest knowledge shall be taught, where the true aspect of Western thought shall be shown—not that aspect which is bringing France to destruction, not that aspect which makes Belgium unconcerned at the Congo scandals, but the aspect which both in America and in England we have always admired at least in theory, and in practice when we have been strong. The fundamental truth on which our civilisation rests is that God is good, and that therefore truth and progress are right and possible, and that the highest expression of the goodness of God is in His incarnation as it is universally taught by Christians of various views and of many denominations. The West owes to the East, if there is any common duty of man to man, to set before it the real truth as to the greatness of Western civilisation, namely, that it is the result of Christianity.
But missions are not anxious merely for a University as a means of defence against the materialistic onslaught which threatens their work—they need it for many other reasons; for instance, the University would make it possible for all denominations to have highly educated native ministers. No student of missions can ever be content to regard them as an ideal arrangement. The conception of a race being ministered to spiritually by another race is obviously inadequate; it is open to many criticisms; there must be a confusion in the mind of the convert between what is national and what is Christian; one Chinese regarded Christianity with doubt because he had heard that the German Emperor is a Christian, and to his mind he is the embodiment of the fierce piratical Western races. The word which the Chinese use for robbers means red-bearded men, so associated, alas, is the Western race in China with war and rapine; it is easy for a member of the Western races to be misunderstood when he is talking about the religion of love. Would any English parish like as its Rector a Chinaman, even if he were saintly and went so far as to cut off his queue?
Setting aside the associations of the Western race, the Western race has great difficulty in speaking Chinese without making ridiculous mistakes. Who among us has not smiled when the Chinaman's inability to say the letter "r" has caused him to offer us "lice" to eat, but what must it be to the Chinaman when he hears the Western preacher lost amidst those mysterious Chinese intonations, and therefore making some wonderful statement. A Chinese gentleman assured me that he had listened to a missionary extolling the virtues of a wild pig. Reverence forbids explaining what was really meant. If the ministers of religion are to be Chinese, it is obvious that they must be highly educated Chinese; to have religion taught by ignorant men in a country like China where learning is reverenced so profoundly, must be to condemn it as the religion of the coolie. The Chinese minister must be able to maintain his position, not only against the Confucian scholar, but against the Western materialist, and must therefore have an equally good education. Without saying that it is reasonable to expect that the Western missionary should be withdrawn within the next few years, I think it is wisdom for every mission body to aim at founding a body of educated native clergy who can free Christianity from the taunt of being a foreign religion, and who can, when the foreigner leaves China, take his place and uphold the faith.
If to have an educated native ministry is one great object of the University, another great and only less important object is the creation of an intellectual Christian laity who shall form and direct Christian public opinion. The school teacher, the writer, are only one degree less important, if indeed they are so, than the Christian minister; and if as China assimilates Western civilisation, she finds in her midst a body of men conversant with the best side of that civilisation, able to interpret its mysteries to her, so that it does not become subversive to all spiritual religion and morality, it is more than probable that she will take those men and put them in high positions, and the grain of mustard seed will by their means grow into a plant which shall overshadow the whole of China. The other day I was reading how St. Grimaldi and St. Neots founded the University of Oxford in 886. Theology, grammar and rhetoric, music and arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, were the subjects taught. After a thousand years we are in a position to judge of the success of the experiment. Surely every one will wish to have a hand in founding a similar undertaking.
The foundation of this University cannot for two or three reasons be left to one body. In the first place, no one communion will be rich enough to undertake such a work; secondly, it might cause a certain narrowness of atmosphere; thirdly and chiefly, co-operation among Christians would afford an object-lesson to the Chinese of the real unity there is between them. We are constantly twitted with the fact that we confuse the heathen by professing the religion of love and then setting before them a mass of warring sects. If we can unite in the founding of such a University, we shall show that though we see the Christian truth in different aspects we have agreed that truth is one, and have in spite of our divisions a fundamental unity. When this matter was referred to at the Shanghai Conference, considerable difficulty was felt among missionaries as to the terms on which such a University should be founded. It was agreed to refer it to the Committee on Education, and that Committee of Education has in the year 1909 welcomed the formation of such a University. Dr. Hawks Pott, who of all men in China can best speak as an authority on education, since he has organised and maintained that wonderful institution at Jessfield, warmly advocated its formation.
No doubt one of the reasons why the missionaries now see their way to the acceptance of this University is because a neutral body has come forward to initiate the undertaking. Committees of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge have been sitting for many months considering the question with all the skill and ability which their great learning and technical knowledge enable them to bring to bear on this subject. Though of course they have a thorough knowledge of education in all its aspects, they were aware that they lacked knowledge of China and the Chinese, so for many months they heard and examined the evidence of any one who was thoroughly acquainted with China and with the conditions of missionary work. They devised a scheme which they thought would at once satisfy the workers in the mission field and be acceptable to the Chinese. The mere outline of the scheme is that this University should encourage the formation of denominational hostels, which shall be under the control of individual missionary bodies, and which shall form colleges at the University; and while the University alone would concern itself with giving secular teaching from a neutral standpoint, the colleges would give Christian teaching to their pupils. In this way all conflict between missions would be avoided; each mission would continue to care for the pupils which it had hitherto sheltered and educated. To the University would accrue the great gain of having a supply of properly prepared pupils coming into it from the mission schools, one of the causes of disappointment of ill-considered University schemes being that there is no proper provision for a supply of pupils. In the West there are numerous secondary schools, and any University can easily find a sufficient number of pupils properly grounded in knowledge. In the East to erect a University without feeding schools is like building a house in the Chinese fashion roof first. The Yale University Mission found itself compelled to set up elementary schools to teach the elementary Western knowledge which was necessary before even the lowest grade of college work could be attempted. Western teachers are, as we have before explained, few and far between outside the mission schools, and therefore mission schools would both help and be helped by a University. The University completes the work they have begun, and returns the men to the mission to carry on its work with honour and efficiency. On the other hand, the mission supplies the University with pupils, which after all are the prime necessity of education.
Another great feature of the Oxford and Cambridge scheme was that the University should aim to be a native University, and this no doubt was the side which attracted the Chinese. Instead of using knowledge, the common heritage of all men, as the means of imposing the domination of the alien on China, knowledge is offered by this University as essentially the thing which belongs to China as well as to any other race. If in the commencement the majority of the professors must belong to the Western race, it is to be hoped that many of its professors will soon come from China, and that when the University is well begun, and Christianity has become as national a religion as it is in our land, and Western civilisation has lost the right to describe itself by that epithet, and has become the civilisation of the East as of the West, then the University whose foundation is now being laid may be the great light of the future China.
Perhaps the most important part of the scheme is that which suggests denominational hostels as the proper solution of the difficulties that beset union and interdenominational work in the mission field.
There are obvious difficulties in arranging for a common religious teaching, and, on the other hand, it is very advantageous for the many mission bodies at work in China to show a united front against the new materialism and the ancient superstition. Nothing so shows the power of Christian love as a union work of this nature.
We Christians are often taunted with our differences, and we are assured that many will support any scheme that makes for union and peace between the different elements of the Christian world. Here is a scheme which will tend to bring Christians together, and to induce that mutual respect and toleration which must be the foundation of a closer union. The baby must walk before he runs, and if the Christians of China can maintain such a University, their daily intercourse will greatly assist any further scheme for unity.
But there is another use in the hostel system which should not be overlooked. At all times one of the great hindrances to the education of young men is the tendency that they have to waste their strength in riot and wantonness. The Chinaman is perhaps more subject to these temptations than the Westerner. A student said: "We cannot work; we are too profligate." A Chinese statesman advised against certain towns as possible sites for a University because of their tendency to entice men into vicious courses. Far the most efficient way of opposing this evil is to make some one responsible for the moral welfare of the young men, and this is done in the hostel system.
Every hostel would be governed by some person who would make the moral welfare of the young men his peculiar care and study. The head of the hostel might or might not be on the teaching staff of the University; but whether he taught or not, his first duty would be the care of the moral and spiritual welfare of those committed to his charge. He would give all his energy to reproduce the highest moral tone of a Western University.
This scheme is being tried in Chentu, where a union University is being started. And I believe it is in every way proving successful. Those who have not realised the size of China will be perhaps inclined to ask why not unite the two schemes? The simple answer to those who have travelled is that the distances are too vast. You might as well talk of uniting Oxford and Harvard, for those two Universities are about as far from one another in time as Hankow is from Chentu. Even when the railway is built the distances will be immense. The enormous distances of China are also a reason why it was impossible to amalgamate the Hong-Kong scheme and the Oxford and Cambridge scheme. Hong-Kong is now ten days to a fortnight away from Hankow, and such a different language is spoken there that the dwellers in Northern and Central China are often forced to use English to understand one another.
The University of Hong-Kong will be very beneficial to the colony, and is an example of the generosity of the merchants and citizens of that town; but as a means of naturalising the higher side of our civilisation it labours under the great disadvantage of not being either in China nor under the Chinese flag, nor of speaking the prevailing language.