XXVII
WHAT CAN CHRISTIANITY DO FOR CHINA?
However inadequate or imperfect our survey of the life of the Chinese Village may have been, it must at least have shown that it has defects of a serious character. It is therefore a legitimate question how they are to be remedied, on the supposition that they can be remedied at all.
It is certainly conceivable that there might be many remedial agencies set at work with varying degrees of success; but as a matter of fact, so far as we are aware, there is but one the friends of which have been stimulated to try on any extended scale. That sole agency is Christianity. It thus becomes an inquiry of great moment, what effect the introduction into China of Christianity in its best form may be rationally expected to exert upon the springs of the national life and character of the Chinese. What can Christianity do for the Chinese family? What can it do for the Chinese boy and girl?
In the first place it can take better care of them. The dense and impenetrable ignorance which sacrifices so large a proportion of Chinese infants during the first two years of their life, might perhaps be counteracted in other ways, but it is probably safe to predict that it never would be. To the Chinese girl the practical introduction of Christianity will mean even more than to her brother. It will prevent her from being killed as soon as she is born, and will eventually restore her to her rightful place in the affections of her parents. It is never enough merely to point out the folly, danger, or sin of a given course of action. There must be moral as well as intellectual enlightenment, coöperation in a new social order, the stimulus both of precept and example, and adequate moral sanctions. This can be furnished by Christianity alone. History testifies that if Christianity begins to lose its power, the dormant forces of human selfishness, depravity and crime reassert themselves in infant murder.
Christianity will call into existence a sympathy between parents and children hitherto unknown, and one of the greatest needs of the Chinese home. It will teach parents to govern their children, an accomplishment which in four millenniums they have never made an approach to acquiring. This it will do, not as at present by the mere iterative insistence upon the duty of subjection to parents, but by showing parents how first to govern themselves, teaching them the completion of the five relations by the addition of that chiefest one hitherto unknown, expressed in the words Our Father. It will redeem many years during the first decade of childhood, of what is now a mere animal existence, filling it with fruitfulness for a future intellectual and spiritual harvest.
It will show Chinese parents how to train as well as how to govern their children—a divine art of which they have at present no more conception than of the chemistry of soils. It will put an end to the cruelty and miseries of foot-binding. Toward this great reform there was never in China the smallest impulse, until it had long been urged by Christian forces. If it shall prove at length to have successfully taken root in China apart from Christianity, that fact would be a luminous star in the East showing that there are no Chinese walls which may not ultimately fall before the blast of Christian trumpets.
Christianity will revolutionize the Chinese system of education. Such a revolution might indeed take place without reference to Christianity. The moral forces which have made China what it is, are now to a large extent inert. To introduce new intellectual life with no corresponding moral restraints, might prove far more a curse than a blessing, as it has been in the other Oriental lands. Christian education will never make the mistake so often repeated of seeking for fruits where there have been no roots. It starts from a fixed point and moves onward to a definite end.
