Village Life in China: A Study in Sociology

by Arthur H. Smith

Little Old People.

Going to a Christian School.

Christian education will teach the Chinese child his own tongue in a rational manner. It will abbreviate to the greatest possible extent “the toils of wandering through the wilderness of the Chinese language to arrive at the deserts of Chinese literature.” It will awaken the child’s hibernating imagination, enormously widen his horizon, develop and cultivate his judgment, teach him the history of mankind, and not of one branch only. Above all it will arouse his conscience, and in its light will exhibit the mutual interrelations of the past, the present, and the future. It will create an intellectual atmosphere in the home, causing the children to feel that their progress at school is intimately related to instruction at home, and has a personal interest to the parents and to the family as a whole. The value of such a stimulus, now totally lacking in most Chinese homes, is beyond calculation, and would of itself easily double the mental output of every family into which it entered.

Christianity will provide for the intellectual and spiritual education of girls as well as boys, when once the Christian point of view has been attained. The typical Chinese mother is “an ignorant woman with babies,” but she is not the Chinese ideal woman as the long list of educated ladies in many dynasties (a number too considerable to be ignored but too insignificant to be influential) abundantly shows. A Chinese girl told her foreign friend that before Christianity came into her life, she used to go about her work humming a ballad, consisting of the words: “The beautiful teacup; the painted teacup; the teacup, the teacup, the beautiful, beautiful teacup.” Contrast the outlook from such an intellectual mouse-hole with the vista of a maiden whose thoughts are elevated to the stars and the angels. By developing the neglected spiritual nature, Christianity will broaden and deepen the existing rills of natural affection into glorious rivers wide and deep, supplementing the physical and the material by the intellectual and the divine. By cultivating a fellowship between mothers and daughters in all these and in other lines, it will make it easier for children to love their fathers and respect their mothers, and will fill the lives of both parents and children with new impulses, new motives and new ambitions. It will impel mothers to give their daughters much needed instruction in their future duties as daughters-in-law and as wives, instead of throwing them overboard as now, often in mere childhood, expecting them to swim untaught, against the current, and in the dark.

It will for the first time provide and develop for the daughters girl friendships, adapted to their long-felt but uncomprehended needs. The education of Chinese women is a condition of the renovation of the empire. No nation, no race can rise above the status of its mothers and its wives. How deftly yet how surely Christianity is beginning to plant its tiny acorns in the rifts of the granitic rock may be seen in the surprising results already attained. When the present isolated and initiatory experiments shall have had time to bring forth fruit after their kind, it will be clearly perceived that a new and an Imperial force has entered into the Chinese world.

Christianity wherever introduced tends to a more rational selection of partners for its sons and daughters than has ever been known before. In place of the mercenary considerations which alone find place in the ordinary practice of the Chinese, it naturally and inevitably leads to the choice of Christian maidens for daughters-in-law, and Christian youths for sons-in-law. It attaches weight to character, disposition and acquirements instead of to wealth and to social position alone. A Christian community is the only one in China where it is possible to learn with certainty all important facts with regard to those who may be proposed for matrimonial engagements, because it is only in such a community that dependence can be placed upon the representations of third parties. As Christian communities come more and more to distinct self-consciousness, more and more care will be exercised in making matches. Christians are indeed the only Chinese who can be made to feel that caution in this direction is a religious duty. The result of this process continued for an extended period will produce by “natural selection” a distinctly new type of Chinese, physically, intellectually, and morally the superiors of all types about them and therefore more fitted to survive.

Chinese customs will not be rashly invaded, but the ultimate tendency will be to postpone marriage to a suitable age, to consider the preferences of the principal parties—so far as they may have any—and to make wedlock a sacred solemnity instead of merely a social necessity.

Christianity will make no compromise with polygamy and concubinage, but will cut the tap-root of a upas-tree which now poisons Chinese society wherever its branches spread. Christianity will gradually revolutionize the relations between the young husband and his bride. Their common intellectual and spiritual equipment will have fitted them to become companions to one another, instead of merely commercial partners in a kettle of rice. The little ones will be born into a Christian atmosphere as different from that of a non-Christian household as the temperature of Florida from that of Labrador. These forces will be self-perpetuating and cumulative.

Christianity will purify and sweeten the Chinese home, now always and everywhere liable to devastating hurricanes of passion, and too often filled with evil-speaking, bitterness and wrath. The imperative inhibition of all manner of reviling would alone do more for domestic harmony than all the wise maxims of the sages mechanically learned and repeated could accomplish in a lifetime. Indeed, Christianity will take these semi-animate precepts of the dead past, breathe into them for the first time the breath of life, and then reinforce them with the Word of the Lord and the sanctions of His Law.