New Forces in Old China: An Inevitable Awakening

by Arthur Judson Brown

It passes comprehension that any one who has even a superficial knowledge of the real China can doubt for a moment its vital need of the gospel. The wretchedness of its life appalls an American who goes back into the unmodified conditions of the interior or even into the old Chinese city of proud Shanghai. As I journeyed through those vast throngs, climbed many hilltops and looked out upon the innumerable villages, which thickly dotted the plain as far as the eye could reach, as I saw the unrelieved pain and the crushing poverty and the abject fear of evil spirits, I felt that in China is seen in literal truth ``The Man with the Hoe.''

``Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.

``What gulfs between him and the seraphim,
Slave of the wheel of labour, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop.''

This is the need to which the churches of Europe and America are addressing themselves through the boards and societies of foreign missions. These boards are the channels through which the highest type of Christian civilization is communicated to pagan peoples, the agencies which gather up all that is best and truest in our modern life and concentrate it upon the conditions of China. From this view-point, foreign missions is not only a question of religion, but a problem of statesmanship, and one of overshadowing magnitude. As such, it merits the sympathy and cooperation of every intelligent and broad-minded man, irrespective of his religious affiliations. Its spiritual aims are supreme and sufficient for every true disciple of Christ, but apart from them its social and educational value and its relation to the welfare of the race justly claim the interest and support of all. In this work the Church is saving both individuals and nations, and for time as well as for eternity. It holds no pessimistic views of the future. It denies that the development of the race has ended. It frankly concedes the existence of vice and superstition. But it believes that the gospel of Jesus Christ is able to subdue that vice, and to dispel that superstition. So it founds schools and colleges for the education of the young; establishes hospitals and dispensaries for the care of the sick and suffering; operates printing-presses for the dissemination of the Bible and a Christian literature; maintains churches for the worship of the true God, and in and through all it preaches to lost men the transforming and uplifting gospel of Him who alone can ``speak peace to the heathen.''

But some are saying that the Boxer outbreak has destroyed their confidence in the practicability of the effort to evangelize the Chinese. They are asking: ``Why should we send any more missionaries to China?''

I reply: ``Why send any more merchants, any more consuls, any more oil, flour, cotton? Shall we continue our commercial and political relations with China and discontinue our religious relations; allow the lower influences to flow on unchecked, but withhold the spiritual forces which would purify trade and politics, which have made us what we are, and which alone can regenerate the millions of China?''

Is disaster a reason for withdrawal? When the American colonists found themselves involved in the horrors of the Revolution, did they say that it would have been better to remain the subjects of Great Britain? When, a generation ago, our land was drenched with the blood of the Civil War, did men think that they ought to have tolerated secession and slavery? When the Maine was blown up in Havana Harbour and Lawton was killed in Luzon, did we demand withdrawal from Cuba and the Philippines? When Liscum fell under the walls of Tien-tsin, did we insist that the attempt to relieve the Legations should be abandoned? Or did not the American people, in every one of these instances, find in the very agonies of struggle and bloodshed a decisive reason for advance? Did they not sternly resolve that there should be men, that there should be money, and that the war should be pressed to victory whatever the sacrifice that might be involved?

And shall the Church of God weakly, timidly yield because the very troubles have occurred which Christ Himself predicted? He frankly said that there should ``be wars and rumors of wars''; that His disciples should ``be hated of all men''; that He sent them ``forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,'' and that the brother should ``deliver up the brother to death and the father the child.'' But in that very discourse He also said: ``He that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.'' ``Go, preach,'' He commanded. ``Woe is me if I preach not,'' cried Paul. Hostile rulers and priests and mobs and the bitter Cross did not swerve Him a hairbreadth from His purpose; nor did the rending of the early disciples in the arenas of Nero, the burning of a Huss and a Savonarola, the pyres of Smithfield, the dungeons of the Tolbooth and the thumb-screws of the Inquisition quench the zeal of His followers.

And in the like manner, the ashes of mission buildings and the blood of devoted missionaries and the tumult of furious men have led multitudes at home to form a high and holy resolve to send more missionaries, to give more money and to press the whole majestic enterprise with new faith and power until all China has been electrified by the vital spiritual force of a nobler faith. God summons Christendom to a forward movement in the land whose soil has been forever consecrated by the martyrdom of the beloved dead. Instead of retreating, ``we should,'' in the immortal words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, ``be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.''

It may be said that this is a purely sentimental consideration. But so may love for country, for liberty, for wife and children, be called a sentiment. God forbid that the time should ever come when men will not be influenced by sentiment. The intuitions of the heart are as apt to be correct as the dictates of the head. I candidly admit that as I stood amid the ruins of the mission buildings in China, as I faced the surviving Christians and remembered what they had suffered, the property they had lost and the dear ones they had seen murdered,—as I stood with bared head on the spot where devoted missionaries had perished, I was conscious of a deeper consecration to the task of uplifting China. And I am not willing to admit that such a dedication of the living to the continuance of the work of the dead is a mere sentiment.