Our missionaries, then, almost unanimously assert that “opium has been the means of closing millions of Chinese hearts to the influence of Christian preaching,” partly by setting the Chinese against foreigners in general and Englishmen in particular, but chiefly by supplying them with a ready-made argument against the Christian religion as one that tolerates so iniquitous a traffic to the ruin of a friendly nation. Dr. Medhurst[113] supplies us with a sufficient answer to this. “If we do supply the opium, why do you smoke it? Why do you even grow it?” But, in truth, whatever ingenious arguments the astute Chinaman may use to justify his rejection of the new doctrine, the reason of the ill success of our missionaries is not to be found here. For why, if opium be the only obstacle to conversion, are we not more successful in India? There are in the whole of British India only 900,000 converted Christians, of whom far the largest number are Roman Catholic “hereditary” Christians, about a quarter of a million being Protestants of various denominations. “Of course there are some,” says a correspondent to the Times, “perhaps even a considerable number, whose views of life are really elevated by their Christianity; but it is a fact worthy of all attention that really devout Indians who have, under the influence of Christian teaching, cast off Hindooism, have preferred to create a new and, as they say, a purer religion for themselves, rather than accept Christianity in the form in which it is presented to them by the missionaries.” The “Brama Somaj” is indeed worthy of all consideration, but obviously cannot be discussed here. Missionaries in India impute their failure to the advantages given by Government to secular education. The Japanese again,[114] though their orators confess that they are no bigoted adherents of any creed, that their minds are like blank paper, fitted to receive new characters from the pen of any ready writer, decline to embrace Christianity because they do not consider it a good religion; for they see that it does not prevent the English from being licentious and brutal to their coolies, and from having no reverence for old age. Such excuses, and they are mere excuses, are fatally easy; and while Christian practice differs so much from Christian profession, will always remain a weapon of offence against the followers of Christ in the hands of unbelievers. But so far from opium being a barrier to the acceptance of the Christian religion, it has been the means[115] indirectly of opening the gate of the empire for the admission of Western ideas, and, among them, for the introduction of the Gospel of Christ.
“The passion of the Chinese for opium,” says one writer, “was the first link in the chain which was destined to connect them at some future day with all the other families of mankind.” Again, it may reasonably be asked with Sir John Bowring, “whether the greater proportionate number of native professing Christians is not to be found in those districts where opium is most consumed, and how the undoubted fact is to be explained that in Siam, where the Siamese do not smoke the drug, there is scarcely a solitary instance of conversion among the native population, while among the Chinese and other foreign settlers in Siam who habitually employ it, conversions are many.” What, then, are the causes of our failure? Dr. Hobson, himself a medical missionary, and by no means an apologist for the traffic, says, “Our chief obstacle at Canton is the unfriendly character of the people.” And there can be no doubt that this inveterate hostility exists all over China against foreigners in general and missionaries in particular, and has repeatedly shown itself in outbreaks of brutal violence against foreign residents, culminating in the murder of M. Chapdelaine in 1856, and the massacre of the French Mission together with the Consul and several Russian residents at Tientsin in 1870. Later still, we have had the murder of Mr. Margary in Yünnan. This hatred is intensified in the case of missionaries by their civil[116] and political action, and by the fact of Roman Catholic Governments exterritorializing all their converts, i.e. making them for all intents and purposes their own subjects, and releasing them from all subjection to Chinese authority. This establishment of an “imperium in imperio” cannot fail to be intolerable to an independent State, even if it be consistent with the idea of a State at all. Moreover, the admission of missionaries no less than of opium is a permanent badge of their defeat in several wars, and the sense of humiliation aggravates their dislike for the “outer barbarians.” So that we can believe Prince Kung’s wish, expressed to Sir Rutherford Alcock, to have been a heart-felt one: “Take away,” he said, “your opium and your missionaries, and we need have no more trouble in China.” Of the two, indeed, they hate missionaries most, for did not their most powerful mandarins, Li Hung Chang[117] and Tso Tsung Taang, say to Sir Thomas Wade, “Of the two evils we would prefer to have your opium, if you will take away all your missionaries.” Sir Rutherford Alcock gave similar evidence before the Commission in 1871: “The Chinese,” he said, “if at liberty to do so, would exterminate every missionary and their converts.”[118] But cordially as they detest all missionaries, who, backed by their respective Governments,[119] assume a protectorate over their converts, their bitterest hate is reserved for the Romanists. These penetrate into the interior, and aggregate property, own land, and houses, and pagodas, and are now some of the largest landed proprietors in the different localities. They have even gained the right, by the French Treaty, of reclaiming whatever lands and houses belonged to the Christian communities when the persecution and expulsion of the Jesuits took place in the seventeenth century. But besides the hostility of the literati and gentry, other causes are at work to render the labours of our missionaries abortive. Chief among these is one mentioned in a publication by the Church Missionary Society itself, called the Story of the Fuh-kien Mission. “Christianity,” says Mr. Wolfe, a missionary at Foochow, “would be tolerated too, and the Chinese would be easily induced to accept Christ among the number of their gods, if it could be content with the same terms on which all the other systems are willing to be received, viz. that no one of them claims to be absolute and exclusive truth. Now, as Christianity does claim this, and openly avows its determination to expel by moral force every rival system from the altars of this nation, it naturally at first appears strange and presumptuous to this people.”[120] Very similar in old times was the attitude of the Roman polytheism towards the various religions with which it was brought into contact. It was tolerant of all religions and non-religions except (a) exclusive and aggressive ones, like Christianity and Judaism; (b) national ones, like Druidism; and (c) extravagant and mystic ones, like the worship of Isis. So now the Buddhists and Taouists would be ready enough to associate the religion of Christ with that of Buddha or Laoutze, seeing indeed, as they say, little difference between the doctrines of Buddha and of Christ.
Buddhism was introduced into China at the very time when in the West the Fall of Jerusalem had set Christianity free from its dependence on Judaism, and enabled it to go forth in its own might, conquering and to conquer, till it became the religion of the whole Roman world. The name of Christ was not heard in China till 600 years later; and it was not till 1575 A.D. that a permanent Jesuit mission was established in that distant land. This being the case, it is not to be wondered at that the Chinese are unwilling to renounce a religion in many respects as pure and as moral a one as the pagan world has ever seen, and one which they have held for eighteen centuries, in favour of a creed, as it would seem to them, of yesterday, and one which the hated foreigner seeks to force upon them at the point of the bayonet; for the war of 1857 was a missionary war, though not by any means an opium war; and it is only by the Treaty of Tientsin that missionaries have any right to preach Christianity in China. Previously to this Christianity had been forbidden by King Yoong-t-ching in 1723, and that edict had never been repealed.
But though these two causes, the hostility of the people and the assumed intellectual superiority of the Buddhists and Confucianists, render the path of our missionaries unusually difficult, and fully account for their ill success, yet it may be asked why the Roman Catholic missionaries are more successful than ours. Both the above reasons apply to them as strongly, or even more strongly, than to Protestant missionaries. They have even an additional disadvantage in their confessional with women, a proceeding which is looked upon with the greatest suspicion by the Chinese who, as far as possible, seclude their women from the sight of all men. Perhaps, as has been hinted at by a correspondent to the Times, the celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood, an institution which they hold in common with the priests of Buddha, impresses the people with a favourable view of the religion. But there are other reasons.
As mentioned already, the Jesuits established themselves in China at the latter part of the sixteenth century. They first landed at Ningpo, and thence made their way to Pekin,[121] where, “by good policy, scientific acquirements, and conciliatory demeanour, they won the good-will of the people and the toleration of the Government.” In 1692, Kang Hi published an edict permitting the propagation of Christianity. From the success of these Jesuits, sanguine expectations were entertained in Europe of the speedy evangelization of China—hopes that were not destined to be realized. Various causes conspired to effect their downfall in China, principally connected with the political state of Europe at that time. In 1723 Christianity was prohibited, and the Jesuits expelled. “The extinction of the Order of Jesuits,” says Sir George Staunton, in the preface to his Penal Code of China, “caused the adoption of a plan of conversion more strict, and probably more orthodox, but, in the same proportion, more unaccommodating to the prejudices of the people, and more alarming to the jealousies of the Government. Generally speaking, it threw the profession into less able hands, and the cause of Christianity and of Europe lost much of its lustre and influence. The Jesuits were generally artists and men of science, as well as religious teachers.” There can be no doubt that this was the main secret of their success; and in order to ensure like success, we must send out missionaries of like stamp, men of high genius and refined education, who have grasped the theory of Aryan civilization; who can meet the Buddhist, and the Hindoo, and the Confucianist on their own ground; who, going forth in the spirit of Our Lord’s words, “I come not to destroy, but to fulfil,” can, if necessary, graft the law of Christ on the doctrines of Buddha. Let them treat Vishnoo and Buddha as St. Paul treated Venus and Mars, and say to a people given up to idolatry, “Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare we unto you.” Not that we would counsel them to make any sacrifice of principle in order to secure converts, as the Romanists seem to have done; such a course must be fatal: and, indeed, “these unworthy concessions to the habits of vice and superstition so prevalent in China” have already been a serious obstacle to the spread of the true doctrine;[122] for enquirers have expressed their readiness to join the Church if, like the people belonging to the religion of the “Lord of Heaven” (i.e. Romanism), they may continue opium-smoking, and work as usual upon the Lord’s Day. So successful in one sense have these tactics been, that the Roman Catholic missionaries claim to have 30,000 converts in the province of Fuh-kien alone, mostly hereditary Christians of the fifth generation. These so-called Christians are, however, very ignorant of Scripture, and in most respects indistinguishable from heathens. For instance, they identify the Virgin Mary with one of their deities called Seng Mu, or Holy Mother, and pay idolatrous worship to her. Such success need not be envied by our missionaries.
The two points, then, in which the Roman Catholic missions have had the advantage over Protestant ones are—1st. Their missionaries, especially the earlier ones, were far more able men than the generality of our mission clergy. “You may get men,” says a writer to the Times,[123] “of average attainments to go abroad as missionaries, just as you get clerks and engineers. But they who adopt propagandism as a means of living—and it is no disparagement to the missionaries that they do so—are not exactly the men to impart a living impulse to the hearts of masses of people. Xaviers and Bishop Pattesons, indeed, appear at intervals to prove that the apostolic spirit is not yet extinct among men; but such exceptional phenomena fail to redeem the common-place character of the ordinary missionary field-force.” 2nd. The Roman Catholic faith, by its very oneness, by its remarkable similarity to the institutions of Buddhism, and by its concessions to some of the grosser instincts of the human mind, no less than by having a united and organized Church behind it, cannot fail to commend itself more readily to the minds of the heathen than the more spiritual and independent, but at the same time more narrow and sectarian, beliefs which are all ranked as branches of the Reformed Church. “Thinking[124] they are invading a country as soldiers of the Cross, these young missionaries go forth, denouncing the beliefs, the traditions, the worship of the people, calling on them to curse all that they have ever held sacred, and to accept, on pain of eternal perdition, the peculiar arrangements of beliefs which the missionary has compounded for them, and of which Christianity is one, but not always a very perceptible ingredient; and so the poor heathen, hungering, however unconsciously, for the bread of life, is offered instead the shibboleths of a very Babel of sects.” But though they have failed as yet in the higher aim which they have set before themselves, the efforts of the missionaries have been wonderfully successful, though they care not for this success, in raising the social standard of the people with whom they are brought into contact. “They deserve infinite praise for the way they have created written languages where none existed, and for their assiduity in educating and civilizing thousands of savages.”[125]
Our missionaries, then, who deserve every credit for their noble and self-sacrificing efforts in the cause of Christ, who in the face of difficulties such as few can appreciate, do their Master’s work with cheerfulness and zeal, in spite of danger and privation, comparing their own failure with the success of missionaries elsewhere, as, for instance, in Madagascar, and seeking to account for it before their countrymen at home, miss the true causes which we have been compelled, however ungraciously, to point out, and, taking the nominal objection from the mouths of their opponents, with heedless confidence assert that opium is the great obstacle to the propagation of the Gospel, forgetting that it was the difficulties connected with opium that first opened a way for them into the heart of China; that it was the second opium war, as they love to call it, which gave them a locus standi in the country. But, in truth, in comparing their work with that of their fellow-workers in Africa and elsewhere, they are placing themselves at an enormous disadvantage; for we must not forget that in China and India we are dealing with races[126] immeasurably superior to the North American Indians and the savages of Africa; that we are confronted by civilizations which were in their prime when England was inhabited by naked savages, and was indeed, as the Chinese still believe it to be, but as “an anthill in the ocean,” and by a race of men who were “learned,” as Cobden said in the House of Commons, “when our Plantagenet kings could not write, and who had a system of logic before Aristotle, and a code of morals before Socrates.” It would be surprising indeed if we could persuade such intellectual and civilised races to give up in a moment beliefs which have taken centuries to mature; and the difficulty is the greater in the case of the Buddhists from the striking similarity which exists between the general principles professed by followers of Buddha and disciples of Christ. “Conversion to Christianity,” as Dr. Moore says, “involves the belief in certain statements the counterparts of which, when found in Buddhism, are regarded as impossible and untrue by Christians.”
What, then, should a missionary do in the face of all these difficulties? Let him follow Dr. Medhurst’s advice, and remember that “the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much”; let him exhort the Chinese to abandon the habit of opium-smoking, and compel their converts to give up the drug; and, above all, let him be careful not to make exaggerated statements about the opium traffic, which merely tend to disquiet the minds of his countrymen at home, and, when the falsity of his statements becomes apparent, to throw discredit on the cause which he has at heart. But if the missionary’s duty is clear, no less clearly is it our duty who remain at home to make the most strenuous efforts to aid the good cause by subscribing more largely to the missionary fund (instead of expending our money for the purpose of raising an agitation against opium in England), and so, by increasing the remuneration offered to workers in this large field (for the labourer is worthy of his hire), to induce the ablest and most intellectual of our clergy to go out to encounter Buddhism and Taouism—opponents quite worthy of our steel—feeling sure that success, though delayed, is certain in the end, and that the Chinese only need to become Christians in order to be one of the greatest nations upon earth.
It remains now only to mention the remedies proposed by the supporters of the Anti-Opium Society for the evils of the opium traffic, pointing out such objections as may occur to us; and finally to state the alternative course which we ourselves propose. We may premise, however, before dealing with this part of the subject, that there is a considerable divergence of opinion manifest in the ranks of the Anti-Opium Society with regard to the nature of the remedies suggested. Some are for merely washing our hands of the monopoly, so that the Government would have no direct participation in the manufacture of the drug, but would, by means of an export duty, retain more or less of the revenue therefrom. This course, it must be said, does not find favour with the majority, who demand, consistently enough, the total abandonment by India of the manufacture of opium and the revenue from it.
Let us consider the less radical proposal first.