Every superior in China, from the Emperor to the military officer or civil Mandarin, is “a father;” all under him are his “children,” and as such must obey him without question or demur. “Filial disobedience,” whether to parents or governors, is the highest crime. Filial disobedience is thus defined:—“In our general conduct not to be orderly, is to fail in filial duty; in a Magistrate not to be faithful, is to fail in filial duty: among friends, not to be sincere, is to fail in filial duty: in arms and war, not to be brave, is to fail in filial duty.” A people thus treated as children, must ever remain in a state of childhood; and though education is general among the Chinese, it is an education which, like the bandages on their women’s feet, binds their minds from growing, and restricts them to the size and calibre of infancy.
Education in China consists solely in social and political training for the purposes of despotism. The studies are confined to one unvaried routine, and no deviation from the prescribed track is permitted. Within this circle all are, and must be, educated. Hence an uniformity of mind prevails, and has prevailed for ages throughout China, and has extended itself to the national features; betraying itself in Snub Noses and a dull, stolid expression of countenance. So much for compulsory education! It is impossible that it should be otherwise.
A nation whose minds are all reduced to the same level; whose thoughts are prescribed; whose daily conduct is measured out; whose very amusements are dictated by an imperial will, must necessarily soon become uniform, both mentally and physically. This uniformity will be the waveless level of the Dead Sea. Storms may agitate the upper sky, winds may rage, and floods descend; but the waves are too heavy to rise from their death-like repose. They sleep the calm sleep, not of peace, but of death. The last trumpet alone can arouse their torpor. The benignant mind of the Christian may nourish sweet hopes of evangelizing a nation so sunk. but the hopes are vain. Christianity came not till the human mind was fitted and prepared to receive and understand its divine precepts. It came not to the infancy of the world, but to its old age and matured judgment. A nation, therefore, steeped in the irreclaimable dotage of a childhood which has endured throughout its whole life, cannot receive it. Both the Hindoos and the Chinese have forfeited by their long-lived puerility the blessed message.
The first and every subsequent step of Christianity, as of civilization, has been Westward. Neither can they ever return to the East. The Apostle of the Gentiles preached from Judea to Pamphylia and Galatia, but was forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the Word in Asia;[[49]] and when he assayed to go Eastward into Bithynia, the spirit suffered him not, but compelled him westerly into Macedonia. From Macedonia to Rome; from Rome to Gaul; from Gaul to Britain; from Britain to America and Polynesia, the course has still ever been uniformly westward.[[50]] A few isolated Christians may be made in Asia; but it will never be Christianized. Asia has performed its part on the world’s stage. It is dead out, and cannot be resuscitated. When Christianity is entertained by “all nations,” Asia will be no more. It will not be reckonable among the nations, even as a dead man is not among the living. This may seem a harsh judgment. But is it harsher that nations whose own degradation unfits them for Christianity, shall remain ignorant of it during the brief remainder of the world, than that they have been ignorant of it for nearly two thousand years?
It is not for man to judge God, and to say that his ways are unjust. We must not deny the fact because we cannot comprehend it. We cannot tell by what crimes Asia has forfeited her part in the New Covenant of Grace. It may be because she rejected the first dispensation, and flagrantly violated the Old Covenant of Works. To Asia, the mother of mankind, the blissful seat of our first parents, the nurse of the renovated human race, were given the first pure, simple precepts by which Man was taught to obey his God as a child obeys his parent. How soon she flung off this obedience and rejected her Great Teacher let history, both sacred and profane, attest. Long ere Asia sent forth peoples and nations to replenish other quarters of the earth, these original precepts had been obscured and obliterated by idolatry and polytheism. A lesser crime, therefore, attached to these mis-instructed offsprings than to the misteaching mother. A second dispensation was therefore revealed to them, but forbidden to her. So far man might think he comprehended the divine purposes without impugning God’s wisdom and justice; yet he may err, and his frail musings be but the cogitations of the flea which reasons on the movements of the elephant, whose back is his universe. This should be the humble reflection of all who strive to justify the ways of God to man. We know but in part, and we see but in part, and therefore cannot judge of Him who sees and knows the whole.
We have incidentally mentioned the Hindoos as partaking in the mental degradation of the Chinese. But, nevertheless, they are not nearly so degraded a race, nor have they so general an uniformity in their features, nor so low a formation of their Noses. India has been subjected to less uniformity of despotism than China. While to the dominant system of the latter we can assign no limit, we find in that of the former numerous epochs when important changes have taken place.
Fierce religious wars, frequent foreign invasions, domestic feuds and intestine warfare have kept the Hindoo mind more on the alert than that of China. Assyria, Egypt, Scythia, Greece, Persia, and Britain have at different epochs overwhelmed India. Idolatrous Monotheism, Polytheism, Mahometanism and Christianity have, in turn, violated its shrines, and endeavoured to overwhelm both Buddha and Brahma. Buddha and Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, have striven to overthrow each other; but while the country has been desolated, the people have been saved from sinking into the uniform degradation of the Chinese. Nevertheless, under each and every system, despotism has prevailed in India; no free institution has ever flourished on its plains; and, therefore, despite the stirring events which have excited it, it has never risen again to that high station which its people must have held among their contemporaries when they sculptured the caves of Elephanta and Ellora, and raised the pyramidal pagodas of Tanjore and Deogur.
These gigantic works sufficiently attest that the inhabitants of India are not naturally of a low-class race. Forty thousand men labouring incessantly for forty years would hardly suffice to excavate and sculpture the cavern-temples of Salsette alone. Yet those form but a small portion of similar gigantic works of the same age.
No mean-minded men raised fanes such as these to the Deity. Energy of the most vigorous character, talent of the highest rank, and devotion of the noblest nature, could alone have dictated and executed structures which outvie in magnitude the boldest efforts of modern genius. In comparing them with the latter, we should moreover recollect that they were the first efforts of the human race; made without pattern, designed without exemplar, and commenced and carried out without experience.
How different must those men have been from the soft and effeminate Hindoo who has forgotten in the mist of ages these shrines of his fathers, and abandoned them to ruin and decay; and who, conscious of his own utter inability to achieve or conceive their equals, ascribes their formation to giants and demigods. And they were different. The same race, but different men, different in features as in minds. While the profile of the modern Hindoo is soft and effeminate, and the Nose short and rounded (parabolic), the ancient sculptures demonstrate that the profile of their earliest progenitors was manly and decided, and identical with that of their descendants, the Indo-Germanic nations, in Europe. One well-known instance will suffice. The Trimurti or three-headed deity in the caves of Elephanta.