But there is another form of this awakened Eastern thought which invites our attention and which concerns [pg 295] the missionary work not a little. It appears there in a reactionary form among men of culture and leads many of them to turn away in hearty disapproval from our faith. They are wonderfully drawn towards Christ, our Lord. His praises are in their mouths, and they eagerly study his example and life. They claim him as one of the East and, therefore, as one of themselves. But these same men will have none of Christianity, because it is, as they say, of the West, Western. One of their number recently wrote an article under the following caption:—“Why do We Hindus Accept Christ and Reject Christianity?” He claims that they reject our faith because it is “not Christianity but Churchianity”; that is, it savours of the Western Church more than it does of Christ. There is a great deal that is false and foolish in this contention; and yet it has an element of truth in it. We, of the West, have not realized, perhaps we never can fully realize, the great width of the gulf which, in thought and life, separates the Occident from the Orient. Hence we have in part failed in the duty of adapting our faith, in thought and ritual, to the taste and inherited bias of that people. We forget that they and we usually approach things temporal and spiritual from opposite sides. They are deeply mystical and poetic, while we are obtrusively practical and meanly prosaic. Thus the Western colouring and emphasis which is given to our faith in that land can neither be appreciated nor approved by the educated Hindu. Even native Christians are bemoaning this fact. I shall never forget the eloquent appeal which the Hon. Kali Churn Banerjee, a leading native Christian in that land, [pg 296] made before the Bombay Missionary Conference, begging the missionaries to cease emphasizing, as he said, “adjectival” Christianity and to dwell more upon “substantive” Christianity before the people of India. It is a sad fact that we carry there our Western shibboleths, our antiquated controversies, and our sectional jealousies. Most of these are not only unintelligible in India; they weary the people and largely bury the essentials of our faith from public gaze and appreciation.
The question returns to us with a new emphasis today,—How much of our Western Christianity can we eliminate and how much must we retain in order to present to that people the gospel in its simplicity and saving power? How much of our modern Christianity is the product of Western thought, interpretation and life, and how much is of the very essence of Christ's message? We have yet much to learn and are to be overtaken by many surprises in this matter, I believe. God forbid that we should rob our message of one tittle of its essential truth. But may He enable us to discriminate more and more, and lead us to cease encumbering our gospel to the East with such unessential thought and ritual as are suited to us but not to them.
I doubt whether we of the West can accomplish this—it can be fully done only when the Christian Church in India shall have become indigenous and strong, and, when freed from Western influence and leadership, it shall do its own thinking and shape its own ritual and ceremonial on Eastern lines. Then indeed shall we behold that welcome and mighty movement which will draw completely the culture [pg 297] of India into the Christian Church. Then also, and not until then, shall we begin to see the Indian Church contributing her share to the Christian thought and life of the world. We, of the proud West, are prone to think that our type of life is all-embracing and that our religious thought is all-satisfying. Nothing can be more fallacious or more injurious than such a conceit. The East is the full complement of the West. In life and thought we are only an hemisphere, and we need the East to fill up our full-orbed beauty. The mystic piety of India will correct our too practical, mundane view of things. The quiet, passive virtues which find their perfect realization in that land we must learn from them to accentuate in addition to the more aggressive and positive virtues of the West. All this is to take place in the no distant future. The Kingdom of Christ in the East is to reach out its hand to the West and both, in mutual helpfulness, will coöperate in bringing this whole world to Christ. Then shall we see a universal kingdom and the beginning of the fulfillment of the blessed vision in which “the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.” God hasten the day.
Chapter X.
Missionary Results.
We are occasionally compelled to read and to hear detailed and emphatic statements about “the failure of missions.” An increasing number of our countrymen spend their vacation days in hurried trips through mission fields. They are so impressed by glimpses of the strange life and institutions of the Orient that they have neither time nor inclination to study and appreciate the missionary work and organization which everywhere invites their attention. They return home absolutely ignorant of the work whose power, prevalence and progress they might easily have learned on their travels, and they are wont to hide that ignorance behind the emphatic assurance that “there was nothing to be seen” of missions; and they soon convince themselves, and not a few others, that what they did not see was not worth seeing or was, perchance, non-existent. I have long lived on one of the great lines of travel in India and have sorrowed over the fact that hardly one in ten of our travelling countrymen (and many of them members of our home churches too) turn aside for a moment from gazing upon Hindu temples to study the important work which our mission is carrying forward in that city and district.
Even the friends of missions should learn what constitutes missionary success.
In South India there is found a mission which counts its converts only by the hundreds. It is known in Christian lands only through the severe criticisms which have been heaped upon it by some good Christian men because it is an educational mission.