VI
The expectation that Japan would speedily announce to the world her adoption of Christianity was not so unreasonable as some other expectations of former days. Yet it might well seem to have been more so. There were no precedents upon which to build so large a hope. No Oriental race has ever yet been converted to Christianity. Even under British rule, the wonderful labors of the Catholic propaganda in India have been brought to a standstill. In China, after centuries of missions, the very name of Christianity is detested,—and not without cause, since no small number of aggressions upon China have been made in the name of Western religion. Nearer home, we have made even less progress in our efforts to convert Oriental races. There is not the ghost of a hope for the conversion of the Turks, the Arabs, the Moors, or of any Islamic people; and the memory of the Society for the Conversion of the Jews only serves to create a smile. But, even leaving the Oriental races out of the question, we have no conversions whatever to boast of. Never within modern history has Christendom been able to force the acceptance of its dogmas upon a people able to maintain any hope of national existence. The nominal[1] success of missions among a few savage tribes, or the vanishing Maori races, only proves the rule; and unless we accept the rather sinister declaration of Napoleon that missionaries may have great political usefulness, it is not easy to escape the conclusion that the whole work of the foreign mission societies has been little more than a vast expenditure of energy, time, and money, to no real purpose.
In this last decade of the nineteenth century, at all events, the reason should be obvious. A religion means much more than mere dogma about the supernatural: it is the synthesis of the whole ethical experience of a race, the earliest foundation, in many cases, of its wiser laws, and the record, as well as the result, of its social evolution. It is thus essentially a part of the race-life, and cannot possibly be replaced in any natural manner by the ethical and social experience of a totally alien people,—that is to say, by a totally alien religion. And no nation in a healthy social state can voluntarily abandon the faith so profoundly identified with its ethical life. A nation may reshape its dogmas: it may willingly even accept another faith; but it will not voluntarily cast away its older belief, even when the latter has lost all ethical or social usefulness. When China accepted Buddhism, she gave up neither the moral codes of her ancient sages, nor her primitive ancestor-worship; when Japan accepted Buddhism, she did not forsake the Way of the Gods. Parallel examples are yielded by the history of the religions of antique Europe. Only religions the most tolerant can be voluntarily accepted by races totally alien to those that evolved them; and even then only as an addition to what they already possess, never as a substitute for it. Wherefore the great success of the ancient Buddhist missions. Buddhism was an absorbing but never a supplanting power: it incorporated alien faiths into its colossal system, and gave them new interpretation. But the religion of Islam and the religion of Christianity—Western Christianity—have always been religions essentially intolerant, incorporating nothing and zealous to supplant everything. To introduce Christianity, especially into an Oriental country, necessitates the destruction not only of the native faith but of the native social systems as well. Now the lesson of history is that such wholesale destruction, can be accomplished only by force, and, in the case of a highly complex society, only by the most brutal force. And force, the principal instrument of Christian propagandism in the past, is still the force behind our missions. Only we have, or affect to have, substituted money power and menace for the franker edge of the sword; occasionally fulfilling the menace for commercial reasons in proof of our Christian professions. We force missionaries upon China, for example, under treaty clauses extorted by war; and pledge ourselves to support them with gunboats, and to exact enormous indemnities for the lives of such as get themselves killed. So China pays blood-money at regular intervals, and is learning more and more each year to understand the value of what we call Christianity. And the saying of Emerson, that by some a truth can never be comprehended until its light happens to fall upon a fact, has been recently illustrated by some honest protests against the immorality of missionary aggressions in China,—protests which would never have been listened to before it was discovered that the mission troubles were likely to react against purely commercial interests.
But in spite of the foregoing considerations there was really at one time fair reason for believing the nominal conversion of Japan quite possible. Men could not forget that after the Japanese Government had been forced by political necessity to extirpate the wonderful Jesuit missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the very word Christian had become a term of hatred and scorn.[2]
But the world had changed since then; Christianity had changed; and more than thirty different Christian sects were ready to compete for the honor of converting Japan. Out of so large a variety of dogmas, representing the principal shades both of orthodoxy and of heterodoxy, Japan might certainly be able to choose a form of Christianity to her own taste! And the conditions of the country were more propitious than ever before for the introduction of some Western religion. The whole social system had been disorganized to the very core; Buddhism had been disestablished, and was tottering under the blow; Shintō appeared to be incapable of resistance; the great military caste had been abolished; the system of rule had been changed; the provinces had been shaken by war; the Mikado, veiled for centuries, had shown himself to his astonished people; the tumultuous flood of new ideas threatened to sweep away all customs and to wreck all beliefs; and the preaching of Christianity had been once more tolerated by law. Nor was this all. In the hour of its prodigious efforts to reconstruct society, the Government had actually considered the question of Christianity—just as shrewdly and as impartially as it had studied the foreign educational, military, and naval systems. A commission was instructed to report upon the influence of Christianity in checking crime and vice abroad. The result confirmed the impartial verdict of Kaempffer, in the seventeenth century, upon the ethics of the Japanese: "They profess a great respect and veneration for their Gods, and worship them in various ways. And I think I may affirm that, in the practice of virtue, in purity of life, and outward devotion, they far outdo the Christians."
In short, it was wisely decided that the foreign religion, besides its inappropriateness to the conditions of Oriental society, had proved itself less efficacious as an ethical influence in the West than Buddhism had done in the East. Certainly, in the great jiujutsu there could have been little to gain, but much to lose, by a patriarchal society established on the principle of reciprocal duties, through the adoption of the teaching that a man shall leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife.[3]
The hope of making Japan Christian by Imperial edict has passed; and with the reorganization of society, the chances of making Christianity, by any means whatever, the national religion, grow less and less. Probably missionaries must be tolerated for some time longer, in spite of their interference in matters altogether outside of their profession; but they will accomplish no moral good, and in the interim they will be used by those whom they desire to use. In 1894 there were in Japan some eight hundred Protestant, ninety-two Roman Catholic, and three Greek Catholic missionaries; and the total expenditure for all the foreign missions in Japan must represent not much less than a million dollars a year,—probably represents more. As a result of this huge disbursement, the various Protestant sects claim to have made about 50,000 converts, and the Catholics an equal number; leaving some thirty-nine million nine hundred thousand unconverted souls. Conventions, and very malignant ones, forbid all unfavorable criticism of mission reports; but in spite of them I must express my candid opinion that even the above figures are not altogether trustworthy. Concerning the Roman Catholic missions, it is worthy of note that they profess with far smaller means to have done as much work as their rivals; and that even their enemies acknowledge a certain solidity in that work—which begins, rationally enough, with the children. But it is difficult not to feel skeptical as to mission reports: when one knows that among the lowest classes of Japanese there are numbers ready to profess conversion for the sake of obtaining pecuniary assistance or employment; when one knows that poor boys pretend to become Christians for the sake of obtaining instruction in some foreign language; when one hears constantly of young men, who, after professing Christianity for a time, openly return to their ancient gods; when one sees—immediately after the distribution by missionaries of foreign contributions for public relief in time of flood, famine, or earthquake—sudden announcement of hosts of conversions, one is obliged to doubt not only the sincerity of the converted, but the morality of the methods. Nevertheless, the expenditure of one million dollars a year in Japan for one hundred years might produce very large results, the nature of which may be readily conceived, though scarcely admired; and the existing weakness of the native religions, both in regard to educational and financial means of self-defense, tempts aggression. Fortunately there now seems to be more than a mere hope that the Imperial Government will come to the aid of Buddhism in matters educational. On the other hand, there is at least a faint possibility that Christendom, at no very distant era, may conclude that her wealthiest missions are becoming transformed into enormous mutual benefit societies.
[1] Nominal, because the simple fact is that the real object of missions is impossible. This whole question has been very strongly summed up in a few lines by Herbert Spencer:—
"Everywhere, indeed, the special theological bias, accompanying a special set of doctrines, inevitably prejudges many sociological questions. One who holds a creed to be absolutely true, and who by implication holds the multitudinous other creeds to be absolutely false in so far as they differ from his own, cannot entertain the supposition that the value of a creed is relative. That each religious system is, in its general characters, a natural part of the society in which it is found, is an entirely alien conception, and indeed a repugnant one. His system of dogmatic theology he thinks good for all places and all times. He does not doubt that, when planted among a horde of savages, it will be duly understood by them, duly appreciated by them, and will work upon them results such as those he experiences from it. Thus prepossessed, he passes over the proofs that a people is no more capable of receiving a higher form of religion than it is capable of receiving a higher form of government; and that inevitably along with such religion, as with such government, there will go on a degradation which presently reduces it to one differing but nominally from its predecessor. In other words, his special theological bias blinds him to an important class of sociological truths."
[2] The missionary work was begun by St. Francis Xavier, who landed at Kagoshima in Kyūshū on the 15th of August, 1549. A curious fact is that the word Bateren, a corruption of the Portuguese or Spanish padre, and so adopted into the language two centuries ago, still lingers among the common people in some provinces as a synonym for "wicked magician." Another curious fact worth mentioning is that a particular kind of bamboo screen—from behind which a person can see all that goes on outside the house without being himself seen—is still called a Kirishitan (Christian).