Translated by the Rev. Dr. Griffith John.
One cannot but admire Chou-han for his outspoken boldness, as also for his persistence in opposing what he believes to be a depraved heresy. On the other hand, turning to his tracts, it is difficult to believe that any one could circulate them with a good intention.
People who do not believe the Chinese would be any better for becoming Christians can be but little interested in missionaries. Those who, on the other hand, really believe we have glad tidings to tell to them may doubt whether quite the right means are being taken to deliver the message. If every one who went out to China lived as a Christian should, it clearly would have a far more striking effect; but whilst Europe remains what it is, that seems at least as unattainable as converting the Chinese. Of those who are converted, I have come across thousands of Roman Catholics who have borne the burning of their houses and devastation of their property. There were four thousand Roman Catholic refugees in Chungking in the summer of 1898. Not a few have been killed. And in the west of China several cases have occurred where men have been offered their lives if they would burn incense upon Buddhist altars, and have refused and been martyred. I do not know how converts could more prove their sincerity than by thus dying. But of Protestant converts, too, I do not think the staunchness has at all sufficiently been estimated. When riot after riot occurred all along the Yangtse, in some cases all the foreigners went away, leaving their converts to shift for themselves. Native evangelists carried on the services, and there were the congregations just the same when the missionaries came back. Whilst, to turn to lesser persecutions, sometimes even harder to bear, how many Chinese Christians have seen their business fall away from them, and from a position of competence have been reduced to poverty! As long as Treaty Ports exist in China, probably their common talk will be that Chinese Christians are no good; for there of all places men of bad character may be expected to join the Christian communities from interested motives: but on the whole, though naturally they cannot attain to all the Christian virtues at once—it will probably require a generation or two to arrive at such an approximation even as we have ourselves arrived at—yet in the matter of staunchness Chinese Christians stand as high as the Christians of any nation at any age.
COLOSSAL GILDED BUDDHA.
By Mrs. Archibald Little.
If my opinion, however, be anything worth, and on this matter I am not the least sure it is, it is not money so much our missionaries want in the East as sympathetic upholding. Let them feel that their countrymen, not missionaries in name, are wishing them more power, and not taking account of their failures, and they will be upborne to do greater deeds than those of old. Would, however, that missionaries may also believe that those not nominally of their band may notwithstanding be animated by quite as living a Christian zeal!
As it is, the way in which missionaries and merchants eye each other askance is often very painful. As to the differences between the sects, I think these are as much and as needlessly exaggerated as those between different kinds of Chinese. Chinese converts must be further advanced in Christianity than is often the case now to be able to appreciate the difference even between Roman Catholicism and Congregationalism. They see there is a difference in ceremonial. But to that Chinese are much too wise to attach much importance. They fancy all are "good talkees" of different kinds. And are they far wrong? The sincerer the Christian the less importance he always seems to attach to differences of belief and form.
It is sad to reflect that had there not been such fierce rivalries between the cardinals in the thirteenth century, and a consequent Papal interregnum of three years, Kublai Khan's request to the two brothers Polo would have probably been acceded to, and the Chinese become Christians then en masse, after the fashion of the kindred Russian race. Kublai Khan had "begged the Pope would send as many as one hundred persons of our Christian faith; intelligent men, acquainted with the Seven Arts, well qualified to enter into controversy, and able clearly to prove by force of argument to idolaters and other kinds of folk, that the law of Christ was best, and that all other religions were false and naught, and that if they would prove this, he and all under him would become Christians and the Church's liegemen. Finally, he charged his envoys to bring back to him some of the oil of the Lamp which burns on the sepulchre of our Lord at Jerusalem." There is a miniature of the fourteenth century of the great Khan delivering a golden tablet to the brothers. They started for Rome on this mission with a Tartar Baron, but he fell sick and went back. They were three years upon the journey, then delayed, waiting till a Pope, Gregory of Piacenza, was at last appointed. He sent two learned Dominicans with them—two instead of a hundred—and these two friars were terrified by a Saracen outbreak, and turned back in their turn. Again, in the eighteenth century the Chinese would, it seems, have become Christians, but that the Dominicans then came and opposed the Jesuits, who had effected an entrance in 1580, and had gained great influence over the Emperor and the nation. The Dominicans and Franciscans condemned the Jesuit toleration of ancestral worship, and for the second time China was thrown back. The Emperor and his advisers were considering whether Christianity should not be proclaimed the religion of the country, when the coup d'état came. Those of the reformers who have survived, and the Emperor Kwang-shü through them, have thus for the third time been holding out asking hands to Christendom.
In all these cases it has been European enlightenment, as embodied in Christianity, that the Chinese through their Emperors have asked for. But already we hear of governors and high officials actually becoming Christians themselves individually. Up till now none had certainly joined the Protestant Church, and I think none had been baptised into the Roman Catholic Church, for I have always understood in China it was doubted whether a man could become a Christian and retain official place.