We are told that we cannot convert the Chinese. Why, Christianity, while it was yet in its cradle, without churches, without schools, without a printing press, without literature, Christianity infantile vanquished the serpents that had strangled the military Hercules. If we cannot, with the Christianity that we possess to-day, vanquish the semi-civilized paganism of China, we had better get a new Christianity, for we sorely need it.
Let us look, then, at the other method of protecting our nation from the incursion of the Chinese. The one is the barbaric method, the method of military Rome; the other is the Christian method, the method of the successors and followers of the Apostles and of the Lord Jesus Christ. What is this method? What does it involve? It involves welcoming the Chinese to our shores; throwing open the gates; recognizing the truth that the earth is the Lord’s, and that all peoples are entitled to make their home here if they will; welcoming them to all the protection—I do not say to all the powers—of citizenship; holding over them the shield of the Declaration of Independence, and declaring for them the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” It involves bringing them into our schools and into our churches; teaching them that which we teach ourselves and our children; teaching them those things upon which our own intelligence and prosperity and our own national life are based. Above all, it involves teaching them those great principles of Christianity which are the very conservation of national force and the saviours of the nation. It involves teaching them that there is one God; that we are all one family, brethren in the Lord Jesus Christ, doubly brethren—born of God and redeemed by Christ; it involves teaching them immortality, and all the glorious hopes and liberations that come from the faith of immortality; it involves all the assimilating and unifying force and power that come from teaching the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of the human race.
And, observe, you cannot carry on these two methods simultaneously. You cannot say, “We will exclude the Chinese, but if they do come here we will convert them.” You cannot ask the Chinaman to kneel down with you and say, “Our Father which art in Heaven,” and then, when he has finished, take him by the throat and toss him into the Pacific. You cannot say to a Chinaman, “You are my brother, get out of here!” You cannot be both Christian and Pagan; you must take your choice.
It is said that the Chinese cannot be converted, that they are impervious to Christian influences, and that they repudiate and reject all such. What have been the Christian influences that have been showered upon them? They have been impervious to the guns of England when they flamed out, “You shall take opium!” they have been impervious to the influence of Dennis Kearney’s brick-bats when they have been flung at them in the street. I do not wonder that they were impervious to that kind of Christianity. Cannot be converted? Men call this an age of scepticism; but the unbelief that doubts the first chapter of Genesis, that thinks the story of the Fall is a parable, that is uncertain whether the whale did really swallow Jonah or not, that doubts whether those three men went into the fiery furnace unconsumed, is as nothing compared with the unbelief that lurks sometimes in our pulpits and oftener in our pews, that doubts the declaration that the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ is the power of God unto salvation to every man that believeth—not to every Anglo-Saxon man, not to every white man, not to every cultured man, but to every black man, and red-skinned man, and copper-colored man, and Indian man, and Chinaman,—to humanity. It is as nothing compared with the infidelity that puts under its foot the obligation: “I am debtor to the Jew, and to the Greek, to the bond and to the free, to the white, to the black, to the Indian, to every man, because for every man my Christ died.”
We cannot convert the Chinese? Really it does not lie in us to say they are beyond hope. Let me read you the features of a portrait:
“Huge, white bodies, cool-blooded, with fierce blue eyes and reddish flaxen hair; ravenous stomachs, filled with meat and cheese, heated by strong drinks; of a cold temperament, slow to love, home stayers, prone to drunkenness! * * pirates at first; * * sea-faring, war, and pillage, their only idea of a freeman’s work; * * of all barbarians the strongest of body and heart, the most formidable, the most cruelly ferocious; * * torture and carnage, greed of danger, fury of destruction, obstinate and frenzied bravery of an over-strong temperament, the unchaining of the butcherly instincts; * * with a great and coarse appetite.”—[Compiled from Taine’s English Literature, vol. I pp. 30–33.] Do you recognize it? It is the portrait of your ancestors and mine; and if Christianity can make out of that picture such an audience as I see before me to-night, what may it not make out of China?
To-night again we see in the heavens, brighter and clearer by far than ever Constantine saw in his fabled vision, that flaming cross, and under it the motto, “By this sign I will conquer.” That motto, enforced by the history of eighteen centuries of triumph, I set before you; the Roman spear on the one hand and the flaming cross on the other: choose you by which sign you will vanquish the Chinese.
OUR GROUNDS OF ENCOURAGEMENT.
REV. SAMUEL SCOVILLE, STAMFORD, CONN.