This edict can perhaps be regarded rather as a victory of French diplomacy than of the Roman Church. French diplomacy had converted the whole of the Roman Catholic work into an agency for the national aggrandisement of France; the Roman Catholic Church had sold herself to the French Government; her old traditional policy of employing the powers of this world to propagate Christianity had involved her in this position; and she had presented Christianity to her converts as something which, however great its spiritual gain, had also very real temporal advantages. The Church was a great society which would defend you in this world just as it would give you promises of security in the world to come. So she had instituted a regular system by which her adherents were defended in any lawsuit or attack. This interference in lawsuits was, however, not peculiar to the Roman Catholics. It is an old Chinese custom—a custom in which both Romans and other denominations have acquiesced; still it was exaggerated by the Roman Catholic Church till it brought down upon her the anger of the Chinese official world.
It is hard for a Westerner, with his ideas of an independent court of justice, to comprehend the system. A lawsuit is not regarded in China as a thing to be settled simply on its merits. They are only a factor in the decision. The general desire is that, if all things are equal, justice shall be done; but together with justice the judge has to consider the social position of the litigants and their power of vengeance or of reward. The best analogy to a Chinese lawsuit is an English election. If you read the speeches and addresses you will conceive that the whole desire of a candidate engaged in an English election is that justice should be done, but in practice you soon discover that the influence of individuals has to be considered as well. A candidate who always disregards justice is universally condemned; but a candidate who wilfully offends powerful people, who is not prepared to give and take, to sacrifice a conviction here, to push forward a little beyond the line of justice there, is equally unable to gain the suffrages of the voters; and in China the judge stands in the same position as the candidate does in England. If he is convinced that a certain cause is backed by very powerful people who can secure him a better appointment and a higher salary, or who if angered might even succeed in getting him dismissed from his post, he decides the case in that litigant's favour. If, on the other hand, the parties are about equally matched in influence and power, like the English candidate he then considers the justice of the case; and therefore the first thing a litigant does is to try and secure all the influential support within his reach. Chinese officials told me that they have to have their cards printed with "for visiting purposes only" written on them, otherwise they are stolen and used without their knowledge in the furtherance of some lawsuit, and English Protestant missionaries confirmed the story.
Though this interference in lawsuits is a universal custom, its extreme use is peculiar to the Roman Catholics. To attack a Roman Catholic was to bring the whole strength of his mission, with the diplomacy of France behind it, against you. It was in furtherance of this policy that the Roman Catholics were anxious to hold official rank. An official will not speak to any one below his rank; the missionary finds access to the Viceroys very difficult; but if the Roman Hierarchy had this high official rank, the Bishop had only to pay a visit in his green official chair, when, by the strict etiquette of China, he must be received with all politeness, and his visit must be returned. To procure these privileges the Roman Catholics were prepared to sell to France the large and undoubted influence they had among many thousands in China. There is a certain poetic justice in the Roman Catholic Church suffering from the actions of the French Government at home.
Still justice compels us to remember that they have not been alone in this policy. Missionaries of other faiths and other lands have both relied on the defence of foreign powers and have interfered with the lawsuits of their converts. A Protestant missionary from the Southern States of America frankly defended the system. He boldly asserted that non-interference in a lawsuit would be simply misunderstood by the Chinese. When he was young he had absolutely refused to interfere in a case where a widow was being oppressed, and a non-Christian Chinese gentleman had interviewed him, and after some circumlocution, had remonstrated with him on his hardness of heart, that he, a teacher of the religion of love, should neglect the widow in her necessity. Still, the Roman Church, as in Ireland, as in France, as in Italy, is an institution which is essentially political; and the traditional policy of the Roman Church has been followed in China with the invariable result, first, that when the power of the State is used to promote her tenets she grows strong, and next when that power is withdrawn or becomes hostile she feels the loss of the earthly support on which she has relied and apparently grows weaker. This is, however, only transitory; the Roman Church, for instance, is growing stronger, not weaker, now that she has lost the support of French diplomacy, and the missions have entered upon their third epoch when they are preaching Christianity without any special support of a foreign government and are succeeding. For there are few bodies of people in this world who are more heroic and devoted than the Roman missionaries; they have died by fever, have been massacred, they live on a miserable pittance; I was told that one enlightened missionary, once a Professor in Paris University, lived on £12 a year; and their heroism and self-denial reaps a large reward.
Their most beautiful and most successful works are the orphanages which they maintain. They accept any of those children whom the Chinese mothers cast out to die, either because of their poverty or because they are girls. These children are brought up with infinite care and kindness, and are taught embroidery, lace-making, and other trades. No more beautiful sight can be seen than one of these orphanages, with the happy children hard at work and rejoicing as only Chinese rejoice in pleasant labour. When these children grow up they are married to Christians, and from them springs a native Christian population, which has never known any of the horrors of heathenism. As a rule they live in small societies. I believe there is an island on the Yangtsze which is entirely peopled by Christians. The work may be great, but the cost is great too. Many a life has been laid down so that these children might be Christians.
I recall one scene at Ichang. There rises near the town a great orphanage, and when we visited it, we found the French sisters looking weary and whiter than their white robes. An epidemic of smallpox had broken out in the orphanage, and out of 140 orphans, 28 had died of small-pox, besides which the sisters had suffered themselves from malaria. One could but admire the devotion of these women living far off from their own country, tending children whom no one else would tend, and gaining as their reward hatred and misunderstanding from the Chinese. A Bishop belonging to this mission had been murdered, and a lay brother told me that it was because they were accused of stealing children to make Western medicine out of their eyes. This strange slander arises apparently from the desire, which is not understood by the Chinese, to save and preserve the lives of other people's children. Chinese ethics have no place for such altruism. Your duty never extends beyond your own relations, either by blood or from official position. There is another reason, however, for this notion. The Roman Catholics have a system of native agents who are prepared to baptize any child, whether of heathen or Christian parents, who is dying. This system is very well organised. Some of these agents perambulate districts and some remain at fixed points. Perhaps not unnaturally the Chinese cannot understand this methodical search for dying children, and as a reason must be found, and as the reason that seems most probable to the Chinese mind is some form of personal gain, they have invented this slander.
Whether we approve or disapprove the general action of the Roman Catholics—and our feelings are probably very mixed on this subject—we must recognise that they are a very great factor in the change that is coming over China. For centuries they have stood before the Chinese as associating with Christianity the science and the knowledge the Chinese have always admired. The wonderful work done by the Jesuits of the eighteenth century has established a tradition of excellent scientific work which is well maintained by the learned brothers of the Ziccawei Observatory. Many hundreds of lives have been saved at sea by the splendid meteorological service they have organised, and the sailor who cares nothing for Roman or for Protestant walks down on the Bund to see what the Ziccawei brothers can tell him about the probability of a typhoon. The benefit of their service, though great, is not limited to the number of lives of mariners that their science preserves; their science is an object-lesson to the Chinese—an object-lesson especially useful at a time when materialism is taunting Christianity with obscurantism.
Missionaries in the field do not entirely recognise the connection that exists between their own work and the work of other denominations. The man on the mission field sees his bit of work, and realises that it is a failure or that it is a success, but he does not realise how intimately associated that success or failure is with world movements over which he has but the very slightest control. These world movements are dependent on many factors that must be beyond his direct knowledge, and one of the factors that influence the success of Protestant missions is the wide influence of Catholic work. Conversely every new Protestant mission that opens the door of a school or a college probably tends to augment the number of Roman Catholics in China. The question put to the Chinaman is not, "Will you be Roman or Protestant?" That was the question that was put to the European in the sixteenth century. The question is, "Will you become a materialist or a Christian?" And the answer he makes must be largely affected by his experience of the intellectual efficiency and high moral tone of those he calls Christians. I despair of persuading my Protestant friends that the reputation of the Ziccawei brothers is a valuable asset in evangelical work, and I equally despair of persuading the Roman Catholic that the splendid educational establishments of American Protestantism is one of the reasons why their numbers are increasing by leaps and bounds; but the Chinaman would probably think the remark self-obvious.
How small the differences appear that we think so profound was first brought home to me as we passed through the Red Sea on the French mail in company with a body of Coptic schoolmasters who were going to civilise Menelik's subjects in Abyssinia. As it was Sunday morning these young men came up to me to ask an explanation of the ceremony of ship inspection which is performed with some pomp by the French captain on that day. With a wholly exaggerated idea as to the religiosity of the French they had concluded that this was a Christian ceremony, and when I had explained to them that on a French ship it was illegal to have a service, they were distressed, for they explained that though they had been educated in many different quarters, they were all in agreement on religious matters. One had been educated in the Protestant College in Beyrout, and another had been educated in the Jesuit College at Cairo, which, he added in explanation, is practically the same thing. This statement would be regarded as accurate by the average Chinaman.