The very hope I have that Christianity will conquer China makes me fearful for the future. The age of persecution is past, the blood of the martyrs has been shed, and the seed of a Church freely sown. But after the age of persecution comes the age of heresy, and to preserve Christianity in China from future dangers, not only is union necessary, but a well-ordered Church bound by creeds, respecting tradition, which shall embrace all those Christians by whomsoever they have been converted who love the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great danger I fear for the future Church in China is one of Eastern and not Western origin. I do not fear the domination of Rome. I doubt that the Protestant Communions will succeed in ultimately persuading the Chinese to worship God in a bare building and without vestments.
China and Japan will, if they are conquered by Christianity, be neither Protestant nor Catholic any more than we are Nestorian or Eutychian. Their divisions, their dangers, their struggles, will arise from a wholly different set of circumstances. I fear the dangers will come from an effort to incorporate Buddhism and Christianity in one religion. This is all the more probable as it has doubtless happened before. Nestorianism and Buddhism are the probable parents of the present Chinese Lamaism. It is, however, not given for us to see into the future, but we can look back into the past, and we can see that our predecessors in the faith nearly invariably made the mistake of supposing that the old dangers were going to recur, and of therefore depending on the old measures of defence.
The future Church in the Far East must fight her own battles. She must solve her own problems. All we can do is to hand over to her the truth in all its fulness, and teach her to look for divine guidance, to forget such words as Protestant, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and Anglican; to learn merely the word "Christian" and the word "Love." If Far Eastern Christianity will have its battles to fight, it will have also its message to give to the West, "that they without us should not be made perfect." It may be that the message of the East to the West will be that as God is One, so must His followers be; that strong and mighty as is the West, there is in her an element of the very greatest weakness; that the discord that reigns between Christian and Christian, between race and race, between class and class, is not the will of the Creator, but is the result of the national sins of the white races. The Far East, with its greater power of unity, may illumine the West with a higher conception of this great virtue, and the world may be a far holier and happier place when the yellow race has preached to the world the great doctrine of peace on earth and goodwill to men.
THE NEW AND THE OLD LEARNING
CHAPTER XXI
EDUCATION, CHIEFLY MISSIONARY
I have before had occasion to refer to the great influence education has had on the awakening of China, and I think the Americans can fairly claim to have been the greatest workers in this field. The Roman Catholics have from time immemorial been most careful to train children in Christian truth, and they have wonderful institutions for this purpose. In 1852 the Jesuits founded the College of St. Ignatius for the education of native priests, and since that day they have founded many educational institutions. They have besides a very large number of primary schools, intended originally merely to preserve their converts from too intimate contact with the heathen world, and they have also many higher schools. In those schools they teach modern knowledge, making a speciality of teaching French, which they can do with great efficiency, as many of their number belong to the French nation. In the German sphere of influence there are Catholic schools where German is taught; but though the work is excellent, it cannot be compared with the work of the Americans, who were really the pioneers of higher education in China.