QJortttll Hmtteraty Hiheary Jtljara, SJem fork CHARLES WILLIAM WASON COLLECTION CHINA AND THE CHINESE THE GIFT OF CHARLES WILLIAM WASON CLASS OF 1876 1918 Date Due MAR 1 1 1947 V/\%'\ & JAN 6 1852 1S5&- ■MUD - ■3 05/1 ni r Dfccijy^s^ i r^j j' -C' ^T'M) (5^412> Cornell University Library BV 3415.L73 A Chinese appeal to Christendom concerni 3 1924 022 972 586 The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022972586 &w$fyv*^&~- 'ft' /,y A A CHINESE APPEAL TO CHRISTENDOM CONCERNING CHRISTIAN MISSIONS BY LIN SHAO-YANG G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON Knickerbocker press 1911 L73 Copyright, 1911 BY G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS V\l 33 S3 ttbe ftnfcftetbocSct ptcaa, new ffiotft CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF CHRISTENDOM AND MISSIONARY ACTIVITY ... I II. THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE FAR EAST . ... 21 III. MISSIONARIES AND THEIR METHODS . . 40 IV. MISSIONARY MOTIVES, THE CHINESE CHARAC- TER, AND THE ATTITUDE OF YOUNG CHINA 56 V. RELIGIOUS TOLERANCE IN CHINA . . 7 1 VI. MONASTICISM IN CHINA, CHRISTIAN INTOLER- ANCE , AND THE CONVERSION OF ABORIGINES 8 1 VII. REVIVALIST METHODS IN CHINA ... 98 VIII. EMOTIONAL RELIGION . . . . II4 IX. THE PROBLEM OF EVIL AND A PERSONAL DEVIL 1 30 X. CHRISTIAN DEMONOLOGY . . . -145 XI. HELL AND THE DAMNATION OF THE HEATHEN 1 58 XII. PRAYER, FAITH, AND TELEPATHY . -173 XIII. SCIENCE AND PRAYER . . . . 1 9I XIV. CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND SOCIAL PREJUDICES . 212 iv Contents CHAPTER PAGE XV. THE SABBATH ...... 228 XVI. RELIGION, MAGIC, AND WORD-SPELLS . . 238 XVII. CHURCHES, CHURCH-BELLS, AND HYMNS " . 253 XVIII. EASTERN AND WESTERN CIVILISATION, META- MORPHIC CHRISTIANITY, AND BIBLIOLATRY . 273 XIX. WESTERN EDUCATION IN CHINA AND THE , UNITED UNIVERSITIES SCHEME . . 29O INDEX . 313 A CHINESE APPEAL TO CHRISTENDOM CONCERNING CHRISTIAN MISSIONS A CHINESE APPEAL TO CHRISTENDOM CHAPTER I THE RELIGIOUS CONDITION OF CHRISTENDOM AND MISSIONARY ACTIVITY WESTERN residents in the Far East are never weary of emphasising the strangeness and in- accessibility of the Oriental mind. We Chinese, more especially, are continually hearing ourselves criticised as insoluble puzzles. "The European who canunder- stand the Chinese character, ' ' said one who had spent forty yearlTSfthe East, "has not been born into this world." Our Western guests may like us or dislike us, they may magnify our failings or they may speak enthusiastically of our merits, but they will one and all declare with emphasis that we are inscrutable. Very few seem to guess that we Chinese may have the same difficulty in understanding the West that they have in understanding the East; yet surely it should strike them as unreasonable to suppose that if the Oriental 2 Christendom and Missionary Activity mind is opaque to them the Occidental can be wholly transparent to us. If I may presume, indeed, to regard myself as an average representative of my race, I may say with confidence that the Chinese find much that is baffling and mysterious in Western thought, Western character, and Western ideals. After a boyhood and youth spent in the other hemisphere I returned to China with a far more serious doubt about my capacity to interpret Western modes of thought to my fellow- countrymen than when, as a mere child, I went back to the bosom of my family after my first brief visit to one of the great European settlements on the Chinese coast. But it is not my intention in these pages to discuss the question of whether there be indeed some natural law that has set up an impenetrable barrier between East and West. I wish only to draw attention to one sphere of Western activity that denotes an attitude of mind which we Chinese often discuss among ourselves, and which none of us has ever been able fully to understand or to explain. I refer to the work of the Christian missions.. Lest I should be grievously misunderstood, I must hasten to explain that many of us non-Christian Chi- nese have a fair knowledge of your sacred books, and are acquainted with the more obvious reasons (including the alleged commands of the founder of Christianity) that impel you to send missionaries to convert us to your faith. What puzzles us is not merely that you should desire to spread your religion among the people you call heathen, nor that you should be willing to devote time, money, and personal service to this work, nor even that your missionaries should be willing to die for the cause that to them is sacred : all these things we Orien- tals can to some extent understand. What we wonder Christendom and Missionary Activity 3 at is that your missionary zeal should not only remain unabated, but should actually show signs of increasing activity during an epoch which is obviously one of re- ligious unrest throughout all Christian lands, and in which historical research and scientific methods of criticism have caused the gravest doubts to be thrown on the truth of some of the fundamental propositions of the Christian faith. A garrisoned city does not send away the flower of its troops when a powerful enemy is thundering at its gates. A king whose throne is shaken by insurrection within his own dominions and whose capital is being plundered by rebels does not send his most loyal soldiers on adventurous expeditions to foreign lands. It seems strange to those of us who are familiar with the religious situation in Europe that, while unbelief is rapidly spreading among all classes of their own people, missionaries yet go forth in ever-in- creasing numbers to preach the gospel to the heathen. Do they propose to convert China and then wait for the Chinese to re-convert the West? Perhaps few things are more astonishing to the ob- servant Chinese student when he visits a Western country than his discovery that a very great number — if not the majority — of the ed ucate d_men with whom he comes in contact have either renounced Christianity altogether or have remained within the Christian fold only from motives of expediency, perhaps through mere habit or indifference, or because they believe in the social value of the Church of their country as a con- stituent element in the national life. The next signifi- cant discovery he makes is that his rationalist, agnostic, and freethinkingjicc|u aintance s are just as weU^behaveiL and high-principled as the most orthodox of believers. A recent writer in Christian Scotland, himself a believer, admits that "there is at present a widespread alienation 4 Christendom and Missionary Activity from the Christian faith." 1 Canon Henson of West- minster sorrowfully observes that "Christianity no longer holds the supreme position which for centuries it has held in the thought of civilised men." 2 Prof. Henry Jones says, "there is a seething of religious be- liefs and a lawless raging of social forces the like of which has probably not been seen before. " That some of the acutest intellects of the English universities are gravely heterodox in religious matters is a truth that hardly requires emphasis. The works of such distinguished writers as Dr. McTaggart, of Trinity College, Cam- bridge, would certainly not be allowed to see the light if their publication were dependent on an ecclesiastical imprimatur. 3 One of the most able and most damaging of recent criticisms of historical Christianity comes from the pen of one who has been the fellow and praslector of an Oxford college, and whose biblical researches have earned him an honorary doctorate of theology from Giessen. 4 Another Oxford tutor declares that the hold of Christianity on educated young Englishmen was never weaker than it is to-day. s A third Oxford thinker, Mr. H. Sturt, who has lost the honour of persecution through being born a few generations too late, has re- cently published a book in which he holds that, in spite of the poetry and beauty of much of the Old Testament, and the ethical nobleness of the teachings ascribed to Jesus, "of all the terrible intellectual disasters of Europe the Bible has been by far the greatest.' ' He believes I Dr. Pearson McAdam Muir, in Modern Substitutes for Christi- anity. * The Liberty of Prophesying (London: Macmillan & Co.). 3 See especially his admirable work, Some Dogmas of Religion (Lon- don: Edward Arnold, 1906). I I refer to Mr. F. C. Conybeare's Myth, Magic, and Morals (London: Watts & Co., 1909). s H. W. Garrod, Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, in The Religion of All Good Men. Christendom and Missionary Activity 5 that "the ideal of life which Christianity implies is contrary to the best tendencies of the age; that the re- ligion of Christianity has been superseded in the minds of thinking men by a new religious attitude which has for a long time been growing up silently; that its theo- logy has nothing to do with any of our effective convic- tions, and has therefore ceased to be a subject of rational interest ; that its scriptures are alien books which have no relation to our national history and character, and have done great harm by drawing the nation 's thoughts away from the record of its own great deeds and the commemoration of its own heroes." One cannot take up a serious journal nowadays without finding repeated references to the present crisis in Christian beli ef — the subject being variously treated according to the points of view of different writers. The Hibbert Journal — of its kind perhaps the most valuable and interesting periodical published in the English language — opens its columns to religious and philosophic writers of every shade of belief and dis- belief, and a short study of its pages is enough to indi- cate how severely the foundations of dogmatic Christi- anity have been shaken by modern criticism, and how much of the superstructure has already fallen into decay. The Rev. G. A. Johnston Ross says that the evolutionary idea "has revolutionised the presentation of the Christian religion. It has almost fundamentally altered our view of Holy Scriptures, of the history it contains, and of the doctrines it upholds." 2 Mr. Lowes Dickinson — a writer who certainly cannot be charged with being a truculent iconoclast — believes 1 The Idea of a Free Church, pp. 17-18, 303 (The Walter Scott Pub- lishing Co., Ltd., 1909; second edition, published by Watts & Co., London). 3 The Hibbert Journal, July, 1908, p. 765. 6 Christendom and Missionary Activity that no religion "which ought properly to be called Christian can adequately represent the attitude of an intelligent and candid modern man. . . . I need hardly add that a fortiori Roman Catholic or Anglican theo- logy is, in my judgment, incompatible with modern knowledge." 1 The Rev. J. M. Lloyd Thomas ob- serves that "the imposing structure of dogma is every- where falling into ruin. It must be added that many expert theologians have been for a long time perfectly well aware of the fact. But until recently they have more or less successfully suppressed the most alarming symptoms and allayed popular panic by energetic pro- testations that the ancient building was still secure. This pretence can continue no longer. The impending collapse is obvious even to the untrained observer. Orthodoxy has at last been brought before the tribunal of public opinion, and with specially disastrous results for the Protestant religion." 2 Writing in another periodical, an English clergyman admits that the results of the historical criticism of the early Christian documents "have brought about a widespread sceptic- ism as to the historicity of the Christian records." 3 It is clear from such quotations as these (and they might be multiplied indefinitely) that even if an in- quirer were altogether to ignore the writings of pro- fessed disbelievers and the publications of such energetic agencies as the Rationalist Press Association, and were to confine himself wholly to the works of the more conservative theological and biblical scholars and pro- fessors of Apologetics, he would speedily be convinced that the Christian dogmas are being assailed to-day by 1 The Hibbert Journal, April, 1908, p. 515. ' Ibid., July, 1907, p. 798. 3 The Rev. W. B. Selbie, in The Contemporary Review, Feb., 1909, p. 205. Christendom and Missionary Activity 7 scientific critics and even by ethical reformers with a vigour and success that totally differentiate the present movement from the various crises through which the Christian Church has passed in connection with the heresies and schisms of past centuries. In Europe and America theologians such as Harnack, Schmiedel, Wilhelm Soltau, Weinel, Rudolf Schmid, Deissmann, Prof. Wernle of Basel, Loisy, Le Roy, and numerous others, are, each in his own way, subjecting the Christ- ian traditions and dogmas to so drastic a process of attenuation or re-interpretation that it is difficult to see how the Christianity that survives their treatment can consider itself entitled to the name it continues to bear. Certainly it is not the Christianity that is being most widely preached in China to-day. Writers like Sir Oliver Lodge and the late Mr. Hugh MacColl in Eng- land, and the late Prof. James and Prof. Wenley and others in America, have tried to save what they person- ally regard as the essential truths of Christianity by the wholesale sacrifice of much that has hitherto been con- sidered essential by the accredited exponents of orthodox Christian doctrine. They, or some of them, hope to bring about a reconstruction of religious concepts on a safer foundation than that of historical evidence, by means of the ethico-religious consciousness itself. The methods and conclusions of natural science and the results of the historico-critical investigation of the Old and New Testaments have brought about — according to Wenley — the collapse of dogmatic Christianity ; therefore if Christianity is to be saved in any shape at all it must rest on something better than unverifiable dogma. * Three books on the Christian religion, written by 1 See D. C. Macintosh's review of Prof. R. M. Wenley's Modern Thought and the Crisis in Belief (The Baldwin Lectures, 1909), in The American Journal of Theology, Oct., 1909, p. 631. 8 Christendom and Missionary Activity- three American professors, were recently issued almost on the same date. "All three declare with equal em- phasis," says a fourth American professor who wrote a review of their works, "that the Christian Church is now confronted by a crisis of peculiar gravity and urgency." 1 Still more remarkable, as a sign of the times, is the growth of the New Theology in or along- side of the Church of England and its Nonconformist rivals, and the growth of Modernism in or alongside of the Church of Rome. M. Loisy and the Rev. R. J. Campbell are among the leaders of movements which threaten the citadels of Orthodox Roman and Evan- gelical Christianity alike. Irrespective of the direct influence of Modernism, which is costing the Church some of her ablest and most devoted sons, Rome is receiving blow after blow from every land that has hitherto owned her sway. Those who have perused Mr. J. McCabe's important work on The Decay of the Church of Rome 2 are aware that if his figures are reliable the losses suffered by that Church during the past seven decades amount at least to 80,000,000 souls 3 ; and he shows that of the total of 190,000,000 Romanists now in the world more than 120,000,000 must be classed as illiterates. The majority of Catholic adherents consist, he tells us, of "American Indians, half-castes, negroes, and mulattoes ; Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Slavonic peasants of the most backward character; and Indian, Indo-Chinese, and African natives. These make up much more than half the whole. Further, the great bulk of the remainder are the peasants and poor workers of Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, and Ireland." 4 As for France, once the proud "eldest daughter of the 1 See The Hibbert Journal, April, 1908, p. 500. 2 Published, in 1909, by Messrs. Methuen & Co. 3 Op. tit., pp. 297 seq. 4 Op. tit., p. 305. Christendom and Missionary Activity 9 Church," the number of the faithful has fallen to no more than 6,000,000 (at most) out of a population of 39,000,000. x France is no longer a Catholic nation, and she has adopted no other form of Christianity. Simi- larly, free-thought and anti-clericalism are steadily increasing in all the other so-called Catholic countries of Europe, including Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In many parts of those lands the influence of the Church has almost wholly vanished, and her priests are objects of detestation, fear, or contempt. 2 Yet the mj^ifinajxzeal of Christendom in Asia and other parts of the "heathen" world was perhaps never more active than it is at this day! The Chinese, as I have said, cannot pretend fully to understand this strange phenomenon. But though as a non-Christian I hesitate to express opinions of my own on a subject which concerns Christian motives, I may perhaps ven- ture to call attention to certain facts which may, par- tially at least, explain the almost feverish missionary activity that is being shown at present by militant Christendom. It should be remembered, to begin with, that numer- ous as are the benevolent people who regularly support foreign missions, they form but a minute fraction of the population of their respective countries, and that, vast as is the aggregate amount of money annually sub- scribed for mission purposes, it is an almost negligible trifle when compared with the amounts spent on personal pleasure and luxury. 3 As to the sources from which 1 The Decay of the Church of Rome, p. 33. 2 This was written before the expulsion of the monks and nuns from Portugal. s Referring to the collection of mission-funds, that able and clear- sighted observer, Mr. Meredith Townsend, writes thus: "If we had the means of deducting the contributions of about 2000 families who are the mainstay of all missionary bodies and of all charities, the amount io Christendom and Missionary Activity funds are obtained, it may be said that the suppprters of foreign missions are of two classes. A great number contribute to mission work only through the ordinary medium of church collections. They go to church as a matter of weekly routine, and take with them the sum of money that they are in the habit of presenting. If the collections for the day are intended to swell a hospital- fund, their shillings will go to hospitals accordingly; should the parson announce that the collections will go to foreign missions, their contributions will be duly devoted to the expensive process of saving heathen souls. In a vast number of cases the church-member who adds his coin to the heap on the offertory plate neither knows nor (perhaps) very much cares what the destination of his coin may be. He feels sure that it will be used for a good purpose, and with that assurance he is content. The other class of supporters of foreign missions con- sists of those who happen to take a keen personal inter- est in that form of Christian activity, and deliberately devote money and time, and perhaps the labour of their own hands and brains, to the advancement of their favourite philanthropic enterprise. Many are stirred to generosity by the thrilling appeal of a mission- ary who has returned to his native land on holiday; the charitable or religious instincts of others are aroused through reading the biographies of famous missionaries or accounts of Christian martyrdoms. Many are members of a Bible society or of a society for the pro- pagation of the gospel, and they are constant readers of missionary periodicals in which the moral and religious condition of heathen lands is always painted in sombre colours. The large donations and bequests which so frequently come to the net of the missionary associa- raised by the Churches would not appear large, and it is raised with extreme difficulty" (Asia and Europe, 2nd ed., p. 74). Christendom and Missionary Activity n tions, and without which mission work could hardly be carried on, are chiefly derived from warm-hearted people of this kind — most of them, though by no means all, being persons who have never visited a heathen country, and who implicitly accept the missionary's point of view. Such persons — the main supporters of mission- ary enterprise, and the class from which missionaries themselves are chiefly drawn — are not, as a rule, keen students of the deeper problems of religion or philosophy. They have always been Christians, they are perplexed by no doubts or difficulties, the higher criticism is a thing they leave severely alone, "new theologies" they taboo, and the moral stumbling-blocks and the historical in- accuracies of the Scriptures they cheerfully ignore. If some book or magazine article now and again startles them by a hint that the religious situation is not all that it should be, they are speedily consoled by the soothing words of another book or another magazine article which tells them that the assaults of infidelity and the critical investigations of scholars have resulted only in establishing the truths of Christianity more firmly than ever, and that it is only knaves who preach agnos- ticism or free-thought, and only fools who listen to them. The non-Christians of their own land — those who have voluntarily left the Christian fold because they could no longer conscientiously remain within it — are classed by them among anarchists, bomb-throwers, and enemies of public and private morality. What such wicked people may have to say for themselves they neither know nor care to be told. They still have an impression — more or less definite according to the sect or branch of Christianity to which they belong — that the fires of hell are awaiting the souls of the unbaptised heathen, and their natural benevolence incites them to provide the means of salvation. These are the people who in the 12 Christendom and Missionary Activity- last generation or two have responded most eagerly to the summons to aid in the great work of evangelising the heathen. 1 But now we come to what I take to be the principal reason for the present activity of foreign missions and for the deep interest which is beginning to be taken in 1 1 may say that personally I have no objection to the term ' ' heathen ' except in so far as it indicates a certain attitude of rather irritating contempt on the part of the arrogant Christian for his non-Christian fellow-creatures. In itself the word is harmless enough, and it is less clumsy than "non-Christian." Both, of course, are unscientific. From the point of view of comparative religion it is misleading to put all the religions of the world into two classes — Christianity alone occupying one class and all other religions lumped together in the other. The curious thing is that one rarely if ever hears the term "heathen" or the term "pagan" used by Anglo-Saxons in China unless they happen to be missionaries or are in strong sympathy with mission- ary work. At the close of a paper by the veteran missionary Dr. W. A. P. Martin, in which he seems to advocate the peculiar policy of bap- tising large bodies of Chinese en masse even if they do not understand Christian doctrine, may be found the following remarkable words: "Entire communities will then come forward, impelled by a variety of motives, of which the shame of being stigmatised as 'heathen' may prove to be not the least effective" (The Chinese Recorder, Nov., 1909, p. 627). There seems to be a curious confusion of thought here. "Heathen" is simply a word used by Christians to denominate non- Christians, and as most Christians are arrogant enough to suppose that their religion alone is true, the word "heathen" — meaning for them "a believer in false doctrines" — has to their ears an offensive sound. But obviously the heathen himself does not take the same view of the relative positions of Christianity and his own faith. If he were satis- fied in his own mind that Christianity is the true religion, he would ipso facto be a Christian, whether he publicly professed his adherence to that faith or not; whereas if he does not believe that Christianity is true, but believes, on the contrary, in the truth of his own religion, he cannot have the slightest objection to being "stigmatised" as a non- Christian. If he shows irritation at being called a heathen it will not be because he is "ashamed" of being classed among non-Christians, but because he knows that the term as used by foreigners is unchari- tably intended by them to indicate their sense of his inferiority to themselves. [Cf. Huxley's 'Science and Christian Tradition (Eversley Series), pp. 210 sea., 240 seq., & propos of Dr. Wace's observations on the "unpleasant significance" of the word "infidel."] Christendom and Missionary Activity 13 the subject by large numbers of people who have hither- to regarded it with indifference. Great political events have occurred, and are still occurring, which tend to alter profoundly the old rela- tions between Europe and Asia. The Asiatic peoples are awaking, or have already awakened, from their long slumber, and are showing themselves determined to take their proper places in the world as independent, civilised, and progressive nations. They have no intention of acquiescing in the permanent superiority or dominance of the great states of the West, and for this very reason they are keenly desirous, at the present time, of ac- quiring a knowledge of the arts and sciences which, as they now see, have so largely contributed to the ma- terial strength and prosperity of the Western Powers. They do not wholly admire the civilisation of the West ; in some respects they regard it as inferior to their own, but they fully recognise the necessity of adapting to their own requirements those elements of the Occidental sys- tem that make for political stability, military efficiency, and social welfare. For the time being, therefore, we Chinese have become the willing pupils of the West. Christianity is not one of the characteristics of Western civilisation with which we have specially asked to be endowed, but it is not to be wondered at that the Christian Churches have eagerly seized upon a unique and magnificent opportunity to spread the gospel among a vast heathen people that comprises more than a fourth of the world's population. Notwithstanding the grave perils that menace them at home, the Churches instinct- ively recognise that now, if ever, is the time to plant the Cross on the soil of China. They realise that if this chance is allowed to slip by it may never come again ; but that if the chance is seized, and if the great missionary enterprise is crowned with success, it is 14 Christendom and Missionary Activity not impossible that in the dim future a Christian China may help to establish Western civilisation on a world-wide basis and revive and rejuvenate the decaying forces of Christianity in the Western hemi- sphere. Thus the point which chiefly concerns us here is this. Until recent times the sole or predominant motive of missionary Christianity in evangelising the East was the saving of heathen souls and the widening of the boundaries of the kingdom of righteousness. In other words, the aim of foreign missions was almost entirely a religious one (except when it was political, or definitely associated with political designs), and therefore only attracted persons who believed that without the Christ- ian faith the heathen would be engulfed in eternal darkness. But now many people are being forced to the conclusion that missionary work has a sternly practical side which deserves serious attention even from those in whom belief in dogmatic Christianity is wholly dead; that in supporting foreign missions they may be contributing to the salvation not merely of heathen souls, but of the whole fabric of Western civil- isation. z There is a vague but growing fear in the West that a trained and educated but unchristian^China will be a constant menace to the stability of Western insti- tutions and a danger to civilised mankind. Thus the character of missionary effort has undergone a funda- mental change. The West now wishes to evangelise 1 "Missions were begun when distant lands were practically unknown and their religions unstudied, and all alike regarded as simply false and the dark products of the Evil One, whose adherents were all morally and irretrievably ruined and exposed to a hopeless doom. All this is changed; and missions have to be continued with an entirely different set of ideals filling the popular mind. " — T. E. Slater, of the London Missionary Society, in Missions and Sociology, p. 64 (London: Elliot Stock, 1908). Christendom and Missionary Activity 15 the heathen not from altruistic motives only, but with a view to its own safety. r This modification in the missionary attitude is not avowed by the missionaries themselves; indeed, very many of them, as the following chapters will show, seem to be unaware that there has been any modification at all, and regard the awakening of China almost entirely from the point of view of Christian philanthropy. At the Shanghai Missionary Conference of 1907 a unani- mous resolution was passed to the effect that the new political and social conditions in China now rendered it possible for every individual in the empire to be told of "the redeeming death and resurrection and the heart- transforming power of Jesus Christ"; and the Confer- ence appealed "to the whole Christian world to rise in its might, and, trusting to the guidance of Almighty God, realise more adequately its responsibility in this gigantic undertaking." More recently — at a meeting held in London under the auspices of the China Inland Mis- sion in the autumn of 1909 — one of the speakers stated that " altogether 4800 men were wanted in China in the near future for mission work " ; while in a pamphlet pub- lished by the same mission * the ideal is held out of one foreign missionary for every 25,000 of the native popu- lation. This would give a total of 16,000 Protestant missionaries for the whole empire in addition to native clergy and lay preachers. 3 1 For a further discussion of this point of view, see Chapter XIX. 2 Present-Day Conditions in China, by Marshall Broomhall (Morgan and Scott, 1908). 3 The Roman Catholic converts in China are said to number 720,540 at the present time. [See The Decay of the Church of Rome, p. 302, by J. McCabe.] According to the Twenty-second Annual Report of the Christian Literature Society (Protestant): "The Roman^Catholic and Protestant Christians together number _at present only i}4 millions, and the annual net increase of Christian membership is less than 100,000, while the natural increase of the Chinese population is reckoned 16 Christendom and Missionary Activity These resolutions and speeches contain few hints that missionary enterprise must now be regarded not merely as a means of illuminating the darkness of the heathen, but also as a necessary agency for the protection and preservation of the distinctive civilisation of the West. Elsewhere, however, we may find abundant evidence of the prevalence of this view. It has been strongly em- phasised, for example, by the promoters of the United Universities Scheme, which aims at establishing a Christ- ian University in Central China. In a later chapter I shall have occasion to offer some remarks on this im- portant project, which need not therefore engage our attention at present. z The importance of foreign mis- sions as a means of protecting the interests of Western civilisation was insisted on by some of the speakers and writers at the World Missionary Conference held at at four millions annually. The task before us is therefore stupendous. " It is indeed, if every year the new heathens outnumber the new Christians by no fewer than 3,900,000! Obviously China can never be christian- ised at the present rate of progress, for the numerical difference between Christians and heathens, so far from becoming narrower, is growing enormously wider every year. Of course, this state of things would soon be altered if conversions to Christianity began to take place en masse; but there does not seem to be any immediate prospect of that. From Broomhall's Chinese Empire (London: 1907) it appears that there are no less than seventy-one separate Protestant societies supporting missionaries in China. The total number of "communicants" is stated in this work to be 154,142; but there is another body of 93,878 described as "adherents." The population of China, according to the most recent estimate (quoted by Mr. Broomhall), is 426,000,000. If Mr. McCabe's figures are correct, the entire body of Christians in China (including Catholics and Protestants of all denominations) would appear to be only 968,560, even if Protestant "adherents" are added to the "com- municants. " Granting that there are about one million Christians in China, it appears that the proportion of Christians to "heathen" is less than one in four hundred, or a quarter of 1 per cent. The number of Protestant missionaries in China in 1907 was 3719. This works out at about sixty-one native Christians to each missionary. 1 See Chapter XIX. Christendom and Missionary Activity vj Edinburgh last year. The Scotsman newspaper, after re- marking that the Conference promised to be an epoch- making event in the history of Christianity, drew attention to the grave dangers now ahead of Western civilisation and to the active part that missionary Christianity may take in averting such dangers. The World Missionary Conference [said The Scotsman] is the result of that great revolution which has taken place in the non-Christian nations in recent years. Until a short time ago it was taken for granted that the East should bow down before the West. But suddenly the East has sprung to life. The spectacle of the heathen ac- tually beating a Christian Power has confronted the world with hitherto unthought-of possibilities. The sudden rise of Japan to the position of a first-class Power; the slow awakening of the millions of China to a consciousness of their latent power; the revival of Mohammedanism in the shape of a reformed Turkey — these have forced on the Christian Churches the question as to whether the future of the world is to be in Christian or in heathen hands. In Africa Mohammedanism, according to the testimony of travellers, is spreading like a prairie fire. ... It is the sudden emergence of problems such as this that constituted the necessity for the World Missionary Con- ference. ... It needs the concerted action of all the Churches to meet a menace such as that. 1 As I have pointed out, there is probably no Oriental who has sufficient ingight into the Westeni character to justify him in making any dogmatic assertion with regard to the peculiar problems suggested by Christian missions. But perhaps in the foregoing considerations may be found a more or less sufficient explanation of the unwonted activity in missionary effort which the Christian communities of the West are showing at the 1 The Scotsman, Feb. 23, 19 10. 1 8 Christendom and Missionary Activity- present time. Whatever the full explanation may be, the undoubted increase in missionary activity makes it urgently necessary that extreme care should be taken in the selection of missionary candidates, in the super- vision of their methods in the "field, " and in scrutinis- ing and correcting their varying conceptions of the essentials of Christian doctrine. It is because I am firmly convinced that some of the teachings and methods of very many foreign missionaries are seriouslydefectiye in themselves, harmful to the people of China, and dis- astrous to the causes of truth, civilisation, and in- ternational harmony, that I have obliged myself to undertake the difficult and cheerless task of issuing this Appeal to the People of the Christian West. In order to explain my meaning fairly and adequately it will be necessary for me to express my thoughts with a freedom and directness that may, I fear, outrage the susceptibilities of many who still cling fondly to the religion of their fathers, and may perhaps wound the feelings of some who, while they have renounced the dogmas of Christianity, continue to hold in deepest reverence the ideal believed by them to have been realised in the person of Jesus. I can only assure them that, whatever may be the general impression gained by them from the following pages, they will not be justified in supposing that there has been any intention on my part to scoff or cavil at things that better men than myself hold sacred. Also, I should like my readers to understand that if some of my statements appear to be crudely dogmatic they are only so expressed for the sake of conciseness and the avoidance of ambiguity, and their apparent dogmatism does not faithfully represent my mental attitude. * I should like the words ' ' It seems to me, " or " In the light of the evidence so far accessible 1 Omnis sermo noster dubitationis sale sit conditus. Christendom and Missionary Activity 19 to me I am inclined to think, " to be understood in front of every statement of personal belief or opin- ion that finds place in this book. I wish, moreover, to emphasise the fact that the complaints I have to make concerning missionaries and their methods and teachings by no means extend to missionaries of all types and classes. Among your Christian teachers in China there are men and women who are living noble and inspiring lives, and are brightening thousands of Chinese homes by innumerable acts of warm-hearted benevolence, neighbourly kindness, and devoted self- sacrifice. There are cultivated Christians who may be said to exemplify in their own aims and conduct the highest ideals of Western civilisation — teachers from whom we Chinese can learn nothing but good. There are men and women who, by devoting their main energies to medical or educational work, are benefiting the minds and bodies of innumerable Chinese in a manner that deserves and receives our homage and admiration. If in the course of the following pages hardly anything is said of the splendid work done by such missionaries as these, it is not because I am unconscious of the incalculable benefit they are conferring upon many Chinese, but for the very reason that I regard them as so far above all criticism that praise would be superfluous and — as coming from a convinced non-Christian — might be regarded as pre- sumptuous. If this highest type of Christian missionary were the only type of which China has experience there would be no justification for the issue of this Appeal; for though I repudiate the assumption that a belief in Christian theology or in Christian dogmas is a necessary preliminary either to virtue and happiness in this world or to salvation in the next I gladly admit that such a belief has been, to multitudes of people in the Western lands, the mainspring of their actions, hopes, 20 Christendom and Missionary Activity and ideals, and has been the chief source of the inspira- tion that has impelled some of the best and noblest of Western men and women to devote their lives to the advancement of Christian civilisation in the heathen East. [Note. — Perhaps I may take this opportunity of stating that I shall be glad to receive, through the publishers of this Appeal, any criticisms, suggestions, or expressions of opinion — whether friendly or adverse — which readers may feel disposed to offer on the subjects dealt with in the course of these chapters. My correspondents will not omit, I trust, to state whether they object to the future publication of such letters as they may be good enough to address to me, and whether, in the event of such publication, I may regard myself as at liberty to make use of their names.] CHAPTER II THE PROSPECTS OF CHRISTIANITY IN THE FAR EAST A YOUNG Japanese fellow-student of mine was once discussing with me the prospects of Christianity in the Far East. "We Japanese," said my friend, "will not become Christians, but Japan may adopt Christianity." When I asked him to explain this paradox, he told me of the opinion held by many influential people in Japan that their country will never be regarded by the great Western Powers as a thor- oughly respectable and civilised state so long as it remains outside the pale of Christianity. "It is not," he explained, "that the Western peoples really care very much whether we become sincere believers in their creed or not: how could they, seeing that they are ceasing to believe in it themselves? But they have not yet grown out of their inherited superstition that true civilisation and the Christian religion are inextri- cably bound up with one another, and that the heathen must necessarily — so long as they remain heathen — be more or less barbarous in manners and morally corrupt. Our Japanese sensitiveness and national pride make us rebel against being classed with people who clothe themselves in girdles of feathers, and wave tomahawks, and eat their prisoners of war, and it is quite possible that with the view of raising the status 21 a Prospects of Christianity in Far East of the country in the eyes of the Western world, our Government may some day decide to declare Christ i- anity the State religion. But there will be no at- tempt ~made to " tamper with the existing religious practices of the people. Christianity may be nomin- ally adopted as the State creed, but this will be purely for political or economic reasons — perhaps owing to the state of the money market and the difficulty of raising foreign loans — and the statesmen that bring about this outward change in our religious attitude would not dream of compelling us to become converts to the foreign faith, even if they had the power to do so." "Surely," I said, "you are attributing an un- heard-of degree of cynicism to your statesmen." "I do not for a moment deny it," was the reply; "but all successful statesmanship, in the present state of the world, rests to some extent on a basis of cynicism." "You are also assuming," I remarked, "that foreign observers will be so obtuse as not to see through this manoeuvre." "Some might see through it," said my Japanese friend, "but they would be powerless to hamper its success. Almost the only Western resid- ents in Japan are merchants, diplomatists, and mission- aries. The merchants care too little about religion themselves to bother their heads about the matter; the diplomatists might send confidential despatches to their Governments expressing doubts as to the sin- cerity of the Christian movement, but their despatches would be merely pigeon-holed and forgotten; and as for the missionaries, I do not anticipate that any de- nunciations of Japanese cynicism would come from them. They would be so delighted at the prospect of an even nominally Christian Japan that they would meet the Government half-way, and any doubts that they might have about official motives would be stifled Prospects of Christianity in Far East 23 under the belief that a simulated acceptance of the Christian faith would inevitably give place sooner or later to a wholly genuine belief. Meanwhile the mere announcement that the Emperor of Japan had declared Christianity to be the State religion would fill the for- eign missionary societies with holy rapture, pasans of thanksgiving would go up from half the churches in Europe and America, and the missionary journals would jubilantly spread abroad the glad tidings of how God had at last vindicated himself in the strongest fortress of heathendom." "And what date do you assign," I asked, "for your Government to take this momentous step?" "I do not say that the step will be taken at all," was the reply; "I merely suggest the possibility. As a matter of fact it is conceivable that China might take it even sooner than Japan, though for rather different reasons. If our two countries were about to go to war with one another again, your country might officially adopt Christianity with the view of enlisting Western sympathy against mine. Think how the Christian pulpits of Europe and America would ring with denunciations of the Western Govern- ments if they stood idly by while a weak but Christian China was grappling with a strong but heathen Japan ! " If I hesitate to endorse this Japanese view of future religious possibilities in the Far East, it is not because I regard it as by any means fantastic, but because there seems to be no probability that religious con- siderations, however commanding a position they may occupy in the relations between individuals, will in these latter days affect very seriously the political or economic relations between Eastern and Western states. Great Britain did not scorn to ally herself with a heathen power, and made no stipulation that her partner's plenipotentiaries should sign the Thirty- 24 Prospects of Christianity in Far East nine Articles before they signed the treaty of alliance. The alleged hatred of Australians and Americans for Orientals does not appear to be rooted in religious disagreements. The Christian West did not intervene to save Christian Russia from receiving punishment at the hands of pagan Japan. That the proud West dislikes Orientals may be true enough ; but this is due to racial and sociological and, perhaps, especially to industrial causes, far more than to religious differences. If a European Power makes demands on China that she would not dare to make upon a great Western state, she does so not because of any superiority that she may possess through her status as a Christian Power, but because she is conscious of her own political strength and China's political weakness. The arro- gance of the West in its dealings with China will pass away when China becomes a great Power, even though she remains heathen; it would never pass away if China turned Christian but remained politically impotent. But the outlook of individuals is not always the same as that of states; and there is no doubt that many Western people, who have been brought up in the tradi- tional belief that truth and Christianity are practically synonymous terms, do sincerely regard themselves as entitled, on account of their Christianity, to assume a position of superiority in respect of the blundering heathen who walks in darkness. They have been so long accustomed to regard good morals as dependent on an acceptance of certain theological dogmas and formulas that they are inclined to doubt whether, apart from Christianity, there can be any sound morality at all. When they are faced -by the awkward fact that the most outspoken disbelievers in the Christian faith are among the best, most unselfish, and high- Prospects of Christianity in Far East 25 principled men of their acquaintance, they explain this strange fact by the theory that these well-behaved infidels are influenced by a Christian education or by Christian surroundings. A good example of this occurs in Professor Sanday's disappointing little pamphlet, A New Marcion, which professes to be, but is not, a criticism of a recent work by Mr. F. C. Cony- beare in which the historical evidences of Christianity are ably and somewhat unsparingly dissected. "Of course," says the professor, "Mr. Conybeare is better than his creed. This is what constantly happens: a Christian upbringing tells, and the effects of it survive after it has been given up as theoretically untenable." 1 Similarly, Dr. Warschauer holds that if agnostics are good men, it is because willingly or unwillingly they have taken in Christian ideas through every pore. 2 The Bishop of Carpentaria (Dr. Gilbert White) delivers himself of the dictum that, "the level even of conven- tional Christianity is far higher than that of non- Christian life." 3 The Christian belief that only Christians can be good men, or that goodness can be derived only from Christianity, is sometimes nar- rowed still further into a belief that true righteousness can be justly ascribed only to the members of certain sects or subdivisions of Christianity. Protestants have been heard to denounce Catholics as emissaries of Satan, 4 and Catholics retort with the cheerful remark that nothing but the plea of "invincible ignorance" can save the unhappy Protestant heretics from eternal damnation. The pope, in his famous Encyclical Letter, Pascendi Gregis, feels obliged to admit that the Modernists, whom he is denouncing, "possess, as a rule, a reputation for irreproachable morality"; but 1 Op. tit., p. 16. " Anti-Nunquam, p. 27. 3 The East and the West, Jan., 1909, p. 17. * See pp. 100, 156. 26 Prospects of Christianity in Far East he takes care to explain that this fact is "well calculated to deceive souls." The religious believer who holds that Christianity is directly or indirectly responsible for all the moral goodness that is to be found among men, not unnatur- ally recoils with horror and indignation from the infidel who expresses grave doubts, not only as to the fitness of Christianity to be the universal religion, but also as to its historical truth and its ethical soundness. The happiest memories of his childhood, to many a devout Christian, are associated with the simple prayers and hymns that he learned at the knees of a loved and loving mother. As soon would he doubt his mother's affection or virtue as call in question the truth of the Christian story as he heard it from her lips. If his thoughts turn to the days of boyhood and youth he will form a mental picture of the ivy-clad parish church under the shadow of which he was brought up, or his school chapel, or the beautiful cathedral in which the grandeur of the Christian ritual made its first strong appeal to his emotions and awakened his mind to the "beauty of holiness." Artists, poets, architects, mu- sicians have lavished upon the external aspects of his religion all the resources of human genius, and have glorified the forms and symbols of his faith just as the saints and mystics have glorified its spiritual aspects. He not only believes but he knows that truth, clothed with beauty and mystery as with a garment, is revealed to him, in the word and in the spirit of the Christian religion. If this be the way in which Christianity makes its appeal to one who has been brought up in a Christian land and amid Christian traditions, it is not strange that he should be amazed and indignant, and perhaps scornful, when he finds that the heathen seem deaf Prospects of Christianity in Far East 27 to an appeal which to himself is irresistible. He does not realise, without great difficulty, that the average Oriental, whose emotional, religious, and intellectual interests are naturally those of his own race, cannot — even though he become a Christian convert — regard the religion of the Cross from the same point of view as his Western teachers or feel its attraction in the manner in which it is felt by them. One thing that Western Christians often seem unable to understand is that to find favour with the educated and intelligent members of a heathen race it is abso- lutely necessary that Christianity should be pr esente d to them in a form that will bear the c loses t critical -scrutiny by the unprepossessed intellect. I do not, of course, mean that faith and reason may not have their separate provinces. For all I know to the con- trary, faith may be able to grasp truths which are unattainable by the intellect alone. Yet it is not only unwise, it is also immoral, to lead the Chinese to suppose that the unverifiable dogmas or doctrines of the Christ- ian faith are established on a basis of ascertained and indisputable truth. I have heard a missionary teach- ing a large Chinese class the usual Christian stories conce rnin g the birth and childhood of Jesu s. He spoke with fervour, and assured his ignorant listeners that what he was telling them was irrefragably true. Yet even so conservative a critic as Harnack admits that "the tradition as to the incidents attending the birth and early life of Jesus Christ has been shattered. " Some devout but candid Christians will admit that there are many elements of theological doctrine, and a considerable section of scriptural literature, which in their heart of hearts they would be glad to see lopped off the Christian tree. If they are opposed to any such mutilation at the present time, it is either because 28 Prospects of Christianity in Far East they fear that the loping of a branch may endanger the life of the tree, or because they remember that the branch has been hung with the votive offerings of perhaps fifty generations of Christian saints and wor- shippers, and has therefore acquired a sanctity of its own which it would be sinful to violate. Let us sup- pose that the Athanasian. Creed had not been discovered till the year of grace 1900. Would it have found a place, during the ten years that have since elapsed, in the Christian prayer-books? Would it have been accepted as a necessary part of the Church ritual? There can be only one answer to such questions. Even if its discovery (say in an Abyssinian tomb) had been accompanied by positive proofs that it was the genuine work of Athanasius himself, we may be quite sure that no one — not even those who are now bitterly protesting against the proposal to exclude it from the Anglican ritual — would hail it as a true and satisfying exposition of Christian doctrine or demand that its public recital be made a matter of ecclesiastical law. 1 Again, there can be little doubt that if such a thing as a revision of the Scriptures were conceivably possi- ble, and if such revision could be carried out quietly and without attracting attention or arousing discussion, both the Old and the New Testaments would be sub- jected to some drastic alterations and some extensive omissions. From this process the Gospels would not be excepted. Judging from the trend of recent New Testament criticism it is not unlikely that the niir^ac]^ji^rib^d_to_Jejus (except those of healing) as well as the nativity legends and the story of the bodily resurrection and ascension would vanish from the sftcred records. Speculation on these subjects is, of course, entirely •See pp. 160-1. Prospects of Christianity in Far East 29 useless, as the day has long gone by (though we now know that there once was such a day) when the Script- ures could be submitted to the tender mercies of a paste-and-scissors editor. But most students will admit that there is a great and growing divergence between the Christianity of the creeds and sacred books, and the Christianity that is with pain and diffi- culty extricating itself from the hands of historical and ethical criticism. With reference to this grave matter, there are two points to which I am anxious to draw attention. One is, that the process of "recon- ciling "..^cjjptu ral err or and theological inaccuracywTEh the facts established by critical research and scientific discovery is leading to insincerity, sophistry, and am- biguity of speech on the part of religious teachers, and to a pitiful condition of mental confusion on the part of honest Christian laymen, which must not only be disastrous in the long run to the cause of true religion and sound morals, but will seriously discredit the higher or spiritual side of Western civilisation in the eyes of keen Oriental observers. The other point is, that the Christianity which is being taught to the C hinese by the~great bulk of missionaries to~day is not the Christi- anity that is accepted by cultivated and intelligent Christians of the present time in Europe and America, but represents a religious system which is morally defective, intellectually absurd, and historically un- true, and which has been discarded by capable theo- logians as well as by nearly all educated laymen in Western lands. 1 1 "Thoughtful men of to-day . . . are not asking themselves whether Jesus was 'God,' or 'omniscient,' or 'sinless,' or 'the ideal man.' These terms as applied to a human individual have no meaning to them ... if the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels are critically sifted and translated back into the Aramaic dialect Jesus spoke, it becomes evident that he never claimed to be, or showed any 30 Prospects of Christianity in Far East The first point— the insincerity and ambiguity of modern Christian Apologetics — is becoming so widely recognised that even an Oriental may perhaps be par- doned for his presumption in referring to it. Mr. Sturt speaks of the " mental deterioration " that must result from the "habitual insincerity" and "divorce of language from meaning " that characterise much Christian exhortation of the present day. * The fact of clerical insincerity [he says] is notorious; it is notorious that aff our enlightened priests have ceased to accept in any natural sense the propositions to which they subscribed at ordination. . . . Although they recite the formula daily, they do not believe that Jesus was con- ceived by the Holy Ghost, or was born of a virgin, or de- scended into hell, or rose again the third day, or ascended into heaven, or will come thence to judge the quick and the dead. 2 The Church of England, in spite of all its doctrinal compromises and its basis of English common-sense, is one of the worst offenders. Even the authorities of a rival organisation — the Church of Rome — have felt it their painful duty to upbraid the English clergy for "the vague and deceptive character of their language." Referring to the pronouncements of certain Anglican divines on the subject of the Real Presence and the Sacri- fice of the Mass, the Catholic clergy ask why it is " that, capable men as they undoubtedly were, they should desire to become, the Messiah, but that he included himself among the sons of men whom he looked upon as the sons of God, applying to himself all the laws he laid down for their life, only regarding himself as a prophet, a sower of the good seed in the world's great field." — Nathaniel Schmidt in The International Journal of Ethics, April, 1910, pp. 381-2. (It need hardly be said that scholars are still at variance over the Messiah question. See The Idea of a Free Church, by Henry Sturt, pp. 177-201.) 1 The Idea of a Free Church. * Ibid., pp. 263-4. Prospects of Christianity in Far East 31 have been, one and all, so unable to expound their meaning in language of clear and unmistakable char- acter?" 1 Can it be that the ambiguities and want of clarity are due to the desire to provide every theo- logical position with gaps and loop-holes, through which escape may be made in the event of the positions becoming untenable? Another writer speaks of "that timorous and pitiable system of concessions and half- truths, than which nothing has tended more to discredit religion among serious thinkers." 2 No fair- minded man asks or expects Christian apologists to give us the whole essence of Christianity in a few lucid and comprehensive sentences. "Ces choses ne se disent pas succinctement, " as Hegel said. But they should at least be able to express themselves in such a manner that no doubt can arise in any intelligent mind as to what they really mean. Chris tians may (or may not) have built theji mansion^ upon a rock, but at any rate, as Paul Sabatier has said, they are con- stantly engaged in changing i ts furniture : and the changes are rapid enough to cause not only surprise, but bewilderment. The Christian religion, says Mr. St. George Stock, which "was once so boldly dogmatic, has become a kind of Proteus which, on your grasping it, evades you in a stream of pious phraseology." 3 Father George Tyrrell explained the present dearth of candidates for ordination in nearly every Christian body by the fact that "thoughtful and conscientious men" are hesitating "in these days of theological chaos to expose themselves even to the suspicion of laying l A Vindication of the Bull "Apostolicce Cura," by the Cardinal Archbishop and Bishops of the Province of Westminster, p. 116 (Long- mans, Green & Co., 1898). 3 The Hibbert Journal, April, 1907, pp. 496-7. J Ibid., Jan., 1909, p. 453. 32 Prospects of Christianity in Far East fetters on their inward freedom, not to speak of the real danger to their perfect veracity and candour." Men and women, he said, are "still keenly and wist- fully interested in religious questions; but when they turn to the professed defenders of religion they find them tied by solemn obligations to certain methods and conclusions, and incapable of dealing freely with minds whose interest is in truth, and not in this or that truth." x There are a few clear-minded Anglican clergy who have expressed themselves with no less candour. "It is not just indifference or self-indulgence," says the Rev. S. A. Barnett, "which alienates the people from church or chapel or mission; it is the insincerity or inconsistency which they themselves have learned to detect." 2 These are strong words from a canon of Westminster Abbey. Most unhesitatingly do I believe that the shufflings and ambiguities of modern Christian Apologetics will have a terribly chilling effect on the welcome which an awakened China will accord to the religious constitu- ents or accompaniments of Western civilisation. If, so far as the relations between East and West are con- cerned, this matter of clerical insincerity is not at the present moment a very'urgent one, this is only because the Christianity which is being promulgated by mission- aries in China to-day is a Christianity that is sublimely ignorant, or at least contemptuous, of the results actually attained or reasonably anticipated by advanced exponents of the higher criticism, and consequently it is a Christianity that makes little or no use of modern apologetic arguments. Very few Chinese converts have any knowledge of the grim warfare that is at present being waged in the West on theological battle- 1 Contemporary Review, May, 1909, pp. 580, 582. 3 The Hibbert Journal, July, 1907, p. 881. Prospects of Christianity in Far East 33 fields, and only an infinitesimal fraction of such con- verts have the slightest conception of the nature of the weapons with which the attack and defence are conducted and the manner in which the champions of orthodoxy are in the habit of defending their threat- ened positions. But this brings me to the second point to which I desire to draw attention. A Christianity that is decaying^ or has become obsolete in~tEe West among alTthinking persons (clergy as well as laity), a Christi- anity that is to a great extent palpably untrue, that is full of idle and mischievous superstitions, that is ethically impracticable, is still regarded as suitable religious pabulum for an awakening China that is no nation of low-browed savages, but one which expects at no distant date to take an honourable place in the front rank of the progressive peoples of the world. This is a state of things which most emphatically should not be allowed to continue. The position in China at present is a peculiar one. So far as the material developments of Western civili- sation are concerned we are being provided with the newest and best results attained by modern science; but in respect of the religious developments of the West we are being spoon-fed with a theology from which all nourishment — if it ever contained any — has been withdrawn. It is "very much to be desired," as the Rev. Dr. Rashdall has said, "that things which edu- cated men are ceasing^ tq^believe aj__hpme should no'~ longer be taught to the heathen abroad." 1 If I go to a European lecturer on physiology, will he teach 1 "The Motive of Modern Missionary Work, " in The American Jour- nal of Theology, July, 1907, p. 380. Would that some hundreds or thousands of Christian missionaries in China could be replaced by as many Dr. Rashdalls! 3 34 Prospects of Christianity in Far East me Wolff's theory of embryology, which the learned world accepted in the eighteenth century and has long given up, or will he give me the latest and best theories at his disposal? Surely he will not, because I am a Chinese, load me with old-fashioned and obsolete science on the ground that what was good enough for his great-grandfather ought to be good enough for me? If I enter a Western university, shall I be taught alchemy instead of chemistry, astrology instead of astronomy? If I pay a visit to a modern observatory, shall I be told that the sun goes round the earth, be- cause, forsooth, the astronomer's ancestors believed it? If you have outgrown your old belief in the story of the fall of man, is it really necessary that, before we Chinese can hope to reach the religious heights you have since attained, we in our turn must go through a belief in the same fable? If you have surrendered your faith in the Joshua sun-miracle, or the whale- and-Jonah legend, or the virgin-birth of Christ, or the blasting of the fig-tree, or the story of the Gadarene swine, can it be really essential that we Chinese should enter upon our Christian novitiate by accepting all these things as true? 1 I grant that in most cases missionaries do themselves believe in the crude theo- logy which they teach in China, and that they are, in fact, giving us the best that they know and the Christianity that they believe to be true, but this brings meagre consolation to those of us who under- stand that the Chinese are being fed with inferior philosophy, unpractical ethics, and witless supersti- tions, and that folklore and old-world myths (pleasing and picturesque enough if treated as such) are being 1 It is rather curious that in the first century of the Christian era we Chinese had a philosopher (Wang Ch'ung) who_ warned. us_against put- ting credulous trust in stories of virgin-birthsand similar prodigies. Prospects of Christianity in Far East 35 palmed off on our people as divine revelation and historical truth. Remember, we Chinese have no sentimental clinging to the Christianity of the Bible and the creeds. In your country you must, perhaps, "go slow," as the saying is, because you must be merciful to tender con- sciences and must abstain from tearing up people's religious beliefs by the roots. You need have no such fear in China: the roots are not in us. The fact that the Chinese know nothing of your religion does not justify Christian missionaries in teaching them a Christianity that cultured men among yourselves have discarded; on the contrary, it should make them all the more scrupulously careful to teach nothing whatever but what will stand all the criticism that the scientific, historical, philosophical, ethical, and biblical learning of the present and past days has brought to bear on theological and christological problems. The question of the doctrines that should be taught to Christian converts is, of course, recognised as a serious and important one by missionaries of the highly- cultured class with which this Appeal has only an indirect concern. It is recognised as such, for instance, by the Rev. J. W. Burton, a member of the Australian Methodist Missionary Society in Fiji, who says that the doctrinal question is "daily becoming more ur- gent." He sees clearly that if you teach the Chinese an obsolete Christianity, the day must come when you will be obliged — unless you are prepared to face their total and final rejection of your religion — to teach them to unlearn a great deal that has already been laboriously taught. The position to be assigned to the Old Testament [he 36 Prospects of Christianity in Far East says] is a case in point. Should we lead a non-Christian people through the wilderness of Jewish tradition and Semitic ideas? Should we ask a people weaker in the faith than ourselves to make those adjustments in religious thought which our early training has made necessary to us? The most dangerous trial of faith is that of wwlearning. Shall we put this strain upon them? 1 What the present religious condition demands, says another recent writer, is no longer "concessions" to science, but an honest renovation of the whole religious system in the light of scientific knowledge. It is no use trying to twist facts to suit theories derived from a past which was destitute of the knowledge we now possess ; what we have to do is to adjust our theories to suit the facts. Half-a-century ago evolution was unproven, and biblical criticism was in a tentative and conjectural stage; in politics the Temporal Power still held Rome for absolutism, and democracy was suffering from a partial check. To-day, evolution, the great results of biblical criticism, and democracy are all acknowledged facts, and in the light of them the need for religious reconstruction is patent and indisputable. 2 '"Christian Missions as Affected by Liberal Theology," in The Hibbert Journal, Jan., 1909, p. 412. The same writer makes the follow- ing significant admission, which, if it came from one who was not a missionary, would be denounced forthwith as a gross misstatement. "In spite of the dramatic and enthusiastic utterances of the class usually associated, rightly or wrongly, with 'Exeter Hall,' Foreign Missioosjiave not_been_Jhe, success they might reasonably have been _fixrjected to be, when the enormous expenditure of life and wealth is considered. This fact is admitted — privately, of course — by those who are in a position to judge. It is not the criticism of the unsympathetic, but the sigh of the disappointed. The successes are, as a rule, trum- peted abroad, the failures are discreetly hidden away. We hear much on missionary platforms of the faithfulness and devotion of converts; but there is another side — and it is to be feared the larger side — the instability, the unfaithfulness, and the greed of those who have been won. " — Ibid., pp. 408-9. ' The Hibbert Journal, April, 1907, pp. 497, 510-11. Cf. an inter- Prospects of Christianity in Far East 37 Now, is it fair to press on the people of China a Christianity that is in the distracted condition in which we find it to-day? Will you not at least spare us the pain of having to learn much that you yourselves admit we may have to unlearn fifty, twenty, or even five years hence? May we not appeal to you to make up your own minds about what is__true and what is npt^truejn Christianity before you ask us to exchange for it the old faiths and ideals of our own race? If you wish to invite us into your citadel in order that we may find shelter there from warring creeds and clashing philosophies, are we not entitled to ask you, before we enter, whether you have made your citadel strong and impregnable? Perhaps you think still — you certainly once thought — that our heathen religions and ethics are so hope- lessly vile and corrupt that Christianity, in whatever shape or form, must be brought in to replace them. But we Chinese are not Central African or Polynesian savages. You may, if you will, send out trousers and Bibles to such races as these, because they have neither clothes nor sacred books of their own; but we Chinese are not in this unhappy state of physical and moral nakedness. Not only have we an ethical esting article in the same journal, October, 1908, entitled "Evangelical Bargaining," by John Page Hopps. The article deals with certain recent attempts at compromise between the orthodox and advanced theologies. The author comments on the "naive and illuminating confession'' of the evangelical Churches that "the premises are being rebuilt but the business must be carried on"; hence the invitation to "capable middle-men" to act as mediators "between the learned and the public," and keep people quiet and comfortable in an inter- mediate stage of religious faith which will be neither too advanced for old-fashioned believers nor too backward for those who know something of the results of the higher criticism. "In fact," says Mr. Hopps, "it is the part of 'the capable middle-man' to persuade the customers that there is a great change and yet that it all comes to the same thing." 38 Prospects of Christianity in Far East and religious literature which we believe to be com- parable with any other, but many of us have access, also, to all the literary treasures of the West. A missionary who faces a large promiscuous audience in a Chinese city can no longer be sure that he is ad- dressing an ignorant and gaping mob, or that his only educated listeners are those who are learned in the Confucian classics. It is not impossible that among his audience may be men who are acquainted with Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel, and who read with keen interest the publications of the rationalist press and the works of Western philosophers whom the average missionary would describe as infidel, agnostic, or atheistic. What will the unlettered Christian mis- sionary do with a Chinese who has read Hume, or Spencer, or McTaggart, or Bradley, or Nietzsche and Der Antichrist, and is prepared to discuss them with him? Bishop Colenso, as we all know, was so puzzled by the searching questions put to him by his African disciples and inquirers that he himself became a sort of convert to his own converts, and adopted biblical views which, though regarded as harmless and in some respects old-fashioned to-day, were at that time frowned upon as dangerously heretical. But what is to become of a new Colenso in China who is called upon to reply to the criticisms of a Loisy, or a Conybeare, or a Sturt? It cannot be too strongly emphasised that the Chinese do npjjwa^t^ Europe^ s .cast-off theology, and ITyou" insist upon thrusting it on them it is not unlikely that there will some day be a terrible reaction, resulting in the definite expulsion from China of all Western religion. By no means do I desire to see all religious impulses stifled in China. I am not one of those who believe that the day for religion of any and every kind is for ever passed away. George Tyrrell was perhaps Prospects of Christianity in Far East 39 right when he declared that "spiritual religion, far from being outgrown like a toy, becomes more and more of an exigency with the deepening of man's moral and spiritual life. " But if the acceptance of Christianity necessitates the sacrifice of sincerity and truth, I, for one, shall rejoice to see China adopt a religion that is not Christian and is not inconsistent with perfect honesty of thought and speech. I cannot see that man's moral or spiritual life is likely to derive permanent benefit from a faith in dogmas which are either repug- nant to the reason, and, therefore, morally mischievous, or which can be reconciled with truth only by a dis- tortion of language and by theological jugglery. West- ern thinkers are beginning to urge the formulation of a srjgiTjjfif. islig^Il ^ a ^ s hall be consistent with itself and in harmony with modern thought. 1 Whether there be any form of Christianity that by further dis- tortion or manipulation can be made to fulfil such con- ditions is a question that I am in no way qualified to answer; but I may be allowed to express the hope and belief that no form of Western religion irreconcilable with those conditions will find a permanent home on Chinese soil. 2 1 Cf. Prof. Beth's Die Moderne und die Prinzipien der Theologie (Trowitzsch, 1907). Mr. Sturt's proposed Free Church would not, of course, be a Christian Church. If he can arrange to send some missionaries to China to promulgate the religious ideas adumbrated by him, I am inclined to think they will meet with no small measure of success. 2 For further observations on this subject, see below, pp. 304-307. CHAPTER III MISSIONARIES AND THEIR METHODS BEFORE proceeding to give examples of what I believe to be the mistak en method s of mission- aries, it is necessary to reiterate a warning that I have no wish to bring an indictment against the whole body of missionaries, but only against a section of them which is numerically very powerful. I am glad to admit that there are also some educated and cultivated missionaries who invariably behave with the same tact ani the sojourners in purgatory and the least wicked of the inhabitants of hell; yet the rascals of purgatory will sooner or later ascend to the region of eternal happiness, while hell's least ignoble souls are for ever damned. This seemed to my youthful mind a very perplexing situation, and, so far as I could see, the only possible escape from it was either to deny the existence of hell altogether, and thereby render Satan homeless, or to persuade oneself that hell was really a place (or con- dition) of comparative comfort. To use the words of the Christian apologist imagined by Leslie Stephen: "Hell shall have no more than a fine equable tempera- ture, really good for the constitution; there shall be nobody in it except Judas Iscariot and one or two more; 1 On the Pauline theology (as it is held at the present day) for which "no term of reprobation and contempt can be too strong," and which possesses "no redeeming feature in its absurdity and cruelty, " see Sturt's Idea of a Free Church, pp. 234 seq. Hell and the Damnation of Heathen 171 and even the poor Devil shall have a chance if he will resolve to mend his ways." 1 Again, when as a very young student I first en- countered the Christian belief in the eternal punish- ment of infants who died unbaptised, these were among the whimsical imaginings that took shape within my heathen mind. So far as I could gather, the decree of damnation for the unbaptised infant emanated from God or was sanctioned by him; or at least he, being by hypothesis omnipotent, could have rescinded it if he would. Thus my sympathies went out least of all to God, who was merely depriving himself of the services of a potential angel; a great deal more to the infant itself, who was condemned to an "eternity of woe," as the Christian hymnal has it 2 ; but most of all to the Devil, the lord of hell, whose detestable duty it would be to receive the little damned soul and assign it to its appropriate sphere of torture. What would happen, I wondered, if the Devil refused, even at the bidding of Almighty God, to find a place, in his abode of eternal misery, for an innocent child? What if he said to God: "Take away your victim! My hell is for the wicked, not for sinless children. Create a new hell for babies if you will — you are omnipotent and can do so ; but you must create another Satan to rule it, or be yourself its lord." God might be angry, but as he had already damned the Devil and presumably had no reserve of punishments to inflict upon him, the divine wrath would spend itself in vain. Possibly the wretched infant, rejected by both God and Satan, and left to wander aimlessly in the interstellar spaces, might, after the lapse of untold ages arrive by some happy chance at the portals of heaven. Even then the Almighty might 1 An Agnostic's Apology, p. 42 (R.P.A. Reprint). a Hymns, Ancient and Modern, No. 289, st. 4. 172 Hell and the Damnation of Heathen be stern as ever, and pitilessly order the gates to be locked and barred; but perhaps the doorkeeper Peter, not yet degenerated to sycophantic angelhood, might still be human enough to accept the bribe of a baby's smile. CHAPTER XII PRAYER, FAITH, AND TELEPATHY ONE of the many religious questions on which we Chinese find missionaries at variance among themselves and on which we have not succeeded in ob- taining a clear and unequivocal statement of Christian teaching, is the question of Prayer. "God ans wer s prayer ." This seems clear and suc- cinct enough for anybody; and so it would be if all three terms of the proposition were clearly defined. Let me explain at the outset that I am so far from denying what is called the efficacy of prayer that I cannot even imagine such a denial being made in sincerity by any thoughtful person. At first sight the question "Have prayers any efficacy?" might seem to be merely another way of saying "Does God answer the prayers of those who pray to him?" But the two questions are really quite distinct; and the man who ventured to give a negative or agnostic reply to the second, might without any inconsistency answer the first in the affirmative. To admit that prayer is or may be efficacious, by no means implies a belief that a personal God (a God who made man in his own image) listens to the petitions of his worshippers and grants the boons asked for by causing something to happen which would not have happened if the prayers had not been uttered. If, indeed, it be 173 174 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy- further granted (as I for one am fully prepared to grant) that a prayer is, as a matter of fact, sometimes followed by events which would not have occurred if there had been no prayer, there is nothing even in this admission that would necessarily meet with dis- sent from agnostic or atheist. I must try and make this position clear. A d e yo u t Christian . mother, let us say, is watching at the bedside of her child, who is believed to be dying. In the intervals of nursing she prays earnestly to God that her child may not be taken from her; and after a long and dangerous illness the child at last recovers. The doctor, knowing it had been a case of "touch and go," asserts that the child owes its life to the devoted nursing of the mother; the mother, on the other hand, is positive that its recovery was the outcome of her prayers. Now I do not think that any one — even if he rejects as inconclusive the evidence of the existence of a personal God — will have any difficulty in admitting, after a little consideration, that doctor and mother may both be equally right. While the mother was engaged in prayer she, as a Christian, firmly believed that her prayer was listened to by the God to whom it was addressed ; and her faith in God's power and goodness gave her the further assurance that he was able to preserve her child's life. She rises from her knees comforted, fortified, and with renewed cheerfulness, and is able to devote herself to the nursing of her child even more earnestly and suc- cessfully than before. Had she not prayed, had she had no faith, her own health might have broken down and the child might have died through lack of a mother's care; as it is, her faith gives her hope, the joy that hope brings with it adds new strength and energy to her physical frame, and the child lives. I can well imagine an earnest Christian asking with some indignation what Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 175 further proof is needed that God grants the prayers of his people. The admitted facts [he may say] are that the woman prayed for her child's life; that its life was spared; and that if she had not prayed it would have died. What more do you want? What right have we to criticise God's methods because they seem capable of a non-miraculous explana- tion? The laws of the universe are God's laws; is God to be debarred from acting through the laws of which he him- self is the author? 1 This seems plausible enough until we perceive that we can really trace the concatenation of causes no farther back than to the mother' s faith. Faith in what? When we look for an answer to that question we are merely groping among hypotheses. God may or may not be enthroned above it all ; our chain does not reach, so far as we can see, to the feet of God. The mother whose case we are considering had faith in the Christian God, and therefore she prayed to him and to no other. Had she been a native of South-eastern Asia she might have prayed to Buddha, for the average Buddhist does pray, in spite of his theoretical acceptance of the theory of inexorable law. Had she been a North-American Indian she might have prayed to Wohkonda, the Master of Life; as a Chinese, she might have prayed to the local t'u-ti or to Kuan-yin, or to the deity who presided 1 Professor Sanday, in The Life of Christ in Recent Research, remarks that "an act is no less divine because it is fundamentally according to law. " Quite true, as one of his critics observes, "but does not such a reply involve this objection? To speak of a miracle as a 'divine act' carries the inference that an ordinary occurrence is not divine" (W. Jones Davies in The Hibbert Journal, July, 1908, p. 938). And similarly we may say: If every occurrence is divine, then why draw distinctions between one occurrence and another? Why say, "Here we trace God's finger, " if God's finger is acknowledged to be in everything? 176 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy over the particular disease from which her child was suffering ; as an ancient Egyptian she might have prayed to Amon or to Osiris; as a Roman, to ^Esculapius; as a Moslem, to the God revealed by Mohammed; as a native of Vedic India, to Varuna or Agni; as a Zoroas- trian, to Ahuramazda; as a Hottentot, to Tsui-goa; as an ancient Mexican, to Pachamac 1 : and we have no proof whatever that so far as the child's restoration to health was concerned the Christian prayer was of any greater efficacy than any heathen prayer would have been if uttered in equally earnest faith. The Papists on the one side [remarked the good Pro- testant Robert Burton] stiffly maintain how many melan- choly, mad, demoniacal persons are daily cured at St. Anthony's Church in Padua, at St. Vitus's in Germany, by our Lady of Loretto in Italy, our Lady of Sichem in the Low Countries. . . . They have a proper saint for every peculiar infirmity: for poison, gout, agues, Petronella; St. Romanus for such as are possessed; Valentine for the falling sickness; St. Vitus for madmen, etc. . . . Jasper Belga, a Jesuit, cured a mad woman by hanging St. John's Gospel about her neck, and many such. . . . iEsculapius of old, that counterfeit god, did as many famous cures ; his temple (as Strabo relates) was daily full of patients, and as many several tables, inscriptions, pendants, donaries, etc., to be seen in his church, as at this day at our Lady of Loretto's in Italy. . . . The same Jupiter and those bad angels are now worshipped and adored by the name of St. Sebastian, Barbara, etc. Christopher and George are come in their places. Our Lady succeeds Venus, as they use her in many offices; the rest are otherwise supplied, as Lavater writes, and so they are deluded." 2 Medical men nowadays fully recognise the curative 1 See Max Muller's Last Essays (Second Series), pp. 36 seq. * Anatomy of Melancholy, pt. ii., sec. i., mem. iii. Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 177 value of faith, and perhaps the majority of them would whisper that faith in what or in whom was a matter of minor consequence. The object of faith may be a lucky pebble, or the touch of a king's finger, or a piece of wood purporting to be a portion of the "true Cross, " or the holy water at Lourdes, or a holy coat, or Mrs. Eddy's pseudo-metaphysics, or the tomb of St. Thomas of Canterbury, or the relics of Ti-tsang Bodhisatva at Chiu-hua-shan in China : the only thing that is really of consequence seems to be the sincerity of the faith. ' ' Thy faith hath made thee whole, ' ' said Jesus. r Many are apt to assume when they read the "faith" passages in the gospel that it was faith in Jesus as the Son of God • — in the divinity of Jesus — that was meant ; whereas all that was signified seems to have been a belief in Jesus' power to heal bodily disease. It is admitted that Jesus was not the only remarkable healer of his time, indeed he himself added to the number of faith-healers *; and there is no reason to suppose that his patients, even after they had been restored to health by his touch, were converted to a belief in his Godhead. 3 1 For further evidence of the great stress laid by Jesus on faith as faith, see Matt, xxi., 21-2; Luke xvii., 6. 2 See Matt, x., 1, 8. 3 "When Jesus asked men to have faith in him he was not requiring their assent to a Christological creed," etc. (Dr. Henry Goodwin Smith, in The Hibbert Journal, Oct., 1907, pp. 142 seq.). Prof. Estlin Carpenter {First Three Gospels) says: "The real force which worked the patient's cure dwelt in his own mind; the power of Jesus lay in the potency of his personality to evoke this force. " Cf. also S. J. Case, who in his review of Warschauer's Jesus : Seven Questions, remarks that Jesus' ' ' power to heal did not differ in kind from that which other good men of his day possessed, and was dependent for its effect upon the patient's own mental attitude" {American Journal of Theology, July, 1909, p. 460). Cf. also Dr. A. T. Schofield's article on "Spiritual Healing" in The Con- temporary Review, March, 1909, pp. 298-304. "Of course," he says, " the first idea in all ages and in all countries has always been that it is the object of faith that effects the cure; in short, that it is objective and 178 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy Leuba is undoubtedly right [says Prof. William James] in contending that the conceptual belief about Christ's work, although so often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory and non-essential, and that the "joyous conviction" can also come by far other channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the name of faith par excellence.'- The name of "faith-state," by which Prof. Leuba designates it, is a good one [says Dr. James in another place]. It is a biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely ac- curate in classing faith among the forces by which men live. The total absence of it, anhedonia, means collapse." 3 The recognition of the reality of faith-cures is nothing new. The author of the Anatomy of Melancholy quotes a learned opinion to the effect that doctors cannot hope to cure their patients unless "with a true faith they call upon God, and teach their patients to do the like." 3 Nowadays most doctors leave the praying to the patient and to the parson ; but few of them would deny that in certain circumstances and in respect of certain types of disease faithful prayer may be of far more value than drugs. Burton quotes a piece of advice, to the effect that sick persons should first of all pray to God "with not subjective; but when it is carefully noted that however many and various are the objects in which faith is reposed the cures are always the same, it is clear that the object cannot be the active agency. For in- stance, equally credible cures are recorded from faith in idols, fetishes, charms, repulsive objects, or powders or draughts; apparatus such as a thermometer or special bits of wood and iron; or in the vision at Lourdes, or the holy coat of Treves, or in relics of all sorts; or in kings or holy men, or in trees, flowers, fruits; or in impostors such as Dowie, or in systems of faith, or in the gods of Greece or Egypt; or in a thousand other objects, in themselves powerless." 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 246-7 (10th impr.; Long mans, 1904). ' Op. cit., p. 505. s Burton's Anat. of Mel., pt. ii., sect, i., mem. iii. Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 179 all submission and penitency, " then confess their sins, and finally take some medicine. * No man who has studied history [says Huxley] or even attended to the occurrences of everyday life, can doubt the enormous practical value of trust and faith ; but as little will he be inclined to deny that this practical value has not the least relation to the reality of the objects of that trust and faith. In examples of patient constancy of faith and of unswerving trust, the "Acta Martyrum," do not excel the annals of Babism. 2 The fact that prayer is far from being confined to Christianity to-day, and formed an important part of the religious lives of people who lived ages before Christ was born, is not allowed to perplex the mind of the devout Christian. The universality of prayer, he points out, is one of the surest proofs of its efficacy, for people do not persist in doing things that experience shows to be of no avail. 3 Here I find nothing to cavil at, for the efficacy of prayer is not in dispute. But he will very likely go on to assert that prayers addressed by heathen worshippers to stocks and stones are answered (when they have any effect at all) only by the One God re- vealed by Judaism and Christ, the All-Father who be- stows a share of his love and pity even on those who deny his name. Thus here we have a definite proof, says the Christian triumphantly, that "God's in his heaven, all 's right with the world!" Well, but if God answers heathen prayers in the same manner as he answers Christian prayers there ceases to "Burton's Anat. of Mel., pt. ii., sect, i., mem. iii. 2 Science and Christian Tradition (Eversley ed.), p. 214. (Italics not in original.) 3 Surely, says Seneca, we men would not agree in addressing prayers to "surda numina et inefficaces deos" unless we found by experience that we derived benefit from such prayers (Ben., iv., 4, 1). 180 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy be any reason — so far as the matter of prayer is con- cerned — why the idolaters should be coaxed away from their stocks and stones. If they were to lose faith in their "idols" and were persuaded to give an intellect- ual assent to one of the numerous forms of Christianity, they might come to feel, in time, that they had lost more than they had gained by the exchange. The "faith-state," once destroyed, does not easily re-create itself under new conditions. Setting this question aside as not strictly relevant, what is to be said when we hear of favourable responses being granted not only to the prayers of the heathen, but also to those of notorious evil-doers, and even to prayers for help and protection in the commission of actual crime? Does this support the view that a personal God, all-good, all-powerful, and omniscient, is the direct dispenser of the benefits derived from prayer? We make nothing [said the Lord of Montaigne] of invoking God's assistance in our vices, and inviting him into our unjust designs: "quae nisi seductis nequeas com- mittere divis"; the covetous man prays for the conservation of his vain and superfluous riches; the ambitious for victory and the good conduct of his fortune; the thief calls him to his assistance, to deliver him from the dangers and diffi- culties that obstruct his wicked designs, or returns him thanks for the facility he has met with in cutting a man's throat; at the door of the house men are going to storm or break into by force of a petard, they fall to prayers for success, their intentions and hopes full of cruelty, avarice, and lust. 1 This matter might lead us into some strange by-paths of thought if we had space to pursue it. Human nature is a marvellously complex thing, and I suppose there is 1 Montaigne's Essays: "Of Prayers. " Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 181 no doubt that many persons who commit criminal acts are very far from being conscious of their own iniquity or from regarding themselves as limbs of Satan. The housebreaker may feel that he is avenging the cause of the "higher righteousness," or that he is warring against an unjust and corrupt social system, or that the motives which impel him to the defiance of mundane laws are somehow justifiable in the sight of God if not in the sight of man. There is good reason to believe that even murderers have sometimes acted with complete confi- dence in their own rectitude, and have gone to the scaf- fold with the belief that they are being foully wronged. ■ I do not refer only to assassins who in times of political unrest have been led into crime through the promptings of a perverted patriotism; I would include many per- petrators of the ordinary murders that from the point of view of the newspaper-reader or juryman can have been inspired only by the most sordid or detestable of motives. We must allow, I think, that even robbers and cut- throats are not necessarily acting a hypocritical part if — as still happens in the more backward and superstitious of Christian as well as of heathen lands — they bend the knee in prayer and ask God, or a favourite saint, to bless their deeds of violence. It is not surprising that criminals should be religious, for human nature is full of inconsistencies. What seems truly astonishing — on the assumption that the Christian God alone is directly responsible for the fruits of prayer — is that the praying criminal seems to derive as much benefit from his impious petitions to the Deity as his law-abiding neighbour derives from prayers uttered in equally strong faith and with more innocent intent. There can be little doubt that the Spanish or Italian brigand who kneels before the crucifix by the wayside and asks for favour and protection from God or his patron saint does 1 82 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy actually — like the mother who prayed for her sick child — derive strength and confidence from the act of prayer, and that he is more likely to bring off his next coup with success than if he had not prayed. If you insist that it is through the direct action of a pitiful God that the mother gains new cheerfulness and hope from her trust- ful prayers, will you also admit that it is by the -direct action of God that the brigand gains new vigour and self-confidence in the prosecution of his schemes of pillage or murder? A theory whereby we may, if we will, account for the efficacy of certain types of prayer without throwing any direct responsibility on God or even necessarily postulating his existence, is to be found among the sug- gestions of that attractive and daring thinker Frederick Myers, whose name will always be green in the memory of those who realise the supreme importance, to hu- manity, of the psychical studies in which he was so deeply interested. This is no place to discuss at length the theory of the subliminal consciousness, with which no doubt most of my Western readers are familiar, and which finds — perhaps I may venture to say — all the readier acceptance among Orientals because it merely puts into fairly definite shape a portion of a theory in which for ages past we have more or less explicitly be- lieved. Myers, indeed, seemed anxious to avoid en- tangling himself in the meshes of pantheism; but his "infinite life," 1 in which every human personality has its original home and to which every individual soul may under certain conditions withdraw itself for the purpose of imbibing fresh draughts of energy, is cer- tainly suggestive of the "world-soul" of Eastern pan- theistic philosophy. According to Myers — and he is supported by a large 1 See Human Personality, vol. ii., p. 313, and many other passages. Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 183 amount of psychological and pathological evidence — the conscious or "supraliminal" Self is not the only Self, and not the most important Self, that we possess. There exists, [he says] a more comprehensive conscious- ness, a profounder faculty, which for the most part remains potential only so far as regards the life of earth, but from which the consciousness and the faculty of earth-life are mere selections, and which reasserts itself in its plenitude after the liberating change of death. 1 In more technical language he maintains the same view thus: I regard each man as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite, as inheriting from earthly ancestors a multiplex and "colonial" organism — polyzoic and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree; but also as ruling and unifying that organism by a soul or spirit absolutely beyond our present analysis — a soul which has originated in a spiritual or metethereal environment; which even while embodied subsists in that environment; and which will still subsist therein after the body's decay. 2 We need not here consider the question of whether Myers was justified in supposing that the available evidence proved the individual's survival of bodily death 3 : the point that more immediately concerns us 1 Human Personality, vol. i., p. 12. 1 Ibid., vol. i., p. 34. s There have been, of course, numerous criticisms of the theories advo- cated by Myers, especially as regards their bearing on the "life after death." Not the least interesting observations are those of R. B. Arnold, in his Scientific Fact and Metaphysical Reality, pp. 334 seq. (Macmillan & Co., 1904). He admits the importance of the evidence collected by Myers and his colleagues, but says that "the explanatory reasoning was somewhat vitiated by the treatment of the 'subconscious self ' as though it were some separate type of existence, somewhere away in ' infinity.' . . . The subconscious has been well expressed as the 184 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy is the possibility that human personality not only far transcends the utmost limits of the normal consciousness, but may even be connected, through the medium of the unplumbed depths of the subconscious self, with the ultimate reality, the infinite life, the world-soul in which (it may be) we all live and move and have our being. Many of the phenomena relating to telepathy, tele- aesthesia, hypnotic and ordinary sleep, disintegration of personality, sensory automatism, self-suggestion, trance, ecstasy, so-called devil-possession, and some of the experiences connected with the "inspirations" of genius and the visions of mysticism — these and other peculiari- ties of the human organism can best be explained, according to Myers and his colleagues and successors, on the hypothesis that under exceptional or more or less abnormal conditions the subliminal faculties — that is, the faculties that usually remain below the threshold of normal consciousness— may assume control, and even neural mechanised background of consciousness. . . . Thus the sub- conscious self is not an entity somewhere away in the stars, but it is only postulated to explain the full working of mind, matter, and ether, in- cluding — and in their ultimate reality transcending — the ' ordinary ' activities of our organisms, as is possibly already indicated in reported telepathy," etc. From another point of view, the criticisms of Prof. W. R. Inge {Personal Idealism and Mysticism, pp. 181-3) deserve attention. He points out, as others have done, the unphilosophical atti- tude of the "individualist " who "can hardly think of immortality except as survival in time (time being to him absolutely real). " But the un- philosophical Christian's attitude toward the eschatological problems of his own faith are, after all, cast in a very similar mould. The man-in- the-street, whether the street and the man be in China or in Europe, is either totally ignorant of, or has a hearty contempt for, the theories of a Berkeley or a Kant. He will kick a lamp-post and expect to be congratu- lated on having achieved a brilliant refutation of idealism. As for space and time, he is just as certain that they are "real" as he is of the existence of the lamp-post. At the same time it would not be difficult to show that such arguments as those used by Dr. Inge by no means stultify the survival theory propounded by Myers in his great work on Human Personality. Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 185 effect a temporary effacement, of the supraliminal con- sciousness of ordinary life. It is further supposed that man may, by an act of combined faith and will dive into his own subliminal consciousness and refresh him- self in its life-giving waters, undergoing thereby a pro- cess of purification and re-invigoration that renders him far better able than before to face the troubles and perplexities of daily life. It is almost a necessary corol- lary of this theory that the act of prayer, provided it is faithful and sincere, is one of the simplest and most effective methods of immersing the dusty and travel- stained Self of ordinary consciousness in the clear and sparkling waves of the subUminal ocean. It is not sur- prising, then, that in spite of the frowns of many ortho- dox theologians, who are not disposed to look with favour on anything that is suggestive of Spiritualism, many good Christians have eagerly seized upon this theory as admirably capable of effecting a reconcilia- tion, in respect of the important matter of prayer, be- tween religion and science; and they do so with the more confidence when they know that on their side are ranged such prominent leaders of modern religious and scientific thought as Sir Oliver Lodge, Adolf Har- nack, 1 and the late Dr. James. Thus we need not 1 Those who are surprised at the inclusion of the name of Prof. Har- nack in this list may perhaps be reminded of the following passage which occurs in the volume of lectures entitled What is Christianity? (Eng. trans., pp. 28-9). "Although the order of Nature be inviolable, we are not yet by any means acquainted with all the forces working in it and acting reciprocally with other forces. Our acquaintance even with the forces inherent in matter, and with the field of their action, is incomplete; while of psychic forces we know very much less. We see that a strong will and a firm faith exert an influence upon the life of the body, and pro- duce phenomena which strike us as marvellous. Has any one ever yet drawn any sure line between the spheres of the possible and the actual? Who can say how far the influence of soul upon soul and of soul upon body reaches? No one. Who can still maintain that any extraordinary 186 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy- be surprised to find the following passage in a sermon preached by the Rev. R. F. Horton, D.D., at a great Missionary Conference held at Liverpool in January, 1908: In the act of prayer [he says] you dive down into what modern philosophers sometimes call the subliminal self — that is to say, that every self is made up of a certain con- sciousness which is conscious, and of a great deal of potential consciousness which is not for the moment conscious at all. The little bit of consciousness that is conscious at the mo- ment is like the cork upon the surface of the sea that indi- cates the great net that goes down into the depths below. Now in the act of prayer, if it is real prayer, the wonderful thing is that you explore that subliminal consciousness. You get really down into yourself, and what happens there is very remarkable. Sir Oliver Lodge says that the one thing which has been established by psychological research is the reality of telepathic communication. When you get down beneath the surface of your own self — it is a most mysterious truth — you come into contact with other people there ; you touch the wires of communication which connect you with people far away — you actually influence the thought and the feelings of persons on the other side of the globe. It is one of the mysterious facts of modern phenomenon that may appear in this domain is entirely based on error and delusion? Miracles, it is true, do not happen; but of the marvellous and the inexplicable there is no lack. In our present state of knowledge we have become more careful, more hesitating in our judgment, in regard to the stories of the miraculous which we have received from antiquity. That the earth in its course stood still; that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe.and we shall never again believe; but that the lame walked, and the blind saw, and the deaf heard, will not be so summarily dismissed as an illusion. " It may be mentioned, by the way, that many Christian missionaries are still assuring unlet- tered Chinese audiences that the very things which Harnack says "we do not believe, and we shall never again believe, " did, as a matter of his- toric fact, take place. This is one of the principal justifications for the present Appeal. Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 187 psychology, but it is indisputable; and it reveals the truth, which we have held all along, that by praying for people we directly help them; that if you give yourself to prayer for a person, we will say, in the mission-field, the very act of prayer brings you to the point where telepathic com- munication is carried right through to the soul far away; and that fact, which is familiar to us all, is becoming a scientific fact, a psychological fact established by inquiry, experiment, and verification. 1 Now with the substance of this interesting and clearly expressed passage many of us will hesitate to disagree. There are non-Christians who could assent to its pro- positions (perhaps expressed in slightly different phrase- ology) just as readily as Christians, for (as should be carefully noted) they are dependent on no theological dogmas or formulated religious system whatsoever. If there really be such a thing as telepathy (and the evi- dence in its favour is now regarded by many competent judges as conclusive), scientific investigators will cer- tainly drag it, sooner or later, out of the obscurity in which it has hitherto lurked and oblige it to undergo as patient and thorough an examination as any other natural law or process cognisable by science. But the question of the existence of a God or of the truth or falsity of this or that system of religious doctrine is not necessarily affected by the establishment of the truth of telepathy. Moreover, as the Rev. R. F. Horton must have well known, his view that prayer acts telepathetically does not yet meet with the universal acceptance of theological experts. Some authorities condemn in no measured terms the proposed alliance between religion and the philosophy of the subconscious, 1 Prayer and the Divine Source of Power (London: Student Volunteer Missionary Union, Chancery Lane). 1 88 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy on the ground that it implies a reversion to primitive modes of religious thought which we have long out- grown. Extremes meet [writes a well-known theologian] when the objective efficacy of prayer is explained and defended by reference to the supposed connection of mind with mind, and of the human mind with God, through the subconscious. If telepathy be true, then of course my prayer for another may produce effects in his mind and body. Myers's speculation concerning a possible medium for telepathic vibrations now reappears as an assertion that prayer recognises "waves of psychic force." . . .* The warm idealism, and even the practical insight, that sometimes accompany such crude mythology, do not lessen its crudity. . . . But, in any case, the appeal to the sub- conscious in proof of the efficacy of prayer is another instance of reversion toward the earliest and crudest religious philosophy. 2 For my own part, I am not convinced that the theory to which Mr. Horton pins his faith is such a contemptible one as Dr. Coe seems inclined to think. But there is little doubt that the theory of the subliminal consciousness has been drawn out to ex- travagant lengths by clergymen and laymen who regard it as a new and valuable proof of the existence of a personal Deity. ' ' I believe, ' ' says a preacher cited by Dr. Coe, " that the subconscious mind is the indi- vidual manifestation of the Universal Mind — God." 3 Perhaps this is true; perhaps, on the other hand, it is not true. Even in the former case some exceedingly important questions still remain unsolved. In what 1 This quotation is from J. Brierley's Religion and Experience, p. 47. 2 Prof. G. A. Coe, Ph.D., in The American Journal of Theology, July, 1909. PP- 34°-i- » Ibid., p. 346. Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy 189 measure does the individualisation of the Universal Mind modify or destroy the perception of divine truth? To what extent does the divine cease to be divine when it individualises itself in the subUminal consciousness? Unless we know how we stand with reference to these matters, the knowledge that we possess a fragment of individualised divinity may be regarded as a doubtful benefit. Not the most devoted admirer or worshipper of his owm subconscious self will be presumptuous enough to assert that it invariably expresses itself in a manner suggestive of the infinite knowledge, power, and goodness ascribed to God. Dr. Coe hints that if the subconscious mind is divine it seems to disguise itself pretty effectually sometimes as a mumbler of "plati- tudes and ambiguities." 1 Moreover, it is noteworthy that different subconscious personalities give entirely different and often incompatible accounts of what con- stitutes religious truth. He who has been brought up in Christian surroundings and is himself a Christian may indeed find his religious outlook greatly widened when he experiences a "subliminal uprush, " or when by some means or other he has obtained access to his subcon- scious self, but it is rarely, if ever, that the pronounce- ments of the subliminal self will be found to contradict, in essentials, the religious convictions of the supralimi- nal or normal mind. So far as I am aware, there is not a single example of a person who in the trance-state — that is, the condition in which the supraliminal con- sciousness is put to sleep and the subliminal becomes active — has testified to the truth of a religion with which in his normal state he was totally unacquainted or with which he was entirely out of sympathy. The Japanese trance-medium finds in his subliminal consciousness nothing to contradict the ordinary Japanese notions 1 Prof. G. A. Coe, loc. cit. 190 Prayer, Faith, and Telepathy regarding the deities of Shinto and Buddhism. 1 Hyp- notise a Scots kirk-elder, and unless he has been sur- reptitiously dabbling in Eastern lore in his waking hours his friends need have no fear that in his subliminal raptures he will blasphemously murmur the praises of Krishna. Obtain access to the subconscious mind of a Chinese Taoist priest whose supraliminal intellect has never been influenced in any way by Christian teach- ings, and you may explore its deepest recesses without coming across the least trace of a consciousness of the Godhead of Jesus of Nazareth. 1 See Percival Lowell's Occult Japan, pp. 97 seq. (4th impr.). CHAPTER XIII SCIENCE AND PRAYER RELIANCE on the telepathy argument to explain the efficacy of prayer may lead to unexpected results somewhat dangerous to the cause of so-called revealed religion; and we need not be surprised if the argument becomes less and less popular among the clergy, in proportion as the processes of telepathy pass under the dominion of natural science. A recent writer on the subject declares that prayer maybe said to have efficacy, "not by a violation of natural order, but through t^gle - pathjojagencjgSj which are part of that order. " * Now if this be so, surely the result will be that as soon as telepathy, duly classed and ticketed, has taken its ap- pointed place among facts of the natural order recognised by science, all prayers that depend for their efficacy on telepathic agencies will gradually become secularised in form, and finally lose all religious significance. If a man in China finds that by following certain printed rules, or by placing himself in the hands of a professor of telepathy, he can get into communication with the mind of his friend in America, it is hardly likely that out of mere respect for religious tradition he will long persist in submitting the process to sanctification by prayer. The operator of wireless telegraphy does not act on the supposition that the proper transmission of messages is 1 Some Problems of Existence, by Norman Pearson, p. 121 (Edward Arnold, 1907). 191 192 Science and Prayer dependent on his offering propitiatory sacrifices to the ether-demons; yet if the "natural order" includes tele- pathy as well as wireless telegraphy, it is difficult to see why prayers should be considered necessary or desirable in the one case and not in the other. Already, indeed, modern civilisation has witnessed the gradual encroachment by science on what was once regarded as the exclusive domain of prayer. Let us imagine that we are living in England in the early years of the reign of Queen Victoria. A fond father has just said good-bye to his emigrant son, who is going to Australia. With the son goes an older man who has promised to be the youth's protector, and who is believed by the father to be a man of probity and honour. Long after the ship has set sail, but before it has reached its destination, the father discovers clear proof that his son's companion is a man of bad character who has formed a plot to de- fraud his son of all his worldly possessions as soon as the vessel reaches Australia. The father is helpless. By the time he can communicate with his son by letter the rascal will probably have got away with his booty, and the son may be a destitute wanderer in a strange land. It happens, however, that the father is an extremely devout Christian and a sincere believer in prayer. As a matter of course, then, he spends many anxious hours in praying that his son's interests may be safeguarded by his heavenly Father, and that by special divine inter- vention the rogue's villainy may be unmasked. Such, we may suppose, would have been the procedure of a Christian father in the first half of the nineteenth cen- tury. And what would he do in similar circumstances at the present time? Obviously, he would send a tele- gram to meet his son at the first Australian port. He might pray, too? By all means — after his return from the telegraph office. Science and Prayer 193 Doubtless we shall be told that all the inventions of modern civilisation are themselves gifts of God, and that if he chooses to grant our wishes through the medium of electricity our gratitude to him should not therefore be less than if, for our special benefit, he were to suspend the operation of a law of Nature. I do not for a moment wish to imply that science knows everything that can be known about the laws and forces of which it makes use. The ultimate mysteries of electricity, like those jealously guarded by the "flower in the crannied wall," are still beyond our reach, as every honest man of science readily acknowledges. It may be that the whole universe is interpenetrated by an infinite Spirit or guided by a Divine Being who possesses, or does not possess, the attributes of personality; but this does not alter the fact that the scientific methods resulting from the discoveries and inventions of modern times do usurp, to an ever- increasing extent, the territory over which Prayer formerly held undisputed sway. A mother's prayers may indirectly, as we have seen, be the means of saving her child's life ; but when one of your great modern cities is attacked by plague or cholera do you ask God in prayer to take the disease away, 1 or do you reinforce your sanitary staffs and see to the drains? Possibly you do both; but there is little room for doubt as to which of the two methods enjoys the larger share of popular confidence. The much-discussed question of the usefulness or otherwise of prayers for rain and fair weather is specially apposite to our present inquiry, for such prayers, from 1 As in Hymns Ancient and Modem, No. 377: "Thine awful judgments are abroad, O shield us lest we die; . . .. "Accept the sacrifice we bring, And let the plague be stayed. " 13 194 Science and Prayer time immemorial, have been offered up on the hill-tops of China as well as within the churches of Europe. 1 According to the orthodox Christian theory, prayers for rainarejust as reasonable , just as likely to meet with a favourable response, as any other form of prayer. That is to say, the personal God can, and sometimes does, in answer to the prayers of his people, provide them with rain which would not have fallen if they had not prayed. But although prayers for rain and fair weather are still retained in the Western prayer-books, and occasionally made use of, it may be assumed with some confidence that no man of science to-day believes in the power of such petitions to bring about a change in meteorological conditions. 2 No one doubts, of course, that prayers for rain may possess efficacy of a certain pragmatic kind. The act of prayer presupposes a more or less robust faith in the utility of such an act ; and it must have hap- pened again and again in both Eastern and Western hemispheres that people who were becoming disquieted by the sight of brazen skies and withering crops felt comforted and hopeful when they were told that public supplications for divine pity were being addressed to a heavenly power. Certainly in China, where droughts often occur, the offering up of official prayers for rain has, on numerous occasions, been the means of staving off tumults, and allaying popular discontent. 3 Official 1 For examples of, and remarks on, Ancient Greek and other non- Christian rain-prayers, see Max Muller's Last Essays (Second Series, 1906), pp. 37 seq. ' Perhaps it is as well to explain that I am not ignoring the rather vague speculations of Sir Oliver Lodge in the first chapter of his Man and the Universe. 3 A missionary writer tells an amusing story of some village priests in China "who, finding their god was supine in the matter of sending rain, bored a hole in his side and inserted a centipede" (Ritson's Abroad for the Bible Society). Science and Prayer 195 prayers, at such seasons, are postponed as long as pos- sible; thus time is gained, and meanwhile, any day the rain may come in obedience to normal meteorological law. But though prayers for rain may thus have a certain usefulness of their own, among a simple-minded people, we are not thereby justified in asserting that they possess objective efficacy. Surely we are pre- vented only by the present imperfection of our scientific knowledge from recognising that it is just as futile to pray for rain when skies are cloudless as it would be for a party of famishing explorers at the South Pole to pray for bananas to grow on an iceberg. The one proceeding seems less absurd than the other only because our bo- tanical knowledge is in a more advanced stage at present than our knowledge of meteorology. What tends to the survival of popular belief in the efficacy of supplications for a divine interference with the laws of nature is the fact that, as experience shows, events do quite frequently occur in accordance with the desires expressed in prayer. It would be astonishing, indeed, if this were not the case ; but thoughtless people are only too ready to accept the theological suggestion that such events can have come about only through special divine intervention and in direct response to prayer. Let us suppose ourselves faced by these three facts: Rain is badly wanted, prayers are offered to God, rain falls. Now follow these important questions. __Did the_ rain com^ n^answeiLlQ_th£_^rayers-? Is it quite certain that the rain would not have fallen if there had been no prayers? A very large number of ecclesiastics and laymen, and certainly the great majority of the Christian missionaries in China, would unhesitatingly answer "yes" to the first question, and most of them would either decline altogether to consider the second, or merely admit frankly that they could not possibly 196 Science and Prayer answer it. But surely it is clear that the two questions are really one. So long as there is the slightest doubt as to whether the rain would or would not have fallen if no prayers had been offered, it is not logically justifiable to answer the first question with an unhesitating "yes " ; unless, of course, the person who gives such an answer tacitly assigns to the question itself a meaning that was not in the mind of the person who asks it. If the rain was caused by the normal action of meteorological laws — so that, given the laws and an adequate know- ledge of them, the rain could have been predicted by scientific experts, even if such experts were not aware that prayers were being said, and did not take such prayers into consideration — then it is not accurate to say that the rain has come as a consequence of the God- moving prayers of a thirsty population. If, on the contrary, rain fell when scientific experts (in spite of the postulated adequacy of their knowledge of meteorology) had ascertained that rain could not jail, then it would be permissible and justifiable to adopt the hypothesis that the event was due to a supernatural or supernormal cause, which might or might not be the will of a personal God. The fact that our knowledge of meteorology is not yet sufficient to enable us to foretell the state of the weather as positively as we can foretell the hour at which the moon will rise on a given day does not justify us in assuming that the laws of meteorology are not quite as regular and inviolable (or at least inviolate) as those that govern the movements of the celestial bodies. * Eu- 1 "It would be positively immoral for us now, " says Bishop Westcott (Gospel of the Resurrection, pp. 38-9), "to pray that the tides or the sun should not rise on a particular day; but, as long as the idea of the physical law which ruled them was unformed or indistinct, the prayer would have been reasonable, and (may we not suppose?) the fulfilment also. " This passage is quoted by Mr. Philip Vivian in his work, The Churches and Modern Thought (2nd ed.), p. 52, and he adds the following simple com- Science and Prayer 197 ropeans, knowing the true cause of eclipses, l augh at the Chinese for carrying out ceremonies that were apparent- ly designed to assist the sun in withdrawing itself from the jaws of a hungry dragon. Perhaps they themselves may be greeted with the gibes of their own descendants for their simplicity in supposing that a religious cere- mony could produce or avert a downfall of rain. Certain kinds of prayer, as has been admitted, may have a very real efficacy ; but we have not the slightest reason for supposing that telepathy, or communion with our sub- liminal selves or with a spiritual world, has ever had the smallest effect of any kind on the ordering of the weather. This conclusion is in no way inconsistent with an admis- sion of the possibility that man, in the ages to come, may be able to turn on the rain exactly when he wants it. We can assign no limits whatever to the powers which man may acquire in the course of his future evolutional development, or through his continual progress in the knowledge of the laws of nature. Perhaps the beings that populate Mars are using their canals for the storage of water selfishly stolen from the atmosphere of more humid planets than their own; possibly it is they who are responsible for the desiccation of the Euro-Asiatic plateau and the rainlessness of Central Australia. Even if this be so, we may rest assured that the Martian Canal Board does not consider it necessary to offer up prayers to the Earth, or to any other heavenly body, before carrying out its severely practical departmental duty of filching the terrestrial waters. ment with regard to the last eight words: "It is difficult to believe that these can really be the words of one of the Church's greatest scholars. To what extent will not bias influence the brain to use its powers per- versely? It is far-fetched arguments of this kind that increase rather than dispel doubt in the normal mind, and especially when they are brought forward in all seriousness by the very pillars of the Church." With this comment I unhesitatingly concur. 198 Science and Prayer It may strike many readers as unnecessary to discuss a question that they suppose has long ago been settled. No educated person now seriously believes, they may say, that prayer is of any avail, except through its effects on the person who prays, and possibly (by telepathy) on the person prayed for. But a glance at the journals published by missionaries in China will prove that prayer is resorted to on every possible occasion and in connection with every conceivable subject. In some circles prayer is so incessant and so protracted that the missionaries themselves have actually taken pity on their converts to the extent of providing them with knee-pads. I have before me a quotation from a letter in which it was observed that "we were led" — presuma- bly by the Deity, though this is not explicitly stated — to get str^w .knee-p ads made, so that at the different services all might kneel in prayer, instead of standing up, as we usually did. The result has been excellent, a con- stant stream of prayer has been kept up at all the meet- ings, both men and women leading in prayer as they felt led. Often we were on our knees from half-an-hour to three-quarters without rising, and even longer. This "knee-drill" has had the effect of opening up the avenues of the hearts of the Christians in a way I have never noticed before. 1 The following quotation will give some idea of what takes place at a really successful missionary prayer- meeting : The Lord brought us to one accord in one place, and every heart seemed breathing out its earnest purpose. Prayer increased in volume and became more intense until there broke forth shouts, and then there followed a mighty movement of God's Spirit among us. Personally, I was 1 China's Millions, Oct., 1909, p. 152. Science and Prayer 199 not aware of any extraordinary influence except an influence to pray. I felt that the Lord led me to intercede; that the Holy Spirit led me to plead the Blood of Christ as I never pleaded the Blood of Christ in my life before — I mean with such earnestness and such continuance — that we might be preserved from everything false, fictitious, and spurious, and God, I believe, answered the prayer. A mighty time followed, in my own experience, in the afternoon. * An account of a similar mighty time, elsewhere, reads as follows: I shall never forget that wonderful day in Mukden, when it seemed as though a rushing mighty wind broke into the church, and the whole congregation, as if with one heart went down on its knees and burst into such a volume of prayer as I think I shall never hear again on earth. It was wonderful. I just wish you had heard it as we heard it; sometimes rising until it seemed like the roaring of the sea, and then coming down again to a little whisper, and then gradually rising again. And this for what? — crying for pardon on behalf of some one, of some number of men and women, who had begged us on their knees to pray for them. Then, suddenly, it ceased, and you would hear that great audience raising its voice in a hymn which we often sang. Shall I sing it to you? 2 The hymn, needless to say, was duly sung. It appears that one reason why praying must be so tumultuously and, as one is inclined to infer, confusedly engaged in, is that many repetitions are necessary be- fore answers to prayer can properly be looked for. One quiet and simple petition to the Deity is not likely to bring a favourable response; it is apparently supposed that if the prayers of the faithful were granted on a first 1 China's Millions p. 148. * Ibid., June, 1909, p. 84. 200 Science and Prayer application they would grow conceited. ' ' God requires us to persevere," we are told, "because if, after the first or second prayer, a great inrush came into the Church, how puffed up we would get." 1 These quotations show with sufficient clearness that evangelical miss ionari es in China are absolutely con- v inced that prayer is a universal p_anacea. They pray for everything tney want, and if they get what they prayed for no shadow of doubt enters their minds that it came in direct answer to their prayers. For example, here is a paragraph which bears the title ' ' Prayer Answered ' ' : For a few days during July the Girls' Day School was closed, partly on account of the hot weather we were having, partly because the teacher we had was unsuitable, and no other was immediately forthcoming. It was a real answer to prayer when Mr. Kiang, a Christian B.A. from one of the country villages, offered to make that his special work for the present. 2 If better room accommodation for prayer-meetings or Church services is considered necessary, this matter is straightway laid before the Lord, and though we find that consular or diplomatic assistance is by no means considered superfluous on such occasions, it is always the Lord, and the Lord alone, who is regarded as re- sponsible for a successful issue. The Lord has granted our request regarding the ob- taining of better accommodation. He has done great things for us: He has filled our mouth with laughter and our tongue with singing. Some perhaps thought we were asking too much, and could scarcely expect to get it; but 1 China's Millions, Aug., 1909, p. 116. 2 Ibid., Dec, 1909, p. 187. Science and Prayer 201 our eyes were unto our God; He knew all our circumstances and the need, and He has marvellously and abundantly provided for it. Though very difficult to get in Huapu, we found a house, and the ground on which it stands, to buy for $430. The Mission kindly granted us $500. > All subscriptions to mission funds are regarded as coming in direct response to prayer. A recent publica- tion states that the China Inland Mission "has in just over forty years received more than £1,000,000 sterling without any public collections or solicitations of funds, but solely in answer to prayer." 2 The following inci- dent is related by a missionary as one of many similar proofs that God "hears the prayers of his people" with regard to pecuniary assistance. "One Saturday morn- ing there was a deficit of nearly £8 for the week's bill, which had to be paid on that day. Before twelve o'clock a lady called, who was in the habit of contribut- ing liberally, and brought two £10 notes as a thank- offering for the recovery of some property. " 3 1 China's Millions, Oct., 1909, p. 158 Cf. the following passage from the same periodical, June, 1909, p. 89. "Kwangsinfu was a very anti- foreign city, and the people of the place made it their boast that, though there were foreigners in other parts, there were none in their city. But in the end of 1901 we managed to rent a house there. The Devil tried to turn us out. When the literati heard that we had settled there, they went to the mandarin and objected. But the mandarin said: ' The house has been rented to these foreigners, and nothing can be done.' Thus the Lord worked for us. " No gratitude, be it observed, is awarded to the Chinese magistrate, nor is there any recognition of the diplomatic and warlike successes of the Western Powers whereby China had been compelled to open her gates to both trade and Christianity. 3 Faith and Facts (Morgan & Scott). The quotation is from an ac- count of the book given in The Review of Reviews of Jan., 1910, p. 87. The sapient and religious editor adds that this wonderful answer to prayer "is one of those phenomena to which men of science so-called frequently give the go-by. " 3 This occurrence might perhaps be judged more noteworthy if the lady had not already been "in the habit of contributing liberally." 202 Science and Prayer That bibliolatrous missionaries should fervently believe in the objective efficacy even of the crassest form of petitionary prayer is hardly to be wondered at when we remember the clear and unambiguous promises alleged to have been made in reference to this matter by Jesus Christ himself. z " If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it." Nor is it surprising that many Chinese, sunk in ignorance and superstition and already half inclined to believe that all foreigners wield miracu- lous powers, fall under the influence of skilful Christian preachers without really knowing or caring anything about the higher aspects of the Christian faith. It would be impossible to say how many Chinese have been induced to attend Christian meetings, or even to become nominal converts, in the expectation of being let into some of the secrets of the foreign magic. The heathen outsider constantly hears the wildest rumours of the wonderful things obtained by his Christian neighbours in the way of answer to prayer. If the Christian convert or the promising "inquirer" wants any material or spiritual "blessing" he is told to pray for it. If he receives the boon for which he prayed he is told — and he believes without difficulty — that it has come in answer to his prayer ; in other words, that if he had not prayed he would not have got it. He has nei- ther the power to disprove this nor the inclination to dispute it. If, on the other hand, the boon does not come, his missionary friends turn his disappointment into something approaching contentment by explaining Perhaps the most celebrated case of complete reliance on prayer as a means of obtaining funds for religious or charitable purposes is that of the well-known George Muller of Bristol. For some observations on that case, see Prof. William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 467-72. 1 Cf. Matt, xxi., 21-2; and John xiv., 12-14. Science and Prayer 203 that the Lord indeed listened with the closest attention to his prayer, but knew, by virtue of His omniscience, that to grant it would do him more harm than good, and that, therefore, in withholding the boon the Lord really answered his prayer in a far kinder way than by grant- ing it! The convert may be rather bewildered by all this, but, once more, he is unable to disprove the argu- ment and has no strong inclination to dispute it. Very likely he feels that he would have gladly risked the harm if only he could have obtained the boon, but this reflection he probably keeps to himself ; and in course of time he may come to believe that all his prayers are heard by an ever-attentive Deity and invariably an- swered in the wisest and best possible way. Meanwhile the heathen learn with astonishment, mingled with a steadily-increasing envy (tempered, however, by dis- trust of the foreigner and his ways), that the God whom the Christians worship will do anything they ask him to do! Writing of the "China Inland" missionaries, a shrewd Scottish observer has made the following remarks: A species of thaumaturgy enters largely into their system. They here meet the Chinese on their own ground of spiritualism and sorcery, and in cases of sickness or trouble the missionaries seem ever ready to back the foreign against the native Deity, after the manner of Elijah with the prophets of Baal. In other words, they live by prayer, not privately merely, but often openly, and by way of challenging their opponents. When a patient dies for whose recovery special prayer has been made, and the petitioners are self-pledged to a successful issue, they do not look at the material cause of death, but examine the mechanism of their prayer as if it were an experiment in physics that had miscarried. When they want a free passage in a steamboat they pray for it overnight, and the 204 Science and Prayer most hard-hearted shipping agent is unable to deny the naively-pious request preferred at 10 a.m. next day. Nothing of the most trivial kind happens to these good people but by miracle, that is to say, by special and con- tinuous interpositions of the Almighty, with whose ideas they affect an easy familiarity which to minds reverentially constituted is rather shocking. 1 That this writer was not wrong in saying that "the missionaries seem ever ready to back the foreign against the native Deity " may be proved by any one who cares to dip into the sometimes saddening and sometimes diverting pages of such a journal as China's Millions. The following passage is cited from the issue of June, 1909: The C hristian s [in Manchuria] meet together and go down on their kn ees, and pray ah to geth er — not one man, but all together. A fine thing that. I think that it would be a good thing if you introduced it here. I was out in a village at Mukden, and I was talking to a man who was not a Christian at all, and do you know what he said to me? "I hear that that prayer-meeting in Mukden is a place of power," he said. A heathen telling us that the prayer- meeting was a place of power! At another place twenty or thirty men and women offered themselves for baptism. I said to some of them : " How did you first hear about Christ? " " Oh," they said, "you know, since the war our temple here has been destroyed. We have no temple to which to go to pray, but we can go to this prayer-meeting that the Christ- ians have got up. We have been offering petitions there, and we have been getting answers." The first things that brought them to think of becoming Christians were the answers which they themselves and their friends had got by sending in requests at this Christian prayer-meeting. That is a great gain to us — a great gain. 2 1 Alexander Michie's Missionaries in China, pp. 33-4 (Tientsin, 1893). ' China's Millions, June, 1909, pp. 84-5. Science and Prayer 205 Of the truth of the last assertion in this passage there is no doubt whatever. But is this the way in which the people of Europe and America wish the doctrines of Christianity to be disseminated in the Chinese Empire? We frequently hear quaint things said of some of the converts, who evidently do not always understand what is expected of them in the matter of prayer. Of the conduct of some Chinese Christians at a prayer-meeting we read this: "Several of the leaders, men of much natural ability and force of character, appeared to be resisting the work by taking up much time praying for others or explaining the gospel to God in their prayers." 1 Perhaps what these able and forceful men were really trying to do was to explain to the Deity the particular interpretation of the gospel which happened to com- mend itself to the particular sect to which they belonged. Possibly it required a good deal of explanation. Any- how it is difficult to see why they should be accused of "resisting the work" by praying for others. Surely their altruism was highly creditable to their goodness of heart, and was deserving of praise rather than censure. All good "happenings," as we have seen, are ascribed to a miraculous act on the part of the Deity, generally in answer to the prayers of the faithful. 2 A glad paean of rejoicing and thanksgiving went up from the 1 China's Millions, Aug., 1909, p. 118. (Italics not in original. ) 3 After mentioning the death of the late Emperor and Empress- Dowager of China, the editor of China's Millions wrote: "There has been no great national upheaval, as, perhaps, might have been expected. Herein is cause for thanksgiving unto God " (March, 1909, p. 40). Now of this we may feel certain, — that if there had been an upheaval we should have been informed in due course by missionaries that here was a clear proof of God's abounding mercy: the political upheaval being doubtless intended by him to lead to a great moral upheaval in which Christianity would at last come to its own. This kind of thing may be pious, but it is uncommonly like cant. 206 Science and Prayer Protestant missionaries in China when the anti-foreign province of Hunan, with its exclusive capital, Changsha, was thrown open, a few years ago, to foreign mis- sionaries. 1 The Hunanese had long been regarded as the best haters and best fighters in China, and long after the rest of the empire was open to missionary activity Hunan kept its gates firmly closed against the foreigner. 2 It was not till after the troubles of 1900 and the fall of Peking that missionaries succeeded in firmly establishing themselves in the provincial capital. The China Inland Mission arrived in 1 901, and eight years later there were representatives of no fewer than eleven different Protestant sects or societies in the city of Changsha alone. The opening of Hunan and Changsha was due, we are told, to prayer and to the intervention of God. We are also assured that prayer has been the means of advancing the prosperity of the missionary propaganda there. " Prayer, opened those c ity g ates, prayer will keep them open, and prayer will maintain the life of that Church continually. ' ' 3 We are told that on one occasion, when there was a difficulty about ac- quiring premises and the question of ways and means was being discussed with much earnestness, a Chinese convert ventured to remind the missionaries that ac- cording to their own tenets all they had to do was to pray! They took the hint — it seems astonishing that the plan had not occurred to them in the first instance — and "the result was that in the year 1903 the desired premises were obtained." 4 Another missionary in the same city writes thus: 1 See p. 65. 3 The Roman Catholics, however, were entrenched in Hunan long before the Protestants were able to obtain a footing there. 3 China's Millions, July, 1909, p. 106. "Ibid. Science and Prayer 207 Together we came to Changsha in 1901, and with heart knit to heart we worked together during the remarkable development and blessing of the succeeding years. God used Mr. Li to lead many to Christ, a number of whom are now preaching the gospel in various parts of Hunan. Working with us at present are evangelists Siao and Yang in the general work, and Chen and T'ien in the hospital work. We earnestly commend these young men to praying friends. You can greatly increase their efficiency by your prayers. For years Mr. Li's hands were held up by dear friends in Brooklyn, to whom we shall ever be grateful. Our return to Changsha was on a Tuesday, and the next day we attended the monthly union prayer-meeting of the Changsha Churches. How our hearts were stirred at the sight of over two hundred Changsha Christians gathered on a Wednesday afternoon to worship the living God! My thoughts went back seven years to the day when Mr. Li and I landed at Changsha and tremblingly walked through the city gate and up the magnificent main street of this beautiful capital, — this city that had been such a strong- hold of anti-Christian and anti-foreign influence, and in which at that time there was but one little meeting-room in a small Chinese house, and not one native Christian. With gratitude and wonder I said: "What hath God wrought!" 1 I have quoted these passages because they are inter- esting in view of later events. The paragraph last cited was published as recently as November, 1909. About five months later (April, 19 10) the foreign mission buildings in Changsha were looted and destroyed, and the missionar ies were Jjeeing. for the ir lives. The Changsha riots (judging from the meagre reports available at the time of writing) appear to have origin- ated in popular discontent at the abnormally high price of food. The animosity of the people was primarily 1 China's Millions, Nov., 1909, p. 166. 208 Science and Prayer directed against their own officials, and was apparently only turned against the missionaries owing to the spread of false rumours of fresh European aggression in China and to the common Chinese belief that foreigners are responsible, directly or indirectly, for most of the em- pire's calamities. x But the fact that the riots were only partially connected with the popular hatred of foreigners can hardly be regarded as an adequate explanation of the disaster to the Christian cause and the destruction of mission property, if we accept the contention of the missionaries themselves that God, in answer to their prayers, daily and hourly works miracles on their behalf. When full reports of the occurrences reach us from per- sons concerned we shall doubtless learn from them that God's special interest in the Changsha missionaries and their work is still abundantly manifest ; for though he allowed their buildings to be destroyed and their property to be looted, he nevertheless preserved their lives from a heathen mob that was clamouring for their blood. But it will be necessary for them also to find some plausible explanation of the strange facts that some of their number were drowned in the course of the journey down the Yangtse, and that the ship by which their boat was accidentally sunk was the very British gunboat that the Lord was sending up to Changsha with a view to their protection! When Port Arthur was captured from the Russians 1 One of the correspondents of The North China Daily News writes thus in a letter of April i8, 19 10: "The real cause of the riot in Changsha would seem to be the old anti-foreign feeling, although the actual oc- casion was a sudden rise in the price of rice. " The fact that certain mission stations in other parts of Hunan were also attacked or threatened is a very significant one; and there seems to be some reason for the sus- picion that anti-foreign feeling throughout Hunan had gradually been gathering in force and might have ended in a simultaneous sanguinary attack on all foreigners in the province had it not been for the fact that the rice-grievance in Changsha led to a premature explosion. Science and Prayer 209 by the Japanese in the late war the following reproduc- tion of a press telegram from Russia appeared in The Times of January 5, 1905: The news has produced an impression of indescribable sadness. Among the working classes there is profound stupefaction. Their religious convictions make it im- possible for them to believe that the fortress for which so many prayers have been said by the Emperor has fallen into the hands of the enemy. It had been firmly believed by the Russian people — their priests and rulers had continually assured them — that "Holy Russia" and her armies and f ortresses w ere under the special protection of Almighty God^ In spite oithis fact, and in spite of the most earnest prayers offered up by God's own imperial representative, the great Manchurian fortress was captured by people who were not even Christians, and whose prayers had all been addressed to false gods or to the Devil! "Stupe- faction" was probably the best word that the corre- spondent could have selected to describe the state of mind produced by so shocking an occurrence. Had Port Arthur not fallen, had the war ended fa- vourably for Russia, there is no shadow of doubt but that the Russian masses would have been encouraged to believe that their success was in itself a triumphant proof of Almighty God's special love for the Russian people. Religio n, indeed, is neve r at a loss to find_ex-_ cuses for such rough_hlawj. as the fall of Port Arthur and the flight of the missionaries from Changsha. It is a very simple matter to point out that the Russian defeat gave an impetus to the reform movement in Russia, and was therefore really a gain to the true inter- ests of the Russian State ; and that in allowing the de- struction of mission property and the interruption of 14 210 Science and Prayer missionary labours in Changsha the Lord was merely- testing his people's faith and perhaps punishing his emissaries for having shown a tendency to excessive self-confidence and pride. Arguments like this, how- ever, are rarely satisfactory except to persons who are already willing to "believe" without argument; they will not convince the sceptic. We might perhaps look forward with hope to a grad- ual cessation of what I venture to call prayer-cant among Christian missionaries in China if it met with no encouragement from the religious circles in Europe and America by whom foreign missions are supported. But unfortunately it is not only imperfectly-educated mis- sionaries and icon- worshipping peasants that believe in a God who works miracles in answer to prayer, and who in times of warfare or political strife interferes with the natural course of events in order to give victory to the side graciously favoured by himself. Even in some of the rectories of -civilised England we may find traces of similar superstitions. In January, 1910, during the General Election, an English clergyman announced in the public press 1 that in his church there would be a "Special Thanksgiving Service to Almighty God for the timely deliverance of Woolwich and Plumstead from the hands of the Socialists and Sabbath-breakers. . . . The Te Deum will be used instead of the proces- sional and recessional hymns." The vicar had ap- parently requested the Deity to secure the return for Woolwich of a parliamentary candidate whose political views coincided with his own, and his prayer was "granted." Thus, while for China we have an anti- Confucian and anti-Buddhistic God, and for Europe and Asia a pro-Russian and anti- Japanese God, it appears that for England, or for a certain parliamentary division 1 See Daily News, Jan. 20, 1910. Science and Prayer 211 in England, we have a God who is Conservative, Sab- batarian, and anti-Socialist ! In the circumstances, the defeat of the Liberal candidate is hardly to be wondered at. He must have had but a poor chance of success against the combined influence of Heaven and the Vicar- age. The advertised Thanksgiving Service, indeed, was not held, after all, for an episcopal order went forth for the cancellation of the arrangements ; and The Spec- tator, commenting upon the incident, very properly denounced the vicar's proceedings as the act of an "ill- mannered fanatic. " * But The Spectator, unfortunately, does not circulate among Christian converts in China; and the fanatics, who are with us in considerable num- bers, know themselves to be gloriously exempt from episcopal supervision. 1 The Spectator, Jan. 22, 1910. CHAPTER XIV CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND SOCIAL PREJUDICES MANY Protestant missionaries refuse to accept converts who are guilty of the sins of drinking intoxicating liquors, opium-smoking, and even tobacco- smoking. No objection is likely to be raised to these rules by any sincere well-wisher to the Chinese people ; but it is difficult to see what scriptural or ecclesiastical authority can be quoted for refusing Christian member- ship to a man who declines to give up his occasional cup of wine or his pipe of tobacco. I am aware that an attempt has been made by earnest missionaries to show that the miraculously-produced wine at Cana of Galilee was an innocuous non-intoxicant beverage; but it can hardly be maintained that there is any biblical warrant for this well-intentioned theory, which the Governor of the Feast would probably have repudiated with vehemence had it been advanced by any of his guests. * It appears that the very strictness of the temperance regulations 2 in Christian circles in China may in some cases be productive of worse evils than either smoking or moderate drinking — namely, deceitfulness and hypo- crisy. During a revival meeting at Honan at which many sinners were moved to confess their shortcomings 1 See John ii., 10. 3 "We have a rule — experience has made us adopt it — prohibiting the drinking of intoxicants even in moderation. " — China's Millions, July, 1909, p. 102. 212 Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices 213 in public, one man got up to say, " I have been smoking tobacco in secret, knowing that it was wrong for me. " * Is it likely that this poor sinner was the only one of the flock who had thus yielded, on the quiet, to the temptations of the flesh? China, of course, possesses its temperance societies just like any Western country. The members of the Tsai Li society, for example (which flourishes in many parts of North China), are under a strict obligation to refrain from drinking and smoking ; but no Chinese society, as far as I am aware, goes so far as to forbid its members to offer drinks and smokes to non-members. There are missionaries, however, who do not shrink from enforcing drastic rules of this kind. Referring to a few cases in which it had been found necessary to "discipline" the Church-members, a missionary writes: "There was a man charged with beating his wife, and another accused of making a present of whiskey to another man." 2 These peculiarities of the Christian propaganda in China do not meet with serious disapproval on the part of right-minded Chinese — why, indeed, should they? We are grateful to the missionaries for setting a good example to our people in the matter of sobriety, just as we are grateful to them for their enthusiastic support of the Chinese Govern- ment in its efforts to abolish opium-smoking. But I have some doubts as to whether the missionaries are well advised in their attempt to persuade the Chinese that abstinence from smoking and drinking is a charac- teristically Christian virtue. I have heard the people of Scotland described as the sturdiest, the most pro- gressive, and the most religious in Europe ; I have never yet heard them described as the most sober. Is it wise to lead a Chinese conyert t£LSiipp0j3e_that the C hristian does not drink" or smoke? Some day, perhaps, he will • China's Millions, Feb., 1909, p. 23. ' Ibid., Sept., 1909, p. 143. 214 Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices make a journey to the treaty ports, or to foreign lands, and there he will make the blood-freezing discovery that multitudes of Western Christians — not laymen only, but ordained clergymen, and even a bishop or two — ■ publicly consume their wine and tobacco and are not ashamed. In questions concerning sexual morality the Christian missionary speaks with no uncertain voice. I am by no means convinced — in spite of the assurances of our Christian critics— that sexual vices are, on the whole, more prevalent in China than in some Christian lands. I have even heard Englishmen admit that in this matter there is not much to expose between England and China, and that if to a superficial observer it appears that the Chinese are more vicious than the English it is partly because they are less hypocritical and partly because of certain differences between English and Chinese law. But this is a point I am not disposed to argue. I grant that there is a great deal of vice in my country, and if the Christian missionaries — whether directly by their teachings or indirectly by their own most admirable example — can induce the people of China to grow more virtuous, we shall owe them an incalculable debt of gratitude. But in matters affecting morality, as in very- many other matters, the missionary body seems to take it for granted that the Occidental practice — or perhaps I should rather say the Occidental code of precepts — is the norm or standard to which all the rest of the world ought to adjust itself. This is notably the case in re- spect of the question oleoncubinage. I do not propose to weary my readers with a dUquisrtton on the laws and customs that govern the Chinese practice in this matter. I think it is only necessary to point out, for the purposes of my argument, that in China a concubine generally lives under the same roof with the principal wife; that Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices 215 she often joins the household with the wife's consent, and even at her expressed wish ; that her position carries with it certain legally-recognised rights, and that her lot is by no means necessarily, or generally, a hard one. It is true that the status of a concubine (chHeh) is so- cially and legally inferior to that of the wife (chti), but on the other hand she generally comes of a family that is poorer or lower in the social scale than that of the wife, and as a concubine she is often far happier and more comfortable than she would have been as the principal wife of a man of her own class. The existence of legal- ised concubinage in China by no means signifies — as Western observers too readily take for granted — that the Chinese people are sunk in licentiousness ; it merely bears witness to the extreme importance, in Chinese eyes, of the raising of offspring with a view to the per- pertuation of the ancestral sacra. If a married couple are childless, and likely to remain so, the husband is obliged, by the duty he owes to his parents and ances- tors, to provide for the succession either by taking a concubine or by formally adopting the child of a brother or other near relative. Most men prefer to have heirs of their body rather than heirs by adoption; and the fact that by Chinese law the children of a concubine are fully entitled, as legitimate heirs, to inherit the family property and to carry on the ancestral rites is of itself a clear indication of the social reasons that have led the Chinese to establish concubinage as a legal in- stitution. The system is not, indeed, wrEKout its abuses. Though a poor man rarely dreams of taking a concubine unless his wife is childless, rich men will avail themselves of the custom merely as a matter of self-indulgence. Probably it will be a beneficial thing for China, on the whole, and especially for the dignity of Chinese woman- hood, when the legal recognition of concubinage is with- 216 Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices drawn, and the missionaries are doubtless doing good by trying to influence public opinion on the matter ; but under present social conditions, and so long as ancestral worship retains its supreme importance in the religious system of China, it is improbable that the efforts of the missionaries will meet with much success. In any case they are scrutinising Eastern manners with the aid of Western spectacles when they declare that concubinage is a necessary indication of corrupt morality. 1 It is difficult, indeed, to understand how they can even claim that it is contrary to their alleged revelation of the law of God. Polygamy [as a recent writer has reminded us] only began to disappear among the Jews in the fifth century B.C., and so curious was the influence of the Old Testament on the early Christian Church that several of the Fathers could not bring themselves to condemn it, and it was not officially suppressed by the Church until a.d. 1060. Luther and the Reformers allowed it even later. * 1 Describing the management of certain schools for women, a mission- ary writes thus: "During the present renaissance many applications for entrance have been received from women who have no desire for Christianity, but who have wanted to learn to read. The girls' schools were closed to them, and thus they have turned to the women's schools. Often they are the second or third wives of officials, and in order to keep up the tone of morality, we do not think it wise to admit them. " — Woman's Work in the Far East, Dec, 1909, p. 158. (Italics not in original.) " The Religion of Woman, by Joseph McCabe, p. 37. Those who be- lieve (on the authority of the Church) that to Christianity alone belongs the glory of giving honour to womanhood, may perhaps find reason, on a perusal of this work, for reconsidering the bases of their belief. See also Philip Vivian's The Churches and Modern Thought (2nd ed.), pp. 277 seq. Principal Donaldson (who surely cannot be regarded as an Antichrist) rejects the "prevalent opinion that woman owes her present high posi- tion to Christianity." He adds: "In the first three centuries I have not been able to see that Christianity had any favourable effect on the position of women, but, on the contrary, that it tended to lower their character and contract the range of their activity." (Quoted in D. G. Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices 217 If the missionaries restricted their efforts to inducing rich men to get rid of their supernumerary female com- panions, public opinion would probably be strongly in their favour ; but they need not count on much popular support on their attempts to persuade middle-aged men who have no children to desist from the practice of act- ing after the manner of Abraham. In a missionary's narrative occurs the following paragraph: On Thursday morning we left Shinlufang . . . and reached Sakaitsai. This place was somewhat out of our way, but Mr. Adam wished to see a convert, middle-aged and childless, who had taken a concubine. It was a modern version of the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. I fear our visit did no good. 1 Here was a stout-hearted convert who quailed not even under the reproachful gaze of his spiritual mentor; but a subsequent paragraph intimates that he was subjected to "church discipline" all the same. As a well-known biblical episode is mentioned in connection with this case, perhaps it may be worth remarking that the Chinese theory with regard to a concubine's children is precisely the same as that of Sarah. "And Sarah said unto Abraham, Behold now, the Lord hath restrained me from bearing; I pray thee, go in unto my maid; it may be that I may obtain children by her. " 2 A child less Qiirj p.se wife r egard s the c hildr en of her husband's con- cubine- as her , o wn. They, in turn, must treat her dur- ing her lifetime with all the respect due to a mother, and after her death they must sacrifice to her manes in accordance with the full rites of filial piety. Ritchie's Natural Rights, 2nd ed. p. 172.) Would St. Paul have approved of female missionaries and of female preachers at prayer-meetings? 1 China's Millions, Sept., 1909, p. 143 3 Gen, xvi., 2. 218 Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices When missionaries adversely criticise some of the characteristic features of Chinese life, their fault-finding is often due to the fact (unrecognised, of course, by themselves) that they are unable to adjust themselves to the Oriental point of view. When they think they are inculcating a higher morality it frequently happens that they are merely inculcating a different morality. In other words, one of the objects steadily kept before them is to persuade the Chinese that the Western code of ethics is the standard to which the rest of the world ought to be required to conform. To a great extent this inability to see things from other people's points of view is common to nearly every one. Perhaps one of the rarest of human qualities (if indeed it is to be found at all) is complete freedom from racial, political, social, and religious prejudices. Every one gets into a groove of some kind, and is apt to regard everything that cannot be fitted into the same groove as heathenish or uncouth. I once heard an Englishman declare that he could not tolerate American naval officers. The asser- tion seemed rather sweeping, and I asked the reason. After some probing I discovered it was because the officers of the American navy frequently yielded to the temptation of leaving the upper lip unshaved. Pre- sumably a moustache does not prevent a man from navigating a ship or firing a gun unless, indeed, it be of an exaggerated German type, and gets in front of the owner's eyes; but the fact that a moustache (un- accompanied by a beard) is tabooed in the British navy, was quite enough to create a sturdy British pre- judice against the adoption of such a facial adornment in the navies of other countries. 1 We all have pre- 1 Cf. the English prejudice against American spelling, and vice versa; and the frequent assertion of Irishmen and Scotsmen that the best "English " is spoken in Dublin or in Inverness. When a well-bred Eng- Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices 219 judices of this or some other kind. If we think we have none, let us question a candid and plain-speaking friend on the point, and we shall speedily find that hitherto we have deceived ourselves, and the truth was not in us. While freedom from prejudices is, of course, an ideal to be aimed at, there is a great deal to be said for the view that the man who professes to be without a prejudice, and to judge all things from the standpoint of a lofty impartiality, is a man whose utterances should be taken with extreme caution, and is quite possibly one whose judgments in most matters are hardly worth considering. We are all acquainted with persons of this type. But this does not justify the average Philis- tine's insular self-satisfaction, which, when it proves to be incurable, may generally be traced to that most deplorable of defects — a lack of imagination. It is this imaginative deficiency, surely, that is chiefly re- sponsible for the terribly common belief that one's own particular moral and social code is the correct and nor- mal one — the code by which all others should be tested and judged. To take a simple example : many Western travellers to China and Japan laugh at our ch opsticks — our "nimble ones, " as we call them — and think a knife and fork are more "civilised." Our own prejudices lead us to take precisely the opposite view. We think it is far more "civilised" to have our food prepared in tiny morsels that can be daintily manipulated by a pair of wooden or ivory sticks held in one hand, than to have it served in great slabs that require to be torn asunder by means of a four-pronged harpoon'and a one-edged dagger. Perhaps neither method is intrinsically superior to the other. The food must be cut somewhere and somehow lishman visits the United States for the first time, it generally gives him a disagreeable shock to hear himself described as speaking with an English "accent." 220 Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices and perhaps some day it may come to be recognised in both East and West that the only way to eat like a gentleman (and here peeps out one of my own special prejudices) is to become a vegetarian. Not long ago a certain native official in China accepted a missionary's invitation to dinner. The food was served up in rather- old-fashioned European style, and one of the dishes consisted of a huge roast of beef which the missionary proceeded ostentatiously to carve on the table al- most under his guest's nose. The official knew next to nothing of foreign customs, and had never dined in European fashion before. Many things surprised and almost shocked him — the long "grace," for instance, might well have been curtailed in view of the fact that he was not a Christian, and by no means likely to become one — but nothing struck him with so much disgust as the carving of the roast. Needless ! to say, he successfully concealed his feelings, but he rose from the table more convinced than he had ever been before that Western manners had not yet completely emerged from their primeval barbarity. There are countless ways in which Western residents in China (not missionaries only), acting under the ap- parent impression that so long as Western good manners are preserved intact nothing else matters, constantly violate Chinese canons of good taste. The Chinese much dislike and often (among themselves) ridicule the Western practice of what may be described as non-ama- tory osculation. Western ladies and the members of most Western families in China think nothing of kissing each other in the presence of their Chinese guests and servants. The low dresse s warn in the evening by Western ladies are, as most people know, considered by the Chinese to be shamelessly improper ; but as mission- ary ladies do not offend in this respect, the subject need Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices 221 not be enlarged upon. Some missionaries, however, betray in another direction their prejudices in favour of Western customs in the matter of clothing. In a recent missionary journal ' appears a photograph of two female school-teachers — foreign-educated Chi- nese — who, though attired in the ordinary upper gar- ment of their country, have adopted the Western skirt. Presumably a Western education has convinced them that the usual garments of a Chinese lady are immodest. It seems a pity that some sensible foreigner has not made it clear to them that so far as decency in clothing is concerned, the Chinese lady has nothing whatever to learn from her Western sisters. Some Western usages are regarded as merely quaint or "funny" — the removal of one's has as a mark of respect, for example, or the custom whereby each lady at a dinner-party is taken into the dining-room on the arm of a man. A Chinese guest at an English dinner- party once asked to be enlightened as to the reason for this custom, but he was merely laughed at as a queer fellow for having allowed such a problem to suggest itself to his whimsical mind. "How like a Chinaman, " they said, "to ask a question like that ! " The ' ' China- man, " in a subsequent private conversation, hazarded the suggestion that the practice is based on a polite fiction. The lady is so weak with hunger before she goes into the dining-room that she requires the support of a masculine arm to enable her to walk the necessary distance ; but having fortified herself with the good fare provided for her at the table, she is strong enough, at the conclusion of the meal, to find her own way back to the drawing-room. But this explanation can hardly be regarded as adequate, for on the European continent the ladies are escorted out of as well as into the dining-room ; 1 Woman's Work in the Far East, March, 1909, facing p. 14. 222 Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices which might suggest to an uncouth Chinese mind that having once been induced to enter that convivial apart- ment they are reluctant to leave it. Needless to say, there are many Chinese habits and customs that are quite as ridiculous or as repulsive in European eyes as are certain Western customs in the eyes of the Chinese. T But I believe there is a good deal to be said for the view that the Chinese are able to adapt themselves to European customs much more readily, and also more gracefully, than Europeans can adapt themselves to the manners of China. The common Western notion is that the Chinese are blindly conser- vative, contemptibly arrogant, and utterly unable to perceive the good points of any civilisation but their own, and all this (be it said in a whisper) is very much what the East dares to think about the West. Every one who knows anything about the painful history of the relations between China and the Western Powers is acquainted with the petty but acrimonious disputes that raged over the question of the k'o-t'ou (kow-tow). The k'o-t'ou is a kind of exaggerated obei- sance of falling on both knees and touching the ground with the hands and forehead. If a European were to attempt to perform this rite he would be almost certain to make himself look ridiculous, not only in the sight of his own countrymen, but also in that of the Chinese. This would be due partly to the awkwardness of his movements consequent on his want of practice and partly to the shape and fit of his clothes. European garments, as we Chinese should have frankly recognised 1 Frequent and noisy expecto ration is one such habit (though that is not unknown outsT3e"of China), and another is the native practice — supposed to be complimentary — of using one's Qgn_choj}s£i£ks to glace a morsel of food on a guest'sjalate. Chinese who wish to create a favour- able impression among Europeans should place both of these practices under a most rigid taboo. Christian Ethics and Social Prejudices 223 at the beginning, are in no way adapted, or adaptable, to the performance of this particular ceremony. Now we Chinese learn to perform the k'o-t'ou in our earliest childhood — for it is a gross mistake on the part of Euro- peans to suppose that it is an undignified act only im- posed on a servile people by the arbitrary will of an arrogant Court. We Jtfo-t 'ou to our parents, to our un- cles, and to many friends and neighbours during the first few days of the New Year and on other solemn occa- sions, and we perform the same simple ceremony in front of the tablets of our deceased ancestors at least twice a year. I have heard even Europeans express pleasure at the sight of a Chinese child paying his father the reverential salute of the k'jhi'ou, and especially at the child's entire absence of awkwardness or self -conscious- ness. Perhaps the gracefulness is very much a matter of clothes ; for the ungainly movements even of a badly- built man are more than half concealed beneath the undulations of the ceremonial long coat. It is not sur- prising that Europeans flatly refused to comply with the rules of Chinese etiquette in the matter of the k'j>-fop, for the custom was in their eyes not only strange and uncivilised, but intolerably humiliating. Now that we know something of European usages, we Chinese can fully realise why it was that the practice was so strongly objected to by our Western visitors, but Europeans and Americans should also see clearly, by this time, that in expecting our foreign guests to &'