■ -r'i«^'»^feVt^K)tWl^*??'w ASIA lEiEicyiHJiiiiiiye *y/\ji-'llpHf.|{, 1 1 Qfotnell Utttuergity Eibtarg CHARLES WILLIAM WASON COLLECTION CHINA AND THE CHINESE THE GIFT OF CHARLES WILLIAM WASON CLASS OF 1876 1918 The date shows when this volume was taken. h To renew this book cony the call No. and g^"- U»M.li i . tb«^ lilirarian. . . OlIN LIBRARY - CIRCULATIOM DATE DUE r, nr^ »-«*™^*"Ua^ /^P^ « CAVLORD DS 721.M92'" ""'"'""' "-'"'"^ '^°"Liii™MrIS™.l!!'"'°"' :chapters on China 3 1924 023 246 931 '""Ay THE STONE BUDDHA FLASHING LIGHT. FOUR HUNDRED MILLIONS. CHAPTERS CHINA AND THE CHINESE. REV. A. E. MOULE, MISSIONARY AT NINGPO. mit^ ^ap0 anD anustrationg. SEELEY, JACKSON, & HALLIDAY, FLEET STREET. LONDON. MDCCCLXXL LONDON: Strakgeways and Walden, Printers, Castle St. Leicester Sq. CONTENTS. CHAP. I. THE RELIGIONS OF CHINA II. ON THE CHINESE LANGUAGE . III. THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CHINESE IV. CORINTH AND NINGPO V. CHINA AND OTHER LANDS VI. CHINESE BEGGARS VII. ON CHINESE PROVERBS APPENDIX PAGE I 41 74 103 138 167 194 209 Cornell University Library The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924023246931 ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE I. THE STONE BUDDHA FLASHING LIGHT {Frontispiece). 2. MAP OF PART OF CHINA II 3. A TOILSOME WALK TO SAVE A PARENT . 2$ 4. MUTUAL AGREEMENT INFLUENCING EVEN THE DOGS OF THE HOUSE 35 67 5. A SELECT LECTURER TEACHING 6. AN AGED SCHOLAR KEEPING SCHOOL 7. A PROCESSION TO MEET THE BONES OF BUDDHA 85 8. SERVANTS PLOUGHING AND GATHERING MUL- BERRY LEAVES »II9 9. MAP OF PART OF CHE-KIANG ... 1 39 10. WORKMEN REPAIRING A YA-MUN . . -155 11. THE RANSOM OF PRISONERS; THE WAY TO AC- QUIRE HAPPINESS 177 12. A MOUTHFUL OF RICE CONCEALED FOR THE CHILDREN 203 The above-named Engravings are facsimiles taken from the ^ Shing yii sedng kea}^ an ^Illustrated Commentary on the Sacred Edicts ' This Book is in ten volumes, very finely printed, and with from one to two hundred Wood En- gravings. PREFACE. The title of my book is not sensational, but aims by the great fact which it expresses to draw attention to the information contained within. Events so terrible have occurred in China, and issues so momentous seem to be hanging in the balance there, as to divert to that far-off land some of that strong tide of intensest in- terest which the European war at our very gates has hitherto so entirely and so naturally at- tracted. I trust, therefore, that my book will not prove ill-timed ; and that the information contained in it will be found to be accurate, though not, of necessity, complete or exhaustive. I would fain hope also, that amidst the indignation w \*' X Preface. caused by the late massacre, or during discus- sion of the conditions demanded in compensa- tion for those atrocities, some of the facts pre- sented by my book may tend to soften too harsh judgments, and may lead Englishmen to entertain the thought (of the truth of which I am myself firmly convinced) that the blunders and sins of the rulers, and the malice of some of the leaders of the people, do not afford a fair index of the feelings and affections of the people themselves. With the Denham murders for England's share ; with the reckless violence of Fenianism in Ireland and in Canada ; with the memory of that wild Spanish mob which last year nearly slaughtered two Englishmen (roused by the same foolish rumours as those which inflamed the mob of Tientsin) ; and with the grim whis- pers of cruel deeds wrought on the skirts of the battle-fields in France, — there is enough to make all Westerns pause before they condemn China for the crimes of some Chinese. Or if the future of foreign influence in China Preface. xi be after all uncertain, if trade be paralysed, and missionary work suspended, may not some of my facts and histories throw light on the cause of such a disaster ? I speak not now of the other wrongs which England has inflicted on China ; but if during a quarter of a century China has been a possible field for mission work, — and scarcely one in a year of the clergy of the English Church has volunteered for such a ser- vice, — if we have failed to push wide open the gates set ajar by God's providence, must we wonder to see the door swing to again, and the slothful and apathetic workers denied ad- mittance ? A. E. M. Sept. 22, 1870. FOUR HUNDRED MILLIONS. CHAPTER I. THE RELIGIONS OF CHINA. China, eleven times the size of the British Isles, with twelve times the number of people, has but twelve Missionaries of the Church of England at work in the land. I speak of China proper alone, but the Chinese empire, to which our mission is supposed to apply, includes the vast though thinly populated regions of Mon- golia, Manchuria, Thibet, and Turki.stan, raising the population of the whole to 400 millions. On the north it lies under the ominous shadow of the Russian eagle, ever hovering for a swoop ; on the west and south it stretches away to the warm, sunny plains of Burmah, it skirts along the giant Himalayas, and abuts on the lovely Valley of Cashmere ; southward it reaches the B 2 TJie Religions of China. torrid zone ; and eastward it looks across the Pacific — Ningpo, indeed, stands face to face with Metlahkatlah. God grant that the same blessing may, in His good time, rest on the one as that which has so abundantly fallen on the other! With a coast-line of 2500 miles, and the huge Child of the Ocean, that mighty river which, after a course through the empire 3000 miles in length, and flowing between banks studded with great cities, reaches at last its parent's bosom, — what magnificent tracks on which to plant our missions are provided, without venturing back from sea and river, and away from all communication with the outer world ! Yet on the coast we have only three mission stations, Ningpo, Shanghai, and Fuh-chau. Peking and Hang-chow are inland cities, and Hong-kongis a British colony. Here, in the Celestial Empire, you may choose your climate. In Peking you may be frost-bound during the winter months, whilst in Hong-kong the thermometer is seldom below 50°. In Ningpo, on the 1st of January of the present year, the mercury fell to 18°, being fourteen degrees of frost ; whilst the summers of Peking and Ningpo are intensely hot, the thermometer ranging between 90° and 100° for days together. I have seen it in my bedroom, with windows and doors open, 95° at ten o'clock at night. The Religions of China. 3 But between Ningpo and Peking northwards, and between Ningpo and Hong-kong south- wards, places of more even temperature are to be met with. Che-foo has a delightful climate, and in Fuh-chau both the heat and cold are, I believe, more endurable than in Ningpo. Such is China. ' Bright suns shine ever on her feet, Her head is veiled in snow ; And o'er her breast, now^ hot now cold, The changeful breezes blow.' There you may meet with tropical vegeta- tion, and with the dog-rose and wild honey- suckle of England ; and in the spring the beau- tiful hills near Ningpo are carpeted with many- hued azaleas from the top to the bottom. We miss the green turf in the plains and the breezy downs of home, but I have walked for miles through bamboo forests, the cuckoo singing and the pheasant calling along the hill-side. In discussing the religions of China, I will begin by noticing the effects produced by them upon the nation at large ; and then I shall proceed to examine the nature of those systems. It is a common saying of the free and care- less thinkers of the present age, that the sole object of a religion is to make men virtuous ; and that if this effect be produced, it matters 4 The Religions of China. little what the agency employed may have been. These philosopher^ seem to ignore or to be ignorant of the fact, that there is a mental im- morality as well as an immorality in which the body is the instrumental offender. They for- get or deny that the first three commandments, not to speak now of the Sabbath law, are pre- eminently moral laws, and that to worship false deities, or to make and reverence idols, is a most immoral act, staining and ruining the character of the most punctilious observer of the last six commandments. Let me, in passing, observe, that such thinkers have their echoes in China. Some five years ago a party of Chinese scholars entered our preaching chapel in Hang-chow, at the further end of which two scrolls were hung, containing the ten command- ments. They read them through, and exclaim- ing, ' The last six are good enough, but we will have nothing to do with those first four,' pro- ceeded to pull down and trarnple upon the chapel notice-board, and to insult and beat the catechist. But to resume. It cannot, nevertheless, be denied, that religious systems which have pro- duced a higher tone of outward morality be- tween man and man even, are very far prefer- able in every sense to such systems as those prevailing in most parts of India, by which vice The Religions of China. 5 is encouraged and directly fostered. I am willing, therefore, to notice, first of all, the moral aspect of the Chinese people, before describing their thoughts of God, and their action with reference to the world to come. Few things have struck me so much during seven or eight years' residence in China, and more especially since my return to England, as the contrast between the streets of a great city such as Ningpo at night and the night scenes and sounds of London. Wine-shops abound, and the native spirit is very strong, but it is exceedingly rare to see a drunken man ; and there are no other sights, except the street stages or idolatrous processions, to offend the Christian's eye. Let China have full praise for this outward appearance of morality ; and if her religions have tended to promote this virtuous exterior, let full merit be acceded to them. Neither can any Englishman pass on to con- sider the offset to this virtue, namely, the vice of opium-smoking, without feeling that this vice of China is in many senses England's vice. The outcry against the opium trade seems in- deed to have died away of late years. This is accounted for, not by any discoveries as to its comparative innocuousness, but because it is too late to do good by protesting : the ruin of trade, the ruin of the people alone, can work a 6 The Religions of China. cure. It is a terrible vice : the religions of China are powerless to check it : Confucianists, Buddhist and Taouist priests, all smoke opium. But Christian England, against the will of China's Emperor, and against the protestations of the Imperial envoys — whether sincere or no matters nothing as to her crime — forced the drug with the roar of guns upon the country. A Missionary, writing in January last, remarks that thirty per cent of the mercantile class, ninety per cent of the under-officials and at- tendants in magistrates' offices, forty or fifty per cent of the soldiers, and, in fact, at least one-fourth of the adult male inhabitants of China, or some twenty-four millions of men, are addicted to the use of this drug. And though very many take it, at first at all events, mode- rately — this fact of there being very many moderate smokers, as there are moderate drink- ers in England, being the only possible de- fence that can be set up for the trade — yet, as this writer goes on to say, the habit is more dangerous than that of taking alcohol, on ac- count of the insidiousness of its approach, and the difficulty of escaping its clutches. Then, with reference to the women of China; though not degraded morally, as in other hea- then lands, their intellectual culture is entirely neglected. There are some few favoured dis- The Religions of China. 7 tricts — the city of Hang-chow, for instance — where several of the high-class females have been taught to read; and not unfrequently a rich man will himself educate a favourite daughter. I know of one instance of a woman keeping a boys' school. These, however, are rare exceptions. There are, I believe, no schools whatever for girls in any part of the Empire : their sole education consists of instruc- tion in the art of cooking rice, of washing cab- bages, of making shoes, of plain and coarse sewing, and of embroidery. The female mind and reasoning powers are utterly stagnant ; and should a desire after learning spring up in the heart of a grown-up woman, as is the case sometimes with our female converts, the written language of China, as I shall have oc- casion hereafter to describe, is, from its cumber- some and intricate character, 'hopelessly beyond the reach of the aspiring student. Chiefly for the sake of such women the ' Romanized ' system has been introduced in printing our Christian literature. The Chinese are not, however, alto- gether ignorant of the advantage of female education. Hear, for example, the wise sayings of an old Chinese author, quoted by Du Halde in his ' History of China ' : ' What is the conse- quence,' he asks, ' of a want of instruction >. All their care will consist in adorning their 8 TJie Religions of China. heads in a graceful manner, in laying on their paint artfully, in rendering their attire and shoes as agreeable as possible, in placing skilfull)' their bodkins for the hair and pendants for the ears, in knowing how to give an exquisite relish to whatever they eat or drink. This will be the sum total of all their knowledge, because they are unacquainted with the least obligations which a mother of a family lies under.' A life- like picture, indeed, does this old writer draw, as I can testify from my acquaintance with the ways and doings of the fair sex in China. Before I went to China I imagined that infanticide was one of the national crimes of the people ; but from what I have seen and heard, I think that the accounts have been ex- aggerated. In describing the state of crime in such a country as China, and contrasting it with England for instance, we must most care- fully take account of the publicity given to criminal cases by the newspapers here, and the cloak drawn over crime by the entire absence of newspapers there. Nevertheless, I believe that this particular crime is by no means of common occurrence in all parts of the Empire. It prevailed to an alarming extent in some districts near Ningpo after the retreat of the T'se-ping army in 1862. The people were re- duced to great poverty by the rebel ravages, The Religions of China. 9 and the very poor frequently destroyed their female infants by drowning. I know a little girl well — she has sometimes repeated Scrip- ture to me — whose father, some years before he became a Christian, sanctioned her being drowned. She would not drown : she managed to struggle up into life again and again, and at last he gave it up, exclaiming that it was fated for her to live. But it is a remarkable fact, and one which I would have all who praise the native movement in India in favour of the pro- tection and education of females, bear in mind, that there exists in the city of Ningpo a native institution for the prevention of infanticide. One of our catechists knows the secretary of this institution well. The rich men subscribe to it : agents are appointed in various districts : I have indeed preached in the house of one. A sum of money is given to any poor family on the birth of a daughter, and heavy fines are imposed if the infant is destroyed. I heard of one case, in which a poor man, in despair at the birth of his eleventh daughter, drowned the little thing, and was instantly pounced down upon by the agent of this institution, and deprived of some of his little landed property. The worse vices of the heathen are too well known in China. Romans i. and Ephesians iv. apply fully to the Chinese : their great idolatrous 10 The Religions of China. gatherings in the cities, and especially in the country districts, are accompanied by wickedness of every kind. They are fond of over-reaching, and are often faithless to their promises. They are a much v/orse people than they look ; but I do contend confidently for this point, that their outward appearance as a nation morally is very far superior to the moral aspect of other heathen nations. Their religions most certainly have failed in making men virtuous. They possess no cure for sin ; but something has had a mighty influence in restraining the outward and bolder exhibitions of vice, and in keeping alive the sense of right and wrong in dealing between man and man. Indeed, reflect on the extreme old age to which the now apparently totter- ing empire has reached ; that it was founded whilst Abraham was wandering through Ca- naan, his soul filled with the yet far-off pro- mise to his seed ; that the sceptre has departed from Judah, and the Temple's glory has for ages passed away, yet China lives on, an em- pire still ; that her authentic history begins be- fore the building of Rome, her historical facts standing out clear on the ages before the myths of Rome's early story appeared ; that Rome has long set in gloom (pagan Rome gone down before the barbarian, papal Rome tottering for her fall) ; while yet China lives on, an empire ■ A. O. ,J,?/^ ^^. .,^j I p© .^^.^.^^J^ ^— IJLILT OF r- =fe'_-..-r >, C H I IT A -1 1 £7 (r?7 JZtsumar Stirtlms ara inuTei17ncrl,aS Tnlt-rJiain 37 -r C> ular J^inU icre, incl'nl, iJiiM, Q Wd 30ff ceo The Religions of China. 1 3 still; — reflect, I say, on this oldest of the nations, watching from afar the rise, the cul- mination, and the setting of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome ; watching, when in the vigour of her 2000th year, the first strugglings for existence of Britain's early inhabitants; remember that Britain's Parliament, in the ripe wisdom of the British nation's old age, has just now been making apologies for insults offered to China's Majesty ; and that in her 4000th year she treats on terms of perfect equality with the young ninety-years' old American Republic ; — and you surely will read in such a history a most literal fulfilment of the promise in the fifth commandment. The Chinese, though with much shortcoming — with formality sometimes, with superficial obsequiousness at others, have, as a nation, honoured their parents : this, with all its failings, is yet their nation's pride; and verily their days have been long in that great land, which the Lord their God has given them. Now, without further delay, let me go on to give a brief description of the religious systems of China, to which, in some measure, we should suppose that this comparatively high standard of morality has been owing. The extent to which the first three commandments of the Decalogue are observed, and the hopes and fears of the people with reference to an existence 14 The Religions of China. after death, will appear best, I think, in con- nexion with the consideration of the religions, and need not be treated separately. Let me notice, first, as in direct connexion with what has gone before, the moral teaching, the ethics of the three chief religious systems in China. There are more than three religions in the empire. The Mohammedans are very numerous in some districts ; and a political sect of Vegetarians has a large following in the neigh- hood of Ningpo : they were called originally the ' Religion of the White Lily,' but having been detected in treasonable night-meetings, and con- sequently hunted down and prohibited by go- vernment, they changed the name of their sect into the ' No Hypocrisy Religion.' Their chief religious observance appears to consist in the prolonged holding of the breath on the part of professors, so long that two meals may be con- sumed during the performance, and so literally that the face becomes livid and the body stiffens. The soul, the breath, is supposed to be wander- ing about meanwhile in search of information in the spirit-world ; but sometimes the spirit re- fuses to come back again when desired, and the poor performer dies. I knew of such a case near Ningpo not long since, and the catastrophe proved a severe blow to the progress of the sect for some time afterwards. These people are The Religions of China. 1 5 more formidable for their Pharisaic pride than for any hold which their tenets have acquired on the minds of the masses. The three religions of China, the only three which we need specially analyse, are the Confucian, Buddhist, and Taou- ist creeds. In examining these religions, I shall have oc- casion to refer cursorily to three or four authors which may with advantage be consulted at leisure by those who feel an interest in the subject — Du Halde's ' History of China,' the work of a French Jesuit missionary ; Legge's ' Chinese Classics,' the work of a missionary of the London Mission- ary Society; Edkins' 'Religious Condition of the Chinese,' a work by a missionary of the same Society ; and papers on the religions of China by the Rev. G. E. Moule, which appeared in the ' Christian Advocate and Review' of 1869; and papers on Taouism signed T. W. in the ' Fuh- chau Missionary Recorder' for 1868 and 1869. The education of the Chinese is wholly Con- fucianist, and the opening sentence of the first class-book put into the hands of youthful scho- lars, ' Man's heart is originally good,' seems to teach plainly a doctrine other than that of the fall. ' Man's nature is good ' is the teaching of Confucius (though his utterances on the subject of our nature were few and brief) ; and Mencius, who flourished about eighty years after Confucius, 1 6 ^ The Religions of China. and whose writings are contained in the canonical books of the Chinese, reiterates and elaborates this doctrine. Yet some will be surprised to hear that, in the opinion of Dr. Legge, the views of Mencius on the constitution of man's nature, and how far it supplies him with a rule of conduct and a law of duty, are, as nearly as possible, identical with those of Bishop Butler : ' There is a difference of nomenclature and a combina- tion of parts, in which the advantage is with the Christian prelate : felicity of illustration and charm of style belong to the Chinese philoso- pher.' The doctrine in both is the same, amount- ing in fact to the ' description of that voice of conscience which shouts its accord with virtue above the clamour of inbred sin and the noise of the full current of evil. Mencius, in fact, with the bishop, seems by nature rather to refer to that law of which St. Paul speaks when he says the Gentile without a written law is a law to him- self But here the philosopher's praise must yield to blame : he seems ignorant of the universal proneness to evil ; he deems perfection not only attainable, but as having been actually attained, by the sages of antiquity ; although Confucius, China's greatest sage, and half-deified teacher, by the confession of his lips and of his actions, fell short of the ideal, and was imperfect. And - ' from this ignorance of the seat of sin's disease The Religions of China. 1 7 there was of necessity deficiency and failure in the ethics of these philosophers. The ideas of the founder of Taouism, Lau-tzu, who was con- temporary with Confucius, and on one occasion conversed with him, though not very explicit on these subjects, appear to have led him to re- gard an infant as good by nature ; and he be- lieved in the existence of a primitive time when virtue and vice were unknown terms. This philosopher and founder of a religion has been compared in many striking particulars to Emer- son. The Buddhist doctrine is not different from the Taouist and Confucian. They say that man's original nature was good. The inborn Buddha (as Edkins describes it), the divinity within, is pure and holy, but is overshadowed and shut out from view by the passions. Now the main points in the moral teachings of the Confucian schools are the ' enforcement of the duty of following the virtuous instincts of human nature,' and the constant repetition of the hu- man relations in which these cardinal virtues find scope for action. ' Philanthropy, right- eousness, decorum, knowledge, and faith or con- stancy in friendship, these are the virtues ; the filial, fraternal, conjugal, and friendly relations, and that of the public servant to his prince, these are the five relations.' But these formally arranged topics are discussed and enforced by C 1 8 The Religions of China. aphorisms which frequently startle one by their beauty, sounding sometimes like far-off echoes caught from the heaven-inspired oracles of the glorious land. The negative side of the great law of love, ' Do not do to others what you would not wish them to do to you,' is found three or four times over in the books of Confucius. Again we hear an anticipation of St. James's words, ' Be ye swift to hear, slow to speech, slow to wrath;' 'The superior man,' says Confucius, 'wishes to be slow in his words and earnest in his conduct.' St. Paul's passage on the distinc- tion between the spiritual and carnal mind finds a counterpart, though feeble and low in Confu- cius : ' The mind of the superior man is conver- sant with righteousness ; the mind of the mean man is conversant with gain.' But yet more wonderful to my mind are the moral teachings of Lau-tzu. His followers have, by an abject imitation of Buddhism, reduced his system to what Du Halde calls a 'web of extravagance and impiety,' but the old man spoke nobly and wisely 23CO years ago. His ideal of excellence is ' freedom from ostentation :' ' Be not fussy or showy,- be humble, lie low like water,' he fre- quently exclaims. To the virtue of temperance and moderation he assigns a high place. ' To be content is to be rich,' he says : ' the good man should even love the man who is not good, TJte Religions of China. 19 and reward ill-will by virtue. The good man gives and asks not, does good and looks for no recompense. He lives not for himself, but for others, and his life is prolonged by so doing.' A remark attributed to Buddha on the same subject of humility is worth recording : ' I tell my pupils not to perform greater miracles than man can perform ; but, live ye saints, I say to them, hiding your good works, and showing your sins.' ' Comniiserate the ills of men,' says the writer of the Kan-ying-peen, the ' Book of Retribution,' a book with Taouist doctrine and Confucianist morality — ' Commiserate the ills of men, rejoice at their well-being, succour them in extremity, publish not the shortcomings of others, boast not of thine own excellence ; when you are insulted be not enraged, when favour is shown you tremble at it.' The moral precepts of Buddhism have not produced so deep an effect as its idolatrous and superstitious teachings ; and the reason, as Ed- kins supposes, is the false and foolish ground on which the morality is rested. The strength and the deadly nature of lusts and carnal desires are indeed forcibly pointed out. ' Man having many faults, if he does not repent, will find sins rush- ing upon him like water to the sea ; ' and with this view true disciples of Buddha are prohibited from sharing not only in the vices, but also in 20 The Religions of China. many of the lawful enjoyments of life : wine, marriage, and animal food, all are forbidden ; but this last prohibition, together with the hu- mane and gentle treatment of all living crea- tures, rests not so much on the sin of cruelty, as on the doctrine of metempsychosis, since, as Shakespeare has it, ' The soul of one's granddam might haply inhabit a bird.' Yet in many cases the virtuous instinct of mercy and pity brushes away these intellectual abstractions, and sup- plies the motive for charitable actions. An aged friend of mine in China, when in his ninety- second year, left off animal food for a time, partly as a meritorious preparation for eternity, and partly from motives of pity. ' If I were out of hearing when the pigs are killed,' he said, ' I might eat my pork perhaps more compla- cently ; but I can't bear to hear the poor things squeal.' Unfortunately the merciful precepts of these religions have not succeeded in raising mercy into the position of a national character- istic. The Chinese are, I fear, a cruel people. I have seen — though even now I can hardly believe the memory of my eyes — a demure and thoughtful man quietly catch a frog in the early morning, amputate one leg for breakfast, and let it go again. And in war their cruelty is terrible. Neither does the idea seem to impress itself upon their minds that it is more wicked to The Religions of China. 2t torture and to kill a body, in which most unde- niably lives the soul of a man and a brother, than it is to kill a bird, or a beast, or a mosquito, the residence in whose persons of one's granddam or more remote progenitor is, even according to their own ideas, problematical. And now let us draw nearer still, and look into the very heart of these religions. We have viewed them so far as mere moral teachers — teachers and reformers with reference to man's duty to his fellow-man. We have seen that they speak well, but that, either from deficiency of power in the moral impulse, or from some other failing, though they have held vice in check they have not succeeded in making men virtuous. Is that other failing to be found in relation to man's duty to God .'' ' By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God.' ' He that loveth God let him love his brother also.' ' Be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.' Such is the interchange of the duty we owe to God and to man, together with the great motive for both, which our holy religion teaches and supplies. Have the Chinese, in their three great creeds, any such teachings and such arguments .' Is there any reason for what seems to be the opinion of the writer of an essay on International Policy 22 The Religions of China. between England and China, that the rehgions of China are admirably suited to the people, and that we had best leave them alone in their re- ligiousness and their morality ? Alas, no : they are without hope, without God in the world. Confucianism represents the old deistic belief dying away into atheism. Buddhism dethrones God, and exalts man to the divine seat. Taou- ism raises nature above God, and favours pan- theistic and materialistic notions. It is evident from the Canonical Book of History, that the belief in one supreme God, the Creator and Preserver, lived long in the hearts and in the religious systems of the people. ' This supreme Emperor, this highest heavenly Lord, is,' says Du Halde, in his ' Review of the Historical Classic,' ' the principle, not perhaps the creator, of all things ; the father of the people, abso- lutely independent, almighty, omniscient, know- ing even the secrets of the heart. . . . They call him father and lord, they honour him with worship and sacrifices, and by the practice of virtue ; and they affirm that all outward adora- tion must fail in pleasing heaven if it does not proceed from the heart.' ' Now although Confucius is said to have com- piled, and in a measure re-edited, these ancient historical documents, and although he. appeals to them and to the other canonical books both The Religions of China. 23 for example and for precept, much as we do to Holy Scripture, yet both he and Mencius have laid themselves open to the charge of chilling and clouding over, however unintentionally, the original faith of the peoplfe. Dr. Legge refrains from calling Confucius irreligious, but he fears that he must be styled an ?^«religious man. It may have been from humility, not venturing to pry into subjects, as he thought, beyond his reach ; it may have been from an excessively practical turn of mind, busying himself with visible things which he thought the only real and substantial objects for action ; but certain it is that he did nothing whatsoever which could lift the faith of the Chinese nearer to God. ' He did not like to talk about spiritual beings.' (An. vii. 20.) ' Reverence the spirits, but keep at a distance from them.' (An. vi. 20.) Such was his practice, and such his precepts ; and amongst spiritual beings he included of course the Great Spirit, the Shang-ti of the ancients. Dr. Legge blames him and Mencius for abandoning the use of this name for God, and substituting the word Heaven instead. ' If you sin against heaven,' he said on one occasion, ' there is no place for prayer,' there is none to whom you can pray ; ' and though both Confucius and Mencius probably referred to a personal Lord of heaven, by such words, kao kao dsce ficn isice, ' the high 24 The Religions of China. and lofty one,' as it is explained elsewhere ; yet the celebrated Chinese commentator on the Confucian books, Choo-He, who flourished in the twelfth century of our era, was able, from its ambiguity, to explain the passage, t'ieit tsih li yice, ' Heaven means principle.' Mencius follows in the same track. He says very little of what we owe to God ; he speaks of heaven in the same vague manner ; and from the use of this materialistic word the Chinese perhaps have been led to worship not only the material heaven, but also the material earth. In fact, the love of God and the filial fear of God are utterly unknown to these Chinese master minds. Listen to this dreary summing up of moral and religious duty : ' The richest fruit of love is this, the obeying of one's parents ; the richest fruit of righteousness is this, the obeying of one's elder brother ; the richest fruit of wisdom is this, the knowing these two things and not departing from them.' Yet in the history of this religious system (for such, notwithstanding the unreli- giousness of its founder, it must be called), there arises this strange anomaly, — a wise contempt for idolatry, and reprobation of offences against the second commandment ; and yet a glaring offence against the first commandment. Bud- dhism was not introduced into China till nearly 700 years after the age of Confucius ; and Taou- A TOILSOME WALK TO SAVE A PARENT. The Religions of China. 27 ism in its early stages had not adopted its pre- sent grossly idolatrous system ; and therefore condemnation of idol-worship is not to be looked for in the Confucian works. In the ' Sacred Edict,' however (which consists of lectures made by authority on sixteen texts which were given by the successor of the great Kang-hi, about 250 years ago, and which lectures are read in public once or twice a - month in the temple of the patron god of each city), the emperor, speaking of course as a Confucianist, makes the following onslaught on Buddhist and Taouist supersti- tions. He speaks gently. He says, ' The monks have no intention of harming the people, but most certainly,' he adds, ' they do no good. Talk of their living in cells at the top of lofty moun- tains, to foster in solitude their meditative powers, and to be rapt at last into the western heaven ; who ever saw them go .' All they do is to offend against the five cardinal virtues, and spend idle, useless lives. And you women, all of you are ignorant of the true doctrine, you who go and worship Buddha. Why, Buddha was only the eldest son of an Indian king, who, from contempt for the pomp of the world, fled to the summit of a hill to cultivate virtue. Now if he, this Buddha, neglected his father, mother, wife, and children, do you suppose he will care for you, and bless and protect you .? If he de- 28 The Religions of China. spised his father's glorious palace, do you sup- pose he will come to dwell in your poor little mean temples ? Then, as to Yuh-hwang-da-ti (a deified emperor), though there be such a god, is he not in heaven, free and independent ? Do you imagine that he wants you to mould an image for him, or build a house for his rest ? All these temple buildings, idol makings, fast- ings, incantations, they are but deceits that these Buddhist and Taouist monks practise upon you ; and when you crowd, men, women, and children into their temples, far from there accruing any merit to you from the act, on the contrary, many foul and abominable things take place.' Then, after a few words condemning the Roman Ca- tholic creed, the lecturer glides into what is essentially Confucian idolatry : ' What, do you not know that each one of you has in his house two living Buddhas — (two living deities) ? Why go elsewhere to bow down and worship ? Why draw near to gods of wood and stone, and in- voke happiness ? Your proverb speaks well, " Reverence your parents at home ; why travel abroad to burn incense to idols ?" If you will but meditate thoroughly on this doctrine, and keep your hearts pure, that is heaven ; if your heart is dark and ignorant, that is hell. Now just go home ; be loyal to your Emperor, be filial to parents : perform all your duties, and you will The Religions of China. 29 gain heaven's joy.' And then, as though he felt it necessary to make at least a passing allusion to the faith of his people in some god, he adds, ' Seek for no out-of-the-way happiness ; commit no unlawful acts ; do your duty, and God will bless you.' Yet, in truth, these two living deities, each man's parent, together with the spirits of his ancestors, are literally idolised ; and their constant tendency is to dethrone the love of the Almighty from the hearts of the people, though no image of the dead is erected, and though the ' Times ' newspaper, in its sapi- ency, imagines the worship of the living and the dead to be a beautiful custom, and one upon which Christianity might advantageously be grafted. In the classic of filial piety, an ancient worthy is held up for praise, because he sacri- ficed to Wen-hwang (the god of literature) as equal to Shang-ti, and reverenced his parents as on an equality with heaven. And Confucius him- self, however unwilling he might have been to ac- cept the honour, has divine honours paid to him, although the attributes of a god are not ascribed to him. The reverence for him, and for parents and ancestors, is, in fact, a religion. Children when entering school bow to him, either to his memory, his tablet, or sometimes to his image ; and with such significancy, that no Christian child can, if compelled thus to do obeisance, 30 The Religions of China. attend such schools. When in after-Hfe they enter the examination halls, to take their de- grees, the same act of reverence is repeated. He is called ' equal to heaven and earth ; ' temples are erected to his memory in all the cities of the empire ; there his tablet (' the throne of his spirit ') is worshipped ; and though images are rarely met with, yet sacrifices of slain animals, with other articles of food, are offered with prayers of adoration to the departed sage. There is no special order of sacrificing priests : the Emperor himself is high-priest by his office ; the magistrates are his deputies in the pro- vinces ; and the learned graduates are the quasi- devotees who attend at the ceremonies. Now this remarkable system, preserving, though in a clouded form, the ancient faith in one true God, condemning gross idolatry, com- manding respect and carrying conviction by its high-toned morality, and yet drawing down the love and reverence of the people from God to m.an, and setting up a more specious but not less deadly form of idolatry, forms the great outwork which Christianity must storm before the defences of Satan's fortress are turned, and China lies .captive at her Lord and Master's feet. I have therefore endeavoured to describe at some length the rationale, as far as I understand it, of this creed ; and I must compress into a The Religions' of China. 3 1 very few sentences what I have to say as to the Buddhist and Taouist doctrines touching the Supreme Being. Buddhism is, as I remarked above, atheistic. God and gods are all placed, when placed at all, in a position subordinate to the self-purified, self-exalted, religious man. Gautama Buddha, the founder of the sect, worshipped in China under the name Shakia Muni, and in threefold form, the past, present, and future, occupies the central shrine in the chief chapel of each con- vent. Amidhaba, (an after-thought of the framers of the religion, a Buddha specially invented to suit the yearning desire of the people for some one whom they can regard as a giver of positive happiness), the Buddha of the western heaven, sits smiling in the central shrine of the entrance- hall ; but the temple attendants and doorkeepers are figures of the Prince of Heaven with four giant companions. In all the convents and monasteries images are erected to the Poosas or Bodhisattwas (a word meaning knowledge and pity), the chief among which is Kwan-yin, or the goddess of mercy. These Poosas are one step below the Fuh or Buddha in rank, but are supposed to be more accessible to the prayer of their wor- shippers than Buddha, who stands on the very threshold of the Nirvana ; the desire to help 32 The Religions of China. man alone keeping his foot from entering that place of nothingness, of impassibility, and of unconsciousness. The Lohan, also, or aspirants to the state of Poosa and Fuh, 500 in number, are worshipped in the great monasteries. I have walked with amazement through the aisles of the great hall in one of the Hang-chow temples, on either side of which, sitting and standing in every attitude and in life size, were these 500 silent images. Now all of these objects of worship are, or were, men, and they are all placed, by the insolence of Hindu philosophy, above the region and reach of gods. And yet so ingrained in the mind of men is the belief that God is supreme, that, in effect, all wor- shippers in Buddhist temples bow down to Buddha and Poosa as God, and treat the gods at the gates' as men. From this also arises the strange anomaly, that Confucianists, though ridiculing and condemning (officially) idolatry, yet, because of the innate yearning after God, and because of their general ignorance of the true God, and how He should be worshipped, are Buddhists and Taouists in practice ; and though the illiterate, and more particularly the old and young women of China, form the great mass of Buddhist devotees, yet the Emperor himself has more than once in China's history professed Buddhism. The Religions of China. 33 Taouism in its later developments is but an abject imitation of Buddhism. Its founder, Lao-kiun, in his writings makes no mention, or but the most remote, of a personal deity : his god was Nature. But some centuries after his decease his followers deified their founder, calling him a Shang-ti, and associating with him two other deities, the triad of Shang-ti, or the Three Pure Ones. Next after these there comes the god Yuh-hwang, whose name and pretensions seem to have usurped almost uni- versally the place of the idea of God in the minds of the people, so that when we speak of God, unless we qualify and explain the word, they conclude that we mean this deified mysti- cal hero, Yuh-hwang. The Taouist pantheon is a very large one : there are the star-gods, the god of wealth (the Chinese Plutus), the deities presiding over heaven, earth, and water, the god and goddess of thunder, the god of war, and a deity whose image sits uncomfortably amidst the smoke of each Chinese kitchen, checking the gossip of the women as they cook, and re- porting the character of the whole family at each year's close in heaven. There is a class of objects for religious wor- ship, which are, properly speaking, neither Buddhist nor Taouist, but native gods, tute- lary deities, patronised nevertheless, and adopted D 34 The Religions of China. into the pantheons of either sect. In a re- markable proclamation recently issued in China, prohibiting the repair or enlargement of Bud- dhist or Taouist temples, these native deities, and all ' who by special service have deserved well of the people,' are expressly excepted. The cities in the spirit-world are supposed to be governed by magistrates of the same name and rank with those in the visible empire, and temples, named after these magisterial deities, are erected in the chief cities. Another deity is worshipped, and vows recorded in his presence at the time of pestilence. His deity and image (if I understand rightly a history of these gods written by my teacher) is five-fold, and with five hues of colour. When buildings are to be erected, or ground raised for a tomb, or when the earth is in any way disturbed, the T'u di Poosa, the earth-god, is invoked by a Taouist sorcerer. Those who wish to adopt any one as a brother, and those who are afraid of ghosts, pray to Kwan-ti Poosa. The sailors have their patron goddess, Nyiang Nyiang Poosa, grand- mother goddess. Husbandmen, in time of flood or drought, pray to the dragon-king, or to the water genii. There are special deities invoked by scholars ; parties going to law seek the help of the ' swiftly-recompensing ' Poosa ; surgeons, physicians, and medicine-vendors, have their spe- MUTUAL AGREEMENT INFLUENCING EVEN THE DOGS OF THE HOUSE. The Religions of China. 37 cial deities ; there is a deity presiding over small-pox ; a deity giving children ; another, whose special care is children's diseases ; and masons, carpenters, and play-actors, all have their patron gods. This is a less arrogant and more straight- forward system of idolatry perhaps than Bud- dhism, but it is outrageously distinct in its usurp- ation of the title, the majesty and the attributes of God. Now when the believers in these three re- ligions look beyond this passing world, and strain their eyes to catch a glimpse of what awaits the soul after death, listen for a moment, before I close, to the dreary and disappointing utterances of their great teachers. Confucius said, 'I do not understand life, how can I know death .? ' 'If you sin, there is no place for prayer ; ' ' You die, and it is all over with you,' — you cease to exist, as his meaning appears to have been. Buddha and Lao-kiun, recognising the ter- rible existence of sin and evil, thought to remove it by self-mortification, by self-purifica- tion, by rest and calm reflection, ' The human teacher is the redeemer, and the man can save himself Then, when self is controlled, and matter 38 The Religions of China. etherealized, for the Buddhist — the fortunate units amongst the millions of failures — comes the Nirvana, the state when metempsychosis ceases to weary and excite the soul ; when pleasure and pain are unknown; and when, if individuality does not cease, the individual is at least unconscious of his existence. For those who fail to reach this heaven of nothingness there are never-ending changes from man to beast, from beast to man, from Lohan to Poosa, and whether upwards or downwards, Buddha does not tell us : there is a residence in some better place, some nobler city, some western heaven, in which the paper they buy at Buddhist shrines in life will turn into spiritual gold and silver ; but there is a hell, a purgatory with no apparent perma- nent outlet for the millions lower still in the scale of hope. And the Taouists, when death overtakes them, notwithstanding the ' elixir of life,' and the power and mercy of their count- less deities, if they know anything of their founder's teachings, look for a return to nature, — a return to nothingness. If there be any idea of a life after death, it is what the writer on Taouism in the ' Fuh-chau Missionary Record,' from which I have quoted above, compares to ' the fancied life in other's breath,' by which a man, though dead, is not The Religions of China. 39 lost, somewhat resembling the Confucian im- mortality, — the immortality of fame. We know better : we know something of the power, the defilement, and the punishment of sin ; we know the sinner's doom ; we know of the sinner's Saviour ; we believe in the doctrine and the reality of the new birth ; we know that there is one God and one Mediator be- tween God and man, one God and one Spirit regenerating fallen men. We have heard the good news ; and do not my readers, if they have caught no more from my narrative than the idea of the helplessness and the hopelessness of China's religions, long to open their lips and echo the glad tidings of salvation .■' I can only, for the present, express a hope, that what I have said may lead many to turn with interest to the study of those subjects connected with Mission work in China, which they will find more fully narrated in the books and treatises which I have mentioned above. Think of China, her vast and wide-spreading provinces, her enormous population, her decent exterior, her high-toned moral code, her un- religiousness, her atheistic religions, her gods many and lords many, her alienation from the life of God, her well-nigh smothered belief in the existence of the Most High, her hope- 40 TJie Religions of China. less deaths, her dreary hereafter, her sons and daughters in solemn despair passing into eter- nity ; and shall we not love her, weep for her, plead for her, plan for her, pray for her, more heartily, more earnestly, than we have ever done before ? 41 CHAPTER II. ON THE CHINESE LANGUAGE. In my last chapter I noticed the great age of the Chinese empire, and I drew attention to the remarkable fulfilment of the terms of the first commandment with promise in the history of the Chinese nation. The power of adhesive- ness in that apparently unwieldy dominion would seem indeed inexplicable, but for the belief in the interposition of God, who alone is King of nations. Living on amidst the convulsions and the tumult of dynasties changed in blood, rent and torn by internal revolution, periodical re- bellion, and latterly by foreign and disastrous war, what can account for this life, for this flame of vigour flickering in the socket, and ever and anon bursting forth into bright shining again, — what but Divine interposition .' If we look to secondary causes, however, which are none the less Divine interpositions, we shall find that one great secret of this ad- 42 On the Chinese Language. hesiveness in the numerous and multiform pro- vinces of the Chinese empire, lies in the one common language of the Chinese people — a language which is understood by any reader, not only amongst the 400 millions of Chinese, but also in Japan. Towards the close of my last chapter, on the Religions of China, after noticing in brief re- capitulation the hopeless and helpless character of those creeds, I spoke of the eagerness with which all true Christians would desire to open their lips and echo on the glad tidings of sal- vation. And difficult as the Chinese language is known to be, yet some may be inclined to conclude that the task of preaching the Gospel to the dense populations of this great empire is not, after all, so hopeless, since there is but one common language for all its peoples. Alas for the mistaken hope ! There is one common language of books, but none for conversation or oral proclamation; there is one royal road for communicating through the Chinese eye with the Chinese mind, but for the ear we must follow each section of the nation, possessing its distinct dialect, and learn to speak that collo- quial before we can use the foolishness of preaching for the salvation of those who shall believe. The Chinese written language is one, and binds the far-stretching provinces together. On th^ Chinese Language. 43 The spoken dialects are more than two hundred in number, and vary so widely in many cases as to be in effect as formidable almost as vary- ing languages, and separate the speakers so strongly that they are to one another sometimes as foreigners, though still fellow-countrymen — all Chinese. I have often experienced the effect of this twofold feature in the language of China — uniform to the eye, multiform to the ear — even in the comparatively limited range of my Mis- sionary itinerations in the province of Che-kiang. I have lain down to rest in the Mission-boat at night amidst the familiar sounds of the Ningpo dialect, or but a very slight variation of it, spoken by the passers to and fro on the banks of the canal ; and in the morning I have waked up to find my boat threading its way through the crowded parts of a large city, all alive with market people, and the shreds of their conver- sation which I could overhear scarcely intelli- gible from the variation in dialect. Yet here, over every shop, painted or cut on horizontal boards, or on signs swinging in the wind by the door, or painted again on the whitewashed walls of streets and private houses, the same picturesque Chinese characters, with the sight of which I was familiar in Ningpo, entirely un- changed in form, conveyed the same meaning. 44 On the Chinese Language. and precisely the same idea, to the speakers of this different dialect. And still more striking was the impression produced by this peculiarity in the languages of China, when, on a tour for my health, I visited Fuh-chau and Amoy, or, last spring, on my return voyage, when I spent a few days in Hong-kong and Singapore. In these places the spoken language was absolutely unintelligible, not only to myself, but also to the ear of our Chinese Ningpo servant, who accompanied us ; and yet their shop-signs, and bills and proclamations posted on the walls, spoke intelligibly to the eye, and spoke Chinese. Analogies to these linguistic peculiarities will readily and naturally suggest themselves ; but, nevertheless, no true analogy is, I believe, to be found. A deputation of the Church Mis- sionary Society, after twelve hours' consecutive railway travelling, may find himself carried from the sounds of the Dorset dialect into the region of broad Yorkshire, and his ear may be per- plexed both by the one and by the other ; but when pleading the cause of the Society one Sunday before the Dorset peasantry, and the next before those of Yorkshire, if he speak in plain Saxon his sermon will be understood : he need not adopt the local dialect. The well- known Dorset poet, William Barnes, born and bred in the heart of the country, and who can On the Chinese Language. 45 move the laughter and tears of Dorsetshire men and women by his sweet pastoral poems in their dialect, as rector of a Dorset parish need use but plain English in his pulpit, and he is under- stood. Not so, alas ! in China : there is no common spoken language, ' understanded of the people,' in north and south of that great land. The dialects are languages, though with a com- mon substratum, and there is no connecting me- dium of speech. The Roman character again, in its adapta- tion to most of the European languages (for there is an increasing tendency to print even German in such letters), may be supposed to correspond to the prevalence of the Chinese character throughout China proper, through its dependencies, and even in the adjacent em- pire of Japan (the Japanese, indeed, have a distinct language and orthography of their own). But the analogy in this case again does not hold good. German and French, Spanish and Italian, are indeed expressed in written and printed documents by exactly the same letters as Eng- lish ; and the same individual letters in various combinations appear on foreign signboards and post-bills as on our own ; but an Englishman is not, on that account, able to read and under- stand what he sees. The alphabet is not the language. In Chinese (to anticipate what must 46 On the Chinese Language. presently be described more minutely), there being no real alphabet, and every apparent letter or character being a complete word, those who can read the, letters can read or understand the language, or at all events (with the excep- tion of lads in their first year of school-life), can give the meaning of the individual words, if not the whole drift of the sentence. In our alphabet of twenty-six letters, only three, a, i, and 0, are words. In China, whose language is her alphabet, and whose alphabet, so called, consists of tens of thousands of what I will term for the time letters, each one is a word ; and right spelling consists not in the right selection and order of the letters in the word, but in the right sequence of the strokes and dots (which are the only substitute for an alphabet) in the letter. The omission of a stroke or dot causes a distinct word to come into view; the omission of a letter in an English word does not neces- sarily destroy the character of the word so much as the reputation of the scribe. And whilst speaking of the character, let me add a few words as to its history and mechanical nature : ' The earliest plan for recording events or ex- pressing thought where speech could not be used, was, it is said, the use of knotted cord. Then came a strange geometrical figure, eight- sided, invented by the remote Emperor Fu-hi On the Chinese Language. 47 as a means of recording, one can hardly say expressing, his views about the nature of things and of duty. Next came what is called the tadpole character, from the waving lines and thick head-like blots of which they are com- posed — probably picture-writing ; and traces of these pictured ideas may be seen in the modern forms of the characters. These tadpole cha- racters are still seen in very old inscriptions, but are never written now. Then followed the seal character, which is still used for seals, and for the titles of books, inscriptions on tombs and monuments, and so forth. Some scholarly gentlemen learn this character on purpose to be able to engrave seals, and present them to their friends ; but many good scholars know nothing about it. About 2000 years ago the Li and Kiai characters were invented by two officers in the court of Ts'in Sze-hwang, the first abso- lute Emperor of China. These characters are those now commonly used : whilst a some- what stiffer style (the Sung character, in- vented about 1000 years ago) is used some- times in printing. Printing is done almost en- tirely by wooden blocks ; and the characters being cut out from the copy pasted on to the block, the style of the printed page depends of course very greatly on the style of the scribe's writing. In ordinary writing the full form of 48 On the Chinese Language. the character is hardly ever used, many well- known abbreviations being employed : and there is yet another style — the grass hand — in which abbreviation and fancy run wild, often puzzling even the practised eye of a Chinese scholar, and not merely the anxious eye of a Missionary student. Such are the letters or characters with which we have to deal in China- — invented in their earliest form, perhaps more than 3000 years ago — for there is mention of a writing in the canon of history about 1270 B.C. — and im- proved to their most perfect form 1800 years ago, under the great Han dynasty, whose name is still given to the Chinese language and cha- racter. Writing is all done on paper made of the second skin of the bark of bamboo, soaked in water with lime till the woody and coarse parts are separated from the pulp. There is a kind of paper used in Fuh-chau called rice- paper, made from rice-straw ; some also is made of cotton, some from the bark of mulberry-trees, wheat-straw, and from the skin inside cocoons. In very early times, smooth slips of bamboo were used instead of paper, and the characters were scratched on them with a stylus. Brushes of various sizes and qualities, such as those used by artists, are employed in writing, and no pens or pencils of a different kind are used by Chinese scribes. Medhurst thus enumerates On the Chinese Language. 49 the successive stages in the formation and in the nature- of Chinese characters ; first they were pictorial, then symbolic, afterwards compounded, and finally arbitrary : a description correct enough if we bear in mind that traces of each of these stages still remain in the system of writing now in vogue.' Now this double language forms the first and the lifelong difhculty of a Missionary to the Chinese. Without some degree of fluency in the spoken language, and some considerable familiarity with the language of books, no con- scientious Missionary will feel satisfied with the result of his studies, and with his mental equip- ment for his work. The colloquial is not beyond the reach of a diligent learner, with a quick ear and a ready memory ; though to speak Chinese well is not the work of a few months, as some have asserted, nor even of a few years. The vocabulary is very large, the idiom intricate and peculiar : it teems with proverbial sayings ; some with an historical and local reference ; some with superstitious or religious allusions : some sayings or modes of expression are rife in the plains, some in the hills, of the same district ; and I have more than once known a veteran and able Missionary puzzled and surprised by phrases or words which I had happened to have not unfre- quently heard, whilst he could perplex me by E 50 On the Chinese Language. numerous expressions entirely strange to my memory and my ear. But the written language of China, to be mastered in its entirety, would require almost two lifetimes of unremitting toil ; to be acquired as an ordinary Chinese scholar knows it, a Missionary must give an amount of daily and lifelong study, which few, if any, can afford to bestow. This being the case, it may well be deemed presumptuous in me, after only eight years' ac- quaintance with this ponderous and difficult language, to attempt to write upon it. I have thought it wiser and better, therefore, to give in what follows, almost verbatim, the results of the researches of one with longer experience than myself, merely adding a few illustrative remarks from my own observations. Let me make one remark, in passing, on a point of vital interest to all future students of languages in the Mission- field. The importance of the first two years of study cannot be too often noticed nor too ear- nestly insisted upon. It is a time which, if once lost by negligence or by accident, never returns. I lost part of that precious time myself through the months of panic, confusion, and fighting, which immediately followed my arrival in China; and I despair of ever thoroughly regaining the ground. The materials from which what follows is A SELECT LECTURER TEACHING. On the Chinese Language. 5 3 drawn consists of an article in the ' Cambridge Philological Journal,' by the Rev. G. E. Moule, on the Chinese marks for the genitive and plu- ral ; of two papers on the language, also by my brother, and read before my father's parishioners last year, from which I have already quoted above ; and of a very brief paper on the same subject, which I shall quote in extenso. : — ' When we speak of the Chinese language, it is important to remember that there are, in fact, two main branches of it, the language of books and that of conversation. ' This is the case in other countries ; for in- stance, in England, where it is hardly good taste in every-day conversation to talk exactly as we write. ' But the difference is very much greater and more marked in China. ' In China there are a great many dialects of the spoken laguage, perhaps as many as two or three hundred ; whilst the book language is everywhere the same. 'The dialects differ amongst themselves as much as Dutch differs from German. Just as the educated Hollander speaks Dutch, and the Saxon, German, so the man of letters at Ningpo speaks his Ningpo dialect, and the Shanghai 54 On the Chinese Language. scholar the dialect of Shanghae, without any re- proach on account of provincialism. 'There is one of the spoken dialects called the Mandarin colloquial, which is more gene- rally understood by certain classes than any other. It is the native tongue, with slight local variations, of most of the provinces north and west of the river Yang-tsze. ' The variety of it which prevails at Peking is called the " Court fashion," and is adopted by all the Mandarins and their attaches and servants throughout China. ' It is a political principle in China, that no Mandarin may hold office in his own province. They are thus, so far as speech is concerned, foreigners wherever they go. Their common focus is Peking. The higher grades of Manda- rins have regular audiences and conversations with the Emperor. They are thus obliged to learn his dialect— that of Peking — and carry it with them in their governments throughout the empire. Hence it becomes naturally the official dialect of the Chinese courts of justice ; not of the law-books, it is true, but of the pleadings, and evidences, and sentences. The witnesses, coming into court, and speaking their provincial patois, are unintelligible to the Mandarin until an interpreter explains in the official dialect. On the Chinese Language. 55 Written pleadings explain themselves to the judge's eye ; but for his ear everything pro- vincial must be interpreted into the " Court fashion." ' So it was of old, when the Barons held court' and pronounced judgment for a Saxon popula- tion in Norman French. ' But it is wrong to call Mandarin the lan- guage of the "educated class.'' Thousands of that class speak nothing but their own patois. In Ningpo, a city of 400,000 people, there are hundreds of literary graduates, but it is very hard to find one of them, not in official employ- ment, skilled in the Mandarin colloquial. ' The great peculiarity, then, of Chinese, lies in the marked distinction between the language of books and that of conversation. For books, one language prevails from end to end of China, and is read besides by Coreans, Japanese, Loo- chewans, Annamese, Thibetans, Mongols, &c. For utterance, the dialects are legion ; seven or eight principal varieties at least in each of the eighteen provinces. ' In learning a colloquial dialect — and very few Missionaries ever attain the mastery of more than one — the pronunciation, and the idioms of syntax, are both serious difficulties. ' Many of the sounds are quite unknown, not only in England, but on the Continent too. For 56 On the Chinese Language. example, at Ningpo some of the commonest words commence with the nasal ng ; ngo, " I ;" ngeo, " cow ; " ngosn, " eye ; " ngao, " to bite ; " &c. Some consist of ng without any vowel ; as, e.g. the word for "thou," for "five," and for " fish." M again is sounded as a word without any vowel, or with a very indistinct vowel sound to help; and so are s, ts, ts', dz, and r. The difference, too, between an aspirated letter and one without .the aspirate is very important, and very hard to observe at first. Tsd, "a debt," must not be confounded with Ts'd "to send;" and A, " low, dwarfish," 'd, " shoes," hd, " crabs," must be carefully distinguished. ' Missionaries must be more than careful not to clip an k in China. ' The tones are another very delicate and very important business. The Chinese distin- guish two classes of tones, the even and the in- flected. ' The inflected are the rising, departing, and entering tones. The first (at Ningpo) gently raises the voice whilst the syllable is uttering ; the second pitches the voice high, and lets it drop slightly as the sound ceases ; the third is short and abrupt. ' In some dialects all four tones, the even and the three inflected, admit an upper and a lower subdivision, grounded partly on the differ- On the Chinese Language. 57 ence occasioned by the heavy or the light initial of the syllable. An educated Chinaman cannot always be trusted in the subdivisions of tone ; but he never mistakes an even for an inflected tone, or vice versd. ' Nicety of ear and accurate utterance are indeed very valuable, but not indispensable ; and some of our most efficient Missionaries have been quite unable to master the tones. ' The confusion that would arise from such imperfections, and also from the monosyllabic nature of Chinese, and the small number (not 500) of distinct sounds in the language, is obvi- ated chiefly by the practice of coupling each am- biguous word to another, which, by likeness or by contrast, seems to define its meaning. ' Thus at Ningpo, " body " is kyi-sing; " toil " sing-kw'u ; " depth " sing-ts'in ; " newness " sing- gyiu. That is to say, four words, different in Chinese writing, but all sounded alike, sing, and which might be mistaken for each other if left by themselves, are distinguished and defined by being coupled to other words : to kyi, a word also referring to the body, to kw'u, which means "bitter," to tsin, which means " shallow," and to gyiu, which means " old." 'This practice of coupling, and the distinct arrangement of thoughts or matters in one's dis- course, are the chief, though not the only, means S8 On the Chinese Language. of guarding against confusion in our use of this monosyllabic, and, so far as different sounds are concerned, this poor language. 'For writing, all confusion is avoided, but, so to speak, by a very costly device. ' This device is the Chinese written charac- ter. ' Every word, i.e. not only every distinct syl- lable, but each of very many different meanings under each syllable, has a distinct written sign. ' Morison gives, under the one syllable E, not less than a thousand differently written charac- ters. And the instances just now given of the meanings of sing may also illustrate my mean- ing. 'These characters, or written signs, are not, like European words, spelt with one, two, or more letters of a definite alphabet. They are formed of strokes arranged, not so as to repre- sent a sound, but to serve as a memorandum or symbol of some definite notion or thing. 'Just as the numerals, i, 2, 3, &c., or 100, 1000, 2000, &c., represent no invariable sounds, but only a particular numerical notion for each ; so that, whilst the Frenchman says trois, the Englishman three, the German drei, and so- forth, all of them, and a dozen other nations besides, agree to think of the same number whenever the symbol 3 is written. On the Chinese Language. 59 ' Of all our difficulties in Chinese, these cha- racters suggesting a meaning, but having no in- variable sound, are the chief. ' To read fluently the Chinese Bible or the Confucian books, we must know 5000 or 6000 of them ; some composed of fifteen or twenty strokes and dots, some again so nearly alike that it wants a practised eye to distinguish them. As to the sounds of the written characters, each dialect has its own way of pronouncing them : eg. the sign for " ship " is chw'dn at Pekin ; zayn at Shanghai ; jeune (French) at Ningpo ; dsoon at Hang-chow. ' The twofold nature of the language, for books and for talk; the quaint monosyllables that go to make up our talk ; the tones and couplings with which we discriminate the sylla- bles ; last, and chiefest, the manifold written characters ; these are some of the China Mis- sionary's difficulties. ' We thank God, however, that in many in- stances they have been overcome in great mea- sure ; and Missionaries can both read and ex- pound to Chinamen in their own tongue, and from the vertical columns of their own printed characters, the wonderful works of God. ' Old Pr^mare said well and truly, " We must become boys again, if we desire to preach Christ Jesus to these Gentiles so as to do them good. 6o On the Chinese Language. But with such a prospect, what toil will not be alleviated?'" Now this paper, brief as it is, contains within it, or suggests, most of the points of chief im- portance with reference to the Chinese language, and these points will require merely a few illus- trative remarks. I would notice, first, that nei- ther the book language of the Chinese, nor the Court or official Mandarin dialect, correspond, as has been sometimes imagined, to the position and use of Latin as the means of communication between the learned in Europe. Latin, though a dead language as the language of a people, can yet be spoken as well as written. But though the Chinese written language can be enunciated as well as written, it is never used as the medium for conversation ; and though the Mandarin collo- quial can be written as well as spoken, it is the medium for official, not for learned converse ; and the vast majority of the scholars of the Empire know little or nothing about it. The Mandarin dialect differs from the many other dialects of China mainly in the fact that it alone has a literature. Some few Imperial works, the ' Sa- cred Edict ' for instance, as well as novels, have been published in this dialect ; whilst the nu- merous local dialects of the provinces had no literature whatsoever until quite recently, when On the Chinese Language. 6i Protestant Missionaries tried the experiment. The New Testament, Genesis, Exodus, and some of the Psalms, the Prayer-book of the Church of England, a Hymn-book, ' Pilgrim's Progress,' together with a considerable variety of smaller books, are now printed, and are read by Christian converts in their own colloquial ; but a Chinese scholar would rarely condescend to read a book in patois, though, as was stated above, he con- verses in the simplest /i^^'^w. Now, with reference to the spoken language, a few words on the tones must be added. Many contradictory statements may be met with on this subject. We find, for instance, in many books on China ludicrous cases recounted of the effect of uttering a word in a wrong tone ; and yet we were informed just above that many of our efficient Missionaries have been quite unable to master the tones. Both of these statements are correct ; neither in effect are they so contra- dictory as at first sight they would appear to be. When engaged in the translation of the baptis- mal offices, our Missionaries discovered to their surprise that the Chinese scribe, writing from their dictation, had given in each place the cha- racter ' book ' instead of ' water.' The mistake arose from their faulty distinction of the tones. In the Ningpo dialect, though not in most others, ' book ' and ' water ' are words of the 62 On the Chinese Language. same sound differently toned, ' book ' being ^shii, and 'water' 'shii. They had said, ^shii (level), each time, instead of 'shii (mounting), and the scribe, who paid little heed to the sense, had consequently written ' book.' Yet one of these very Missionaries, notwithstanding his continued inability to distinguish by ear and by enuncia- tion the tones, has become, nevertheless, a fluent and effective speaker of the colloquial : and I am acquainted with a similar case in one of the southern provinces, where the tones are more numerous and more sharply marked, and hence more important than in the Ningpo colloquial ; and yet the Missionary to whom I refer, though unable to make a distinction of tone, is one of the ablest speakers of the dialect ; both of these veterans having supplied this otherwise fatal de- ficiency by a very large and varied vocabulary, synonyme after synonyme removing all doubt from the minds of the hearers who might other- wise have been perplexed by wrong tones. The conclusion, therefore, is that too great care cannot be bestowed upon the acquisition of the tones; whilst, on the other hand, physical inability to acquire these tones need not hastily be assumed to be an insuperable bar to efficiency. We have, it is true, not a little of tone or accent which has a tonic eff'ect in English ; as ' wture is the place where this was done .' ' ' where ' being the On the Chinese Language. 63 same word and with the same meaning, but ac- cented differently, because in the one case it asks a question, in the other it is the relative. Before I leave the subject of the spoken language, I must not fail to notice the import- ance of the classifiers in Chinese. We are not without them in English, but their application is somewhat different, and their number very- much smaller than in Chinese. In English, if I mistake not, no classifier is required for a living being or an inanimate object if in the singular number : a partridge, a sheep, a trout, a soldier ; in each of these singulars the indefi- nite article suffices ; it is for two, or more than two, that we require classifiers : a covey of par- tridges, a flock of sheep, a brace or a shoal of trout, a regiment of soldiers. In Chinese, how- ever, everything, every object in nature and art, with scarcely an exception, has a classifier ; and the same classifier applies to singular and plural alike. The commonest, which is applied to men, hours, coins, and things, and which is sometimes loosely used for some other objects, is pro- nounced ko, or in Ningpo go, and seems to mean individual ; ih-go-nying, ' one individual man ; ' jih-go-nying, 'ten individual men.' But when speaking courteously and with respect of men, and especially of seniors, a new classifier is em- ployed, meaning a ' throne ' or ' chair ; ' cong-we 64 On the Chinese Language. hyiiong-di, ' all you my honourable brethren,' is, literally, ' all the thrones of my brethren.' Oxen and swine, and sometimes horses, are counted by head ; ih-deo-ngeo, ' one head cow : ' or horses are reckoned by matches; ih-p'ih-mo, 'one match horse.' Umbrellas, sedan-chairs, and caps, are told by summits ; ih-ting-gyiao-ts, ' one top sedan ; ' and the variety is altogether too great to enu- merate. But if in English he would be reckoned an unpardonable ignoramus who should speak of a covey of sheep, a shoal of ducks, a regiment of trout, or a flock of soldiers, much more in Chinese is accuracy in the use of classifiers ne- cessary for a missionary who would speak intel- ligibly and without provoking a smile. There are some points applying equally to the spoken and written language which require a few words of elucidation. I proceed at once to notice the great peculiarity of both the spoken and written language, namely, the absence of inflexion. English is, of course, not so rich, complete, and methodical in this respect, as Greek, Latin, or German. To take a simple instance ; when in Greek we have Svo iaovTai aXrjQovaai tin. to avro, the English rendering is ' two women shall be grinding together ; ' the participle grinding not being susceptible of an inflexion to mark the gender, and necessitating the insertion of the noun ' women.' In Chinese On the Chinese Language. 65 the sentence stands in the written language r vu dong mo, ' two women together grind ; ' concise and brief enough, but the utter absence of in- flexions obHges the use of the word vit, ' women.' In the Ningpo colloquial it is rendered _j/2?^ Itang go nyu-nying bing-ba ky'm mo, where nyii-nying, 'women,' is again inserted ; and in either ver- sion the verb m.o or ky'in mo, ' to grind,' is inca- pable of participial inflexion. With us, even in our most irregular and eccentric language, nouns and pronouns have inflexions to distinguish case and number, verbs are inflected to denote voice, tense, person, &c., and our adjectives are in- flected to mark degrees of comparison. All of these inflexions are unknown in Chinese, and their place is supplied by prepositions or aux- iliary particles, or else the plain sense of the hearer is trusted to supply the meaning from the connexion. In the use of some of these particles a slight tendency to inflexion is, so think some philo- logists, discernible ; a tendency, that is, to a state in which they will cease to be distinct words, and remain as mere appendages to other words, marking case, number, or tense. Drawing now to a close, let me briefly no- tice some of the more general and less minute characteristics of the language ; points which should, perhaps, have been noticed at the outset, F 66 On the Chinese Language. but which will nevertheless form, I trust, a not uninstructive summing up of the subject. Chi- nese is, as we saw just now, monosyllabic ; these syllables are joined together in different combin- ations — pairs, threes, fours, fives ; but are never either expanded into real polysyllables, or lost and dropped out of use as words themselves. Thus, ' astronomy ' is fien-wen, a double word, ' heaven-science,' not strictly a dissyllable. Now when we are further informed that the list of such monosyllabic sounds is exceedingly small — in round numbers only 500, — and yet that, in the great dictionaries of K'ang-hi there are 40,000 characters (Du Halde says there are in all 80,000), each character being the sign or hieroglyphic of a monosyllable, eager interest in the study of such a tongue will, I should hope, be excited, rather than amazed or amused incre- dulity. These 500 primary sounds are increased by the variety of tone to some 15 00; and then, for the vast wants of a language which shall express the philosophy, the aspirations, the tech- nicalities, the love, the hate, the joy, the mourn- ing, of 400 millions of rational beings, the in- genious and picturesque, though cumbersome system of characters, expresses every shade of meaning to the eye ; and the tones, the coup- lings, and combinations of these monosyllables supply the necessities of conversation. ilH AN AGED SCHOLAR KEEPING SCHOOL. On the Chinese Language. 69 One more peculiarity I must notice before I close. ' The Chinese language has no relationship with any other tongue worth attending to. The language which was spoken in China in Abra- ham's day, 2000 years before' England was known to civilised men, is spoken by the Chi- nese of whom English merchants buy their tea and silk, and to whom the missionaries of the Church Missionary Society carry the history of Adam, of Moses, and of Christ, the story of the Gospel, the precious word of God. It has been enlarged, it is true, during these 4000 years, from Yaou and Shun, the primeval emperors, down to the Manchoo family, which now sits on the throne. New wants and new thoughts have made necessary new words and phrases ; writing and printing have suggested new and more com- plicated forms of expression ; the pronunciation has been modified : and a great variety of local dialects has sprung up. But all has been done, not by mixture of other ingredients, nor by taking in of Tartar words, or Malayan, or Sans- krit, or European, but by combining in different ways the native elements handed down from the very earliest tribe of settlers that first laid the foundation, soon after the dispersion of mankind from Babel, of a Chinese nation. How different is this character of the language of China from 70 On the Chinese Language. the nature of our own lansjuage ! English has been growing and changing for some 2000 years — from its first Celtic element (a twig of the tree of languages, the main stem being the Sanskrit), through, and by means of, the Latin introduced by the Roman conquerors ; then came the Danish and Saxon (the real founda- tion of the English language) ; next Norman- French at the time of the Conquest ; and after that, as commerce and learning brought English- men more into, contact with foreign nations, the language was enlarged and enriched by fresh collections from the Latin, Greek, and other European tongues, by the languages of Arabia, Persia, India, and China, the Malayan, and the original languages of America. It is entirely the reverse in China. She has, indeed, lived aloof from the nations in a remarkable manner, but she has not been altogether without the in- tercourse which England has had with other people. China has been conquered by two, if not three, distinct races of Tartars, — Huns, Mon- gols, and Manchoos ; the Chinese have fought and traded with many more of the Tartar tribes, as well as the Arabs, the natives of India, and the Malay Peninsula and Archipelago, the Ja- panese and Leuchewans ; and amongst Euro- peans, with Russia, Holland, Spain and Portu- gal,, France and England ; yet no trace of the On the Chinese Language. 'ji effect of the languages of either the conquerors, the tributaries, or the mercantile acquaintances of China, can be discovered in her language. That language has triumphed over the Tartar languages of conquering dynasties, like Rome in her fall, subduing her barbarian invaders, but no other tongue has been admitted to a domicile in China.' The unique and isolated character of her language may account, in some measure at least, for the general misconception about its nature and composition. But surely no philo- logist will consider this a sufficient excuse for continued ignorance : rather should the mys- teries as to its origin and history, and the diffi- culties connected with its structure and acquisi- tion, give a keenness and a zest to its study. The highest powers of some of the noblest of human intellects have been bent to the study of Greek and Latin. ' They find in such classical studies,' to quote the words of another, 'first two languages, each of the highest refinement and exactness ; each possessing an accidence and a syntax admirably fitted to interest and exercise the faculties of investigation and reason- ing ; and both complete in their history ; em- balmed, so to speak, in their pei'fect form. He deals also with two literatures of pre-eminent grandeur and beauty ; spread (taken together) 72 On the Chinese Language. over more than a thousand years, and now, with their languages, fixed and embalmed in beau- tiful completeness, in their whole progress from youth to age.' Such exactness of syntax, such beauty and sublimity of diction, — though Chi- nese is not devoid of elegance, — such a litera- ture, such treasures of knowledge, are not to be discovered in the language of China ; but if it be ' more blessed to give than to receive,' here, in the study of this tongue, is a magnificent task for the noblest intellect ; here is a field in which minds the best furnished with classical lore may exercise their powers ; here is a task with which those to whom a classical education has been denied may grapple in God's strength, and wel- come as a higher calling, a grander pursuit. For what treasure of wit or wisdom, of tragic interest or tenderest pathos, drawn from the stores of classic literature, can for one moment compare in value and in glory with the Gospel of the grace of God, which, when we shall have learnt Chinese, we may impart to that mighty nation, with her 400 millions of human tongues, with her countless thinkers, readers, teachers, and scholars, passing on into eternity without hope, without God, perishing for lack of knowledge ! One word of practical appeal I would make in conclusion. If it be true that there are 200 different dialects in China ; if it be the case that On the Chinese Language. 73 it is very rare for a missionary to master more than one of these dialects ; then surely the theory with which, if I mistake not, some true friends of missions satisfy themselves, is a delu- sion. It will not do to send a few missionaries — a dozen or twenty at the most from our Church to that vast land, — and exclaim that these men can introduce the leaven to leaven the lurrip ; that a native ministry and a native church is the hope of China. We must have, to give the ex- periment a fair trial, leaven for the populations speaking each of these 200 dialects ; we must have 200 and not twenty missionaries ; or, if they shall go two and two, 400 at the very least, before the Church of England can be at ease as to the performance of her duty to China. 74 CHAPTER III. THE SUPERSTITIONS OF THE CHINESE. The great majority of the superstitions of the Chinese are so intimately connected with their reUgions, that it may be asked why the present chapter did not immediately follow the first. My desire being, however, to awaken a deeper interest, if it may be, in the most vast and yet most neglected of mission fields, the alterna- tion of subjects will not be, I trust, without a meaning. In my first chapter, by a view of the hopeless character of the three great systems which teach and awe, or attempt to satisfy 400 millions of souls, I endeavoured to excite such an interest. In the second, by the idea which I strove to give of the intricacies and the formidable difficulties connected with the Chi- nese language, it is possible that the earnest desire to go over and help the great Chinese nation may in some minds have been damped The Superstitions of the Chinese. 75 and discouraged. In the present chapter, there- fore, my aim shall be to awaken afresh that interest by presenting the picture of the hope- less state of the heathen in China in a some- what different light ; or rather as shaded from the light of God's presence, by the intervention of ranges of superstition, as well as by the three great peaks of their religious systems ; and I shall then hope, from one special instance, and from a comparison of mission work in China, both with Apostolic labours, and with modern missions in other lands, to show encouraging proof that notwithstanding the obstacles placed in the way of Christian missionaries by the re- ligions, the superstitions, and the languages of China, yet their labour in the Lord has not been wholly in vain. The superstitions of the Chinese are very intimately connected with the prospects of mer- cantile enterprise in China; and since we were informed not long ago, that Christianity would do well to follow in the wake of commerce, and not by the enthusiasm or roguery of her emis- saries to embitter the minds of the people against the religions and the wares alike of the West, it will not be without interest to hear that commerce, too, when leading the van, may very possibly come so violently into collision with Chinese superstition as to embitter the "jS The Superstitions of the Chinese. minds of the people against the wares as well as against the religions of the West. Not long since an attempt was made by an English en- gineer to establish a line of telegraph between the port of Shanghai and the anchorage of Woosung, a distance of about twelve miles. The posts were erected, but some of them were immediately pulled down by villagers. They were put up again, and a second time were found prostrate. An appeal was made through the Consuls to the Chinese magistrates, who, after instituting an inquiry into the motives for this insult, reported that a man had died hard by one of the posts ; that the neighbours as- serted that he died in consequence of the dis- sipation or destruction of the luck of the village by the erection of these posts ; that the fact of the man's death could not be denied, and the assertion of the villagers was not an improbable story ; that vengeance on account of the death of the poor man would not be enforced, because of the unintentional nature of the injuries caused by the engineer ; but that they, the magistrates, altogether declined to interfere and compel the people to leave the line of telegraph unmolested. It was therefore abandoned, and has not yet, I believe, been resumed. This same mighty superstition as to lucky influences, on which I must presently enlarge, would seem The Superstitions of the Chinese. yj to have caused the failure, for a time at all events, of an American Company which was formed to connect Peking with Hong-kong by an overland or submarine telegraph; and the same influence probably weighs strongly with the Chinese statesmen who are opposed so tho- roughly to the sanction of railways and mining operations through the plains and hills of the country. There is another view of this subject, which more immediately affects the Christian Mis- sionary. As we believe, that just at the time of our Lord's first coming the power of Satan and of his spiritual wickedness was especially viru- lent, showing itself, for instance, in demoniacal possession ; so it may be that in China and in other heathen lands, which, as we trust, our Lord is now entering, the great enemy of souls uses and intensifies for his own purpose the old superstitions of the people. So that whichever opinion is adopted, whether we believe with some that the way for the Gospel must first be cleared by civilisation, by commerce, and by education, or whether we adopt the truer view, that Christianity is in itself a mighty civiliser, we shall find that the subject of Chinese super- stitions is one of great and most serious import. I shall endeavour as far as possible to range the few specimens with which I am acquainted 78 The Superstitions of the Chinese. from amongst the great host of superstitious beliefs, under these two heads : I. Superstitions intimately connected with religious observances. II. Superstitions corresponding more closely to many which prevail in even Christianised and enlightened countries at the present day. I. Influenced by some of their beliefs, the description of the Athenians in Acts xvii. may well be applied to the Chinese : they are ' too superstitious,' ' iiKjiiaiixovkangoi' 'much inclined to a reverence for unseen powers,' as the word there rather means ; a meaning which the word ' superstitions ' under my first head will be found rather to convey. The system of ancestral worship, which I very briefly noticed in ro.y review of the reli- gions of China, combines very remarkably these two elements of religion and superstition. At the very root of the system lies, as a matter of course, the truth of the separate existence of the soul after death ; for the worship of ancestors does not mean reverence merely for the memory of the departed, but rather the tending and the worship of the present though imperceptible soul. It took its origin probably from the pri- mitive and purer love and care for the bodies of living relatives and the souls of the dead ; purer, The Superstitions of the Chinese. 79 I say, for some beliefs and virtues surely were purer, higher up the stream of human life, nearer the fountain of primeval man ; although, as the preacher tells us, those who imagine the former days as always better than the present, do not wisely inquire concerning this matter. Certain it is, that the original virtue of filial piety, which, though not in any way the soul of religion, is yet a mark of every religious man, has been turned almost into a vice by the ac- cretion of numerous superstitious beliefs ; the love, as we shall see, has been turned into fear, reverence into dread, and pure affection into provision for personal immunity from sickness and molestation. The Chinese believe that every one has three souls. At the moment of death (which they call the breaking of the three-inch breath, seen ts'eng ky'i ih don), one of these souls enters the unseen world and goes to judgment ; one resides in the wooden tablet, the spirit's throne as it is called, which is erected to the memory of the departed either in some recess of the house or in the ancestral temple ; and the tjiird goes with the corpse into the grave. They believe that the unseen world is an exact coun- terpart, only spiritualised, of things visible ; and that the spirits of the departed are in need of the same support as they required when living 8o The Superstitions of the Chinese. — food, raiment, dwelling-place — reduced, how- ever, to a state suitable for the use of the invi- sible, which is attainable, they imagine, by the process of burning. There is a strange incon- sistency in this superstition ; for I have seen in Chinese coffins the corpse dressed in the usual costume of the living, each article of clothing being good and substantial, according to, and frequently beyond, the circumstances of the mourning family; a cap is placed on the head, the pipe is laid by the motionless hand, and frequently strings of hard cash are put in before the coffin-lid is screwed down. Whether this needless expense is incurred for display merely, or whether it is supposed that the raiment, gradually decaying with the mouldering corpse, will become thus invisible and spiritualised, I ' am unable positively to determine. The people are, however, too prudent to carry this extravagance to an excess. Having to provide, not on the day of the funeral alone, but henceforth in perpetuity for the comforts of the departed, and having to assist in the support not of one loved one alone, but of a long hne of ancestors, stretching back with their shadowy forms into the mists of antiquity, the Chinese take care that clothing, furniture, and money, which must be burnt so as to be rea- lised by the spirits, shall be as inexpensive as The Superstitions of ttie Chinese. 8 1 possible. They therefore manufacture imita- tions of these necessaries in paper ; the paper money being covered with tin or gilt foil : and on some occasions a paper mansion, ready fur- nished and prepared, is burnt and passed entire into the unseen world. The food of the spirits is managed more simply still : the feast is spread hot and steaming : and this steam, with the fumes arising from the viands, forms the repast of the spirits ; the substantial food, warmed up again probably, being consumed by the sur- vivors. The Chinese appear to believe, in common with the Greeks and Romans of old, that the spirits of those who have died and are unburied — those, for instance, who have perished at sea, or in battle, or in a foreign land — wander about in misery ; just as in this present world, those who have no home, no dwelling-place, wander about as beggars. There are ghost-beggars, say the Chinese, as well as sturdy, palpable, visible beggars. Now the ranks of this unseen beggar race are swelled by the spirits of those whose comforts are not attended to by their surviving relatives, or whose families have become ex- tinct. And as in this world, the annoyance caused by troops of hungry mendicants is only too notorious, it is believed by the Chinese that the beggar ghosts, though with tongues unheard, G 82 The Superstitions of the Chinese. and hands unseen, and noiseless feet, do ap- proach and annoy and grievously injure those who refuse a pittance of charity. Sudden sick- ness, and misfortune in the family or in busi- ness, are frequently attributed to the unwelcome visits of these beggar spirits. Persons have even been known (so says Mr. Yates of Shanghai, from whose able and interesting paper on these subjects much of what I am relating is drawn) to commit suicide, so as to be in a more ad- vantageous position than they could attain in this world, to avenge themselves on their ad- versaries. Now in Chinese cities, the shopkeepers gene- rally compound with the king of the beggars, for a certain yearly payment, in consideration of which they are guaranteed against the annoy- ing visits of the beggar host. Hence it follows that, apart from the regular and orderly wor- ship and culture of ancestors in each family, all those who value their peace and quiet, provide at certain periods for the wants of the untold crowd of wandering ghosts ; and so tremendous is the power of this superstitious fear over the minds and pockets of the Chinese, that whilst real and present beggars are put off with the smallest possible sum, it is calculated that about thirty millions sterling are spent annually on this provision for the invisible host of imaginary The Superstitions of the Chinese. 83 mendicants. About half the women of China, some forty millions in number, are supposed to spend a large portion of their time in manu- facturing the ' sih-boh' or gold and silver paper for the dead. Hence also results the strong desire every Chinaman feels to have a son in- stead of a daughter ; for should the male line of his family fail, the ancestral feast cannot be performed, and then not only his own spirit will be starved, but all his ancestors will be re- duced to a state of beggary. Christianity, by forbidding ancestral worship, breaks in the per- son of its converts the line of succession ; and ruins (if Chinese superstition be other than superstitious) the credit of the family in the seen and unseen worlds alike, by consigning all to a condition of perpetual beggary. On one occasion (says Mr. Yates) a father, enraged even to despair at the resolution of his son to become a Christian, threatened to destroy himself : the son in that case would have been beheaded as the undoubted murderer of his father ; and his spirit, appearing headless in the spirit world, would have been greeted with insult and op- probrium there, as one whose guilt required no further evidence. The heads of pirates and other notorious criminals are suspended in cages, after execution, over the city gates and in other conspicuous places, as a warning and a 84 The Superstitions of the Chinese. deterrent, not merely through the prospect of punishment in this life, but also of indignity in the world to come. Ancestral worship as an opponent of Christ- ianity, so far as power and wide-spread influ- ence are concerned, answers to the system of caste in India. There is yet another phase of the super- stition which must be noticed before I pass on to other branches of the subject. Since, accord- ing to Chinese ideas, the unseen world is a counterpart of things seen, and since the every- day observation of the people goes to prove that justice in China is altogether subordinate to. covetousness, and that to gain one's cause you must bribe, the logical conclusion is, that the spirits of the departed are in sore need of money. It often happens that a rogue who has money, while on the way to the magistrate, will buy over the police who are dragging him along, and induce them for a consideration to connive at his escape. A well-dressed prisoner, again, is treated with far less indignity and cruelty than one in ragged clothing and with a dis- reputable exterior. Now the spirit, so think the Chinese, immediately after its release from the body is arrested by the police of the spirit world. The sorrowing survivors set themselves, therefore, to provide for the wants of the de- A PROCESSION TO MEET THE BONES OF BUDDHA. The Superstitions of the Chinese. 87 parted ; they supply clothes by burning, as I have described above; and vast quantities of paper money are ' contributed by the friends and relatives of the deceased, to enable him to cor- rupt his captors, and outbid all competitors in the courts of justice below; or if the worst comes to the worst, to furnish, at all events, his prison cell with some little comfort and respect- ability. But something more serious than mere incarceration may happen to the soul. The Taouist and Buddhist priests who fatten on this, which in some senses may be termed a Confucian superstition, discover, whilst engaged in their devotions, that some ancestor spirit belonging to a rich family of their acquaintance is in a state of purgatory ; casual information on this point reaches the ears of the family ; they send for the priest, and consult him as to the neces- sary steps for the relief of their relative : the priest prescribes an elaborate performance of the ceremony of the kung tuh, ' meritorious ser- vice,' and a large sum of money, part to be spent in the ceremonial, and the remainder to be the perquisite of the priests. The family, in real anxiety about their friend, and terrified at the same time at the threatened outlay, offer a lower figure, lOO/. say, instead of the priest's 200/., and after long haggling, the priest with much reluctance undertakes the attempt for 88 The Superstitions of the Chinese. 150/. The service commences with sound of gong and amidst the fumes of incense. Sud- denly the abbot pauses, and with feigned emo- tion announces that the position of the spirit is unchanged, and that for the sum offered by the family the work of release cannot be effected. They, roused now to anxious enthusiasm, raise or borrow in some way the extra 50/., and the service is resumed ; the spirit is struggling up the sides of the pit; one more effort, a little more money, and he will be free; and so the family, frantic with eager expectation, ' tear the bangles from their arms, the rings from their hands, and raising thus money from the pawn- brokers, pay an additional sum to the priests, the spirit is free, and their piety rewarded with success.' The release is, however, only tem- porary ; and when the family has recovered from the depression consequent on this great outlay, the priests will probably discover some other spirit in similar misery, or the same spirit, for some cause, shut up again in purgatory, and crying, ' Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye friends ! ' One might make merry over such a pal- pable invention of corrupt and covetous priests ; one might compare it with that which it most strikingly resembles, the Roman Catholic su- perstitions : but it is a subject too sad for laugh- The Superstitions of the Chinese. 89 ter, too terrible in its power and widespread influence for mere philosophical analysis or mere amused comparison with sister follies. But before finally leaving this branch of my subject, I must notice another superstition. The priests are not the only mediums between the two worlds. Witches abound in China, and they are very generally consulted by the friends of the departed as to the condition and circum- stances of the spirits in the other world. I have seen a good deal of these witches during my residence in China ; and amidst a great pre- ponderance of deliberate imposture, I am in- clined to believe that there is much in their practices and pretensions which bears a strong resemblance to the account of the Jewish witches in the Bible. One of these women came to my house two years ago with her husband, who was for some weeks possessed as well as his wife. She entreated me to allow her to spend the night somewhere on the premises. She assured me that it was not all imposture in her case, although admitting that she did much simply for the sake of gain. ' But it is a disease,' she said; 'I cannot help it ; and if only I may spend the night here, the spirits will not venture to molest me.' Occasionally blind young men practised witchcraft ; and I once watched such an one in a village amongst the hills, swaying 90 The Superstitions of the Chinese. to and fro under the spirit's influence, the mother and friends of the dead sitting before the young man in awe, and with the most intense interest written on their countenances, whilst he uttered the communication of the spirit he had called up. The people dread the evil eye and the mysterious influence of these witches exceed- ingly ; and this superstitious dread acts as a powerful opponent to Chi'istianity. On two occasions I have, known favourable impres- sions, and a rising interest in Christianity, entirely dissipated and destroyed by the lying stories of the witches. In the one case an old Christian widow, in the other an aged Christian farmer, having died tranquilly, and with the bright hope of immortality, having also on their death-beds warned their relatives not to forsake the Christian Church, we had good hope that the influence of the departed saints would abide in force. After a few days, however, a witch reported that the spirits of these Christians had appeared, bemoaning their misery, for they were shut out, because of their apostasy, from the front door and back door of the temple of their ancestors, and entreating, therefore, their surviving relatives to abandon so ruinous a religion. The effect was instan- taneous ; and most of them left us, and have The Superstitions of the Chinese. 91 never returned. Witchcraft is, however, treated as worse than a mere superstition in Chinese law, and according to the statute book is pun-^ ishable with death. Magical arts, and the communication be- tween the two worlds, are not, however, con- fined to the Taouist or Buddhist priests, to witches, or to the blind ; there is a class of so- called scholars who make exorcism, divining, fortune-telling, and above all, the determination of good and evil, fung shuy, or geomancy — that great superstition to which I must now turn — their chief occupation. The two words, fung shuy, mean wind and water, but the true sense and import of this name for the superstition cannot be gathered from these words. The Chinese seem to believe not only in the exist- ence and active agency of disembodied spirits, but also in the power to bless or curse possessed by an invisible influence or agency ; and to woo the good, and ward off the bad, is the object of the study and profession oifung shuy. ' Fair weather cometh out of the North,' said Elihu to Job ; or ' gold,' as it is given in the margin ; the golden gleams of sunlight, breaking through the thick clouds which have been broken and scattered by the springing up of a north wind. Matthew Henry seems to imagine from this verse, that the wind which 92 The Superstitions of the Chinese. sprang up and dispersed that thickest of all clouds which have veiled the face of the earth, the flood cloud, was a northerly wind. Be this as it may, we all know that here in England, as well as in Judaea, a long and dreary rain, like Job's misery, is turned into gleams of sunlight and blue sky by the shifting of the wind to the north. But it is withal a cold quarter. North and north-east winds blow in China from Octo- ber till the end of March, and they are associated in the minds of the people with the death of Nature, the fall of the leaf, the fallow fields, with shivering bodies, cold feet, cold hands, and all that makes the earth dreary and the person sufi'ering. Hence all evil influence is supposed to come from the north. When, however, in April, the softer airs from the south-east and south set in, the earth begins to stir, the flowers awake from their winter sleep, the trees put on fresh green clothing, the birds, silent when the north wind blew, sing for joy, and the animal creation generally feels the genial influence from the south, an influence which had been chilled and suspended through the long winter months. Therefore, conclude the Chinese, all good and beneficial influence comes from the south. They care not for the foolish and selfish prejudice of the missionary and merchant, who hail the first blasts from The Superstitions of the Chinese. 93 the north as the sound of deHverance from the prostration and the diseases caused by the heat of a Chinese summer. They take a wider and more philosophical view ; they see earth and her myriad inhabitants all alive and vigorous under the breath of the south wind ; they feel the glow of the lengthening warming days ; they feel sure of the correctness of their theory, and they extend the action of this theory to the dead — the unseen world — as well as to this visible earth. The dead, too, are affected by points of the compass ; and both the living and the dead must be protected from the baneful northerly spirit, and must welcome and secure by any means the influence from the south. It is strange that the same superstition pre- vails, I believe, in not a few country villages in England. I know one village in Somersetshire, where none but suicides are ever buried on the north side of the church. Either there are relics of heathenism in Christian England, or this super- stition of the Chinese is not altogether heathen- ish. Certain it is, however, that the power and deep-rooted influence of the belief cannot be ex- aggerated. One is not surprised to find all the temples and houses which can possibly be so erected, built to face the south ; because both priests and people may thus sit at their doors and enjoy the summer breeze, be sheltered from the 94 The Superstitions of the Chinese. blasts of winter, and enjoy the warmth of the south- erly glancing sun, whenever he will look forth through the clouds and snow of the cold season. But it is in the selection of sites for graves that the talent of the professors oi fung shuy, called in Ningpo, nyimn-bun sin-sang, is chiefly displayed. ' A thoroughly good situation must then be one open to the south, with nothing abruptly to check the flow of the southerly blessing : and to the north there must be some hill or rising ground, some tree or other ob- ject, to check, puzzle, and defeat the tide of evil from that withering region. And just as the roots of the apparently dead trees and plants feel and respond to the breath and the call of the airs in spring-time, so are the buried dead supposed to feel the influence of good fung shuy, an influence which rises from the root — the departed ancestors — into the living boughs and branches of the family who have shown their loving care for the dead, by select- ing the clever magician, who has in his turn chosen so well the place of repose. But if the position be bad, the dead, irritated and annoyed by the unpleasant influence from the north, make known their resentment by causing sick- ness and other calamities to assail the family ; and finally, if the mischief is not repaired, they make it wither away. Each village has its fung The Superstitions of the Chinese. 95 shiiy, its luck, and the hand of the man who would cut down a lucky tree, thus letting in a stream of curses from the north, is said to be paralysed and wither on the spot.' I have put this superstition on its trial. Three winters ago, being unable from press of work to take my usual Christmas-eve walk into the coun- try to cut holly, I requested one of my catechists, on his way to Ningpo, to cut some boughs from a tree which I had marked, and whose position I described to him. He reached the tree and set to work, when out ran the people from the neighbouring houses, shouting and threatening ; ^ you destroy our tree ; don't you know it's the luck of the place (the fung shuy) ? ' My good friend, being of ready speech, answered them quietly, and by a clever question or two gained their attention, went on cutting the boughs, whilst he preached them a sermon, and finally brought the holly up in triumph to me. During the occupation of the city of Ningpo by the T'sping rebels in 1862, the late Captain Ro- derick Dew, who was in command of the squadron then lying in the river, caused a canal to be cut through a narrow neck of land lying north- east of the foreign settlement, whereby two bends of the river Yung were joined, and the exposed peninsula converted into a defensible island. During those sad and troublous days. 96 Tlie Superstitions of the Chinese. even Chinamen forgot fung shuy, and the rich merchants gladly subscribed towards the ex- penses of the work ; but since that time the trade of the place having greatly declined, the discovery has been made that the canal de- stroyed the luck of Kong-poh, and this useful and important work will not improbably be filled in and destroyed, through the power of a senseless superstition. It is an interesting fact that this superstition oi fung shuy is denounced in the Emperor Yung-Cheng's Sacred Edict as a capital crime. Chinese villages are generally built in squares, with houses on three sides, and the entrance open towards the south. The two sides as you enter have different degrees of honour and im- portance ; the right hand is the green dragon, the left the white tiger ; and if, by design or accident, the white tiger's head be lifted higher than his opposite brother, the dragon's, or if any special advantage be gained by the left, then the luck of the place is gone. I was ob- liged on one occasion to suspend repairs on the church premises in one of our out-stations, be- cause unfortunately the Christian church was lodged in the white tiger's region, and the door which I wished to open towards the south would have given to the tiger an undue preponderance of advantage over the dragon. Our chief mission The Superstitions of the Chinese. 97 church in Ningpo is built on the left hand as you enter a lane turning out of a main street ; on the right of the lane stands the house of a rich man ; our church has a high pitched roof and a bell-turret ; and the people affirm that since the building of this church, overtopping the mansion, the fortunes of the rich man have steadily declined. II. But it is time for me to turn to those superstitions which more closely resemble such as prevail in the enlightened West. I might enumerate a great many under this head ; but, lest I become wearisome, I will mention only two. Mr. Home would be interested, and per- haps surprised, to hear that the principle, at all events, of table-turning is known to the Chi- nese, and has been known probably for cen- turies. Begging Mr. Home's pardon, I suspect also that, coupled with some features which are not easily explained away, there is yet about as much imagination and imposture in the Chi- nese as in the English phase of the superstition. The idea is the same ; the unseen spirits converse through some medium, — and this medium uses some substantial and tangible object wherewith to enunciate the oracle. The plan the Chinese adopt is to strew, a table with flour or sand, and either to suspend a writing pencil so that the point may just touch the table, or to fix it in H 98 The Stiperstitions of the Chinese. the rim of an inverted wicker rice-basket, which must be balanced on the fingers of two persons sitting opposite to each other. In either case, after quiet waiting, tlie pencil will begin to move, and will answer any questions which may be put, by writing on the sanded table. The Rev. R. H. Cobbold, formerly Arch- deacon of Ningpo, and who has kindly given me the result of his own investigations on these points, tells me that on one occasion his teacher consulted the oracle for the purpose of filling up some names in the ancestral register which were wanting. On asking for a particular name, the oracle wrote, ' Inquire of another branch of the family ; ' and on doing so the spirit at once wrote down the name. Now the difficulty of denouncing this superstition as pure imposture arises from the apparent impossibility of writing intricate Chinese characters with a pen sus- pended by a string, simply through the muscular energy caused by the united will of the two mediums. So great is the mystery, or, if you please, so clever is the trick, that some of the oldest and most wide-awake of the missionaries have been quite unable to explain it away, even when performed under their own eye and on their own study tables. This mysterious art goes by the name ol pH-kyi, meaning, I suppose, explanatory record. The Stiperstitions of the Chinese. 99 The Chinese believe in ghosts ; and the fol- lowing is an account given to me by a China- man last year, of a ghost which he had himself seen. He was returning from Hang-chow in one of the large passenger - boats carrying from twenty to thirty persons, and propelled by two sculls at the stern, and with four men tracking on the bank. One evening, with a low moon dimly shining through the mist, the towers on the bank shouted loudly to the passengers. They stood up in the boat, and saw, about thirty yards beyond the foremost tracker, a figure as of a man ; they called, and there was no answer ; they ran, and the ghost ran ; they stood, and it stood. Whilst intently watching, it turned and plunged into the stream, but no ripple marked the water's face ; and there was no noise nor plash as it entered. It swam over the canal, scrambled out on the other side, and my in- formant himself saw it disappearing in the mist as it moved away into the country. There are no monkeys nor bears in that district, and I freely confess, that though I laughed when my old friend related the story, I cannot yet satisfac- torily account for the phenomenon described to me with great minuteness and in all seriousness. The mention of monkeys reminds me of a curious superstition which prevails in Java and in China, answering, in a measure, to the English super- lOO The Superstitions of the Chinese. stition of nailing horse-shoes over stables and barn-doors. The meaning of the latter custom I cannot accurately narrate, but the Chinese custom with its origin are not without interest. They very generally keep one or more monkeys in their horse-stables, evidently as a charm, and a preservative against disease and accident to the steeds. The origin of this custom is nar- rated in the number for April, 1 868, of a very interesting publication, ' Notes and Queries on China and Japan.' It appears that about 1500 years ago, the horse of a celebrated general suddenly dropped dead. A man named Kwoh- p'oh happened to be calling on the general, and he said, ' Send twenty or thirty vigorous fellows armed with bamboos into the woods thirty miles off, which surround the temple of the gods of the land and grain. Let them beat the cover, and they will catch a thing, which they must bring back, and your horse will live again.' The fellows were sent, and caught this thing, which resembled a monkey. When it came near the dead horse, it blew its breath into the horse's nos- trils, which suddenly arose, and ran as fleetly as before ; but the monkey disappeared. The Chi- nese and Javanese to this day, without knowing this story, cling to the custom which took its superstitious rise from the superstitious tale. These superstitions, if they show nothing The Superstitions of the Chinese. loi else, prove undoubtedly that the Chinese are very human ; their very superstitious beliefs and customs tell us that they are made of the same blood with their brethren in the West ; and thus I would fain hope that the very follies which I have been narrating may draw out our brotherly sympathy towards that mighty but enslaved nation. And the whole subject suggests to my own mind a closing thought. When after listening to stories which touch on the mysterious intercommunication between the seen and unseen worlds, a feeling of awe comes over the mind, I have felt that the one blessed cure for the dread of the presence of the unseen spirits is the presence and love of the unseen but ever-near Redeemer. His voice speaking, though the world hears not, to the heart ; His Holy Spirit, comforting and calming the soul, can give courage to the coward, and strength to the weakest, can disperse all super- stitious and all substantial fears, and ' Make even the darkness of the tomb . A smile of glory wear.' This is what China needs. The dim twilight of her moral systems, the darkness of her idola- tries, the midnight gloom peopled with the 102 The Superstitions of the Chinese. ghosts of her superstitions, need the light of the Gospel, the glad tidings of a j ustifying and atoning Redeemer, the influence of the Lord and Giver of life, the presence, yet unseen, of the Saviour, like the dawn of a summer day before the sun mounts above the horizon ; and we may help to scatter the darkness, and to spread the glo- rious light, till the Sun of Righteousness ap- pears, the day breaks, and the shadows flee away. I03 CHAPTER IV. CORINTH AND NINGPO : A COMPARISON AND A CONTRAST BETWEEN MISSION- WORK IN APOSTOLIC AND MODERN TIMES. There is an element of truth, and yet, if I mis- take not, an element also of superstition, in the repugnance we must naturally feel to such a comparison as the one I have proposed for this chapter. Corinth and Ningpo, St. Paul and names we meet with in recent Reports of the Church Missionary Society, can scarcely be put in the same category surely, without arrogance on the part of the modern writer. My impres- sion, however, is, that such a comparison, if conducted in a reverential spirit, is not only permissible, but will also suggest subjects for encouragement on the one hand, and of practical missionary teaching on the other. Reverenti- ally indeed would I approach such a theme. The holy memories of the immediate compan- ions and messengers of our Lord should awaken 104 Corinth and Ningpo. reverential awe. Is there not, one is inclined to ask, a great line of demarcation between the Apostles and modern Missionaries ? Men who had heard with their own ears the voice of the Son of God must have been more deaf surely to the syren charm of this world's voices, — to praise or blame, to tempting words, or threats and de- nunciations, than Christians who followed them : men whose feet had trod thp sea--shores of Pales- tine, or climbed her hills in the very footprints of the Son of God, must surely have walked more warily through this world of sin, and have sped more swiftly on their Lord's errands of mercy, than Christians do now : — men whose eyes had strained heavenwards as the form of Him they loved soared away, still with a smile on His face and the sign of blessing in those uplifted vanish- ing hands, — such men must have set their af- fections on things above more constantly surely, more intently, than we can hope to do. Men who had learned the truth from the lips of the Messiah, who had listened to the sermons of Him who spake as never man spake ; — men on whom the inspiring and enlightening power of the Holy Ghost descended ; — Paul, who received the Gospel not from man but immediately from heaven, having first seen with his own eyes the ascended Saviour in glory; — such preachers surely must have spoken with more power than Corinth and Ningpo. 105 preachers in these days, and their evangehstic work, — this is my main point, — must have been followed, we suppose, with far wider and deeper results than missionary labours in modern times. But surely these contrasts are true rather as matters of fact than as necessary results. I would draw a very deep and clear line as to in- spiration between the Apostles and the other writers of the New Testament on the one hand, and all subsequent fathers, martyrs, and confes- sors of the Church on the other. By the imme- diate influence and teaching of the Holy Spirit, the Gospel histories, our Lord's discourses, and the Acts and Sermons of the Apostles, so far as God saw fit to preserve them, were compiled, re- corded, and remembered without mistake, omis- sion, or human addition. By the same divine in- spiration, St. Paul, St. Peter, St. James, St. Jude, and St. John wrote their letters or recorded their revelations ; and by the Divine Providence they have been preserved for the use of the Church during eighteen centuries. We have believed in Christ through His disciples' word.'' How dared we believe on Him if we knew not that they recorded truth and spoke as His ambassadors, and wrote as His amanuenses .' This inspira- tion we believe to be of a different kind from the teaching and influence of the Holy Ghost which we all desire and need in our missionary io6 Corinth and Ningpo. work : it was more definite, if I may say so ; it was to impart and to fix God's revealed truth : we desire help from heaven to understand, to expound, and to preach that revealed truth, and in words agreeable to the same. But the inspi- ration we desire and may look for is none the less real, and, when received, none the less effica- cious. Surely it is erroneous to imagine that the Apostles had any personal power to forgive sins, of some higher nature, and, as some seem to suppose, more nearly resembling our Lord's power when on earth, than have Christ's minis- ters in this nineteenth century. The difference lay here, that the Apostles announced the terms of pardon and of condemnation immediately from God. ' Receive ye the Holy Ghost,' said our Lord, and, breathing on His Apostles, He signified the actual and immediate bestowal of the gift. By His teaching you shall be pre- served from error in writing and in speaking ; taught by Him, proclaim forgiveness of sins to the penitent and believing, and retaining of sins to the impenitent and disobedient, and those by these terms forgiven and condemned are forgiven and condemned in heaven. ' Receive ye the Holy Ghost,' says the ordaining bishop of the Church of England, after the solemn questions have been, in God's presence, solemnly answered, and after the solemn and united invocation of Corinth and Ningpo. 107 the Blessed Spirit has been sung — ' Receive ye the Holy Ghost,' and not immediately, but in- strumentally, not by the breathing, but through the Apostolic imposition of hands, do we believe that if the profession be true, and the prayer one of faith, the Holy Ghost is given ; and then by the aid and teaching of that blessed Spirit, in our home parishes or in heathen cities, the terms of pardon and of doom, according to the inspired Book of God, are proclaimed authoritatively, and the decision is ratified in heaven. And by that gracious Comforter's influence, Christ is revealed in the Missionary's as well as in the Apostle's heart. Taught by the Holy Ghost, the Gospel page is all reality ; and as we read, the sound of that voice, the tread of those feet, the smile of the altogether lovely, may be heard and seen in England, India, and China now, even as they were 1800 years ago in the Holy Land. Strengthened with might by the Spirit in the inner man, Christ may dwell in the English as well as in the Ephesian Christian's heart by faith, and we with all saints may be able to com- prehend His incomprehensible love. Are we dismayed by failure, and disheart- ened by the apathy of heathen hearers in China, with its strange speech and hard language } Hear the experience of Ezekiel the prophet 2400 years ago — ' The house of Israel will not io8 Corinth and Ningpo. hearken unto thee, for they will not hearken unto Me, saith the Lord ; for all the house of Israel are impudent and hard-hearted.' Are we cast down and self-condemned by our weakness, our negligences, ignorances, of- fences — our incapacity and inefficiency ? Hear the experience of Paul the Apostle 1800 years ago — ' We have this Gospel treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, not of us.' It is our shame, therefore, and not our fate, that we fall so far short of the prophets and Apostles of our Lord ; and not glorifying them but God's grace in them, not worshipping but emulating them, lamenting our shortcomings, but firmly believing that the grace for mission- ary labour bestowed on them may fall on us, let us see what lessons of encouragement or of warning and correction may be learnt from a contrast between their missionary work and our own. ' What one sound reason can be assigned,' asks Dean Goulburn, 'why there should not be now-a-days men as zealous, as devoted, as sim- ple-minded, as the Apostles and saints of the primitive Church .'' ' My plan will be, first to point out the com- parative advantages and disadvantages possessed by the Apostles and ourselves for mission la- bour, and then to see the effect of these helps or Corinth and Ningpo. 109 hindrances in two definite fields — Corinth and Ningpo. Our conclusion will be, I think, that though the sowers in these latter days cannot hope to compare with the men of old time, yet the seed is the same ; the pure Gospel, by whomso- ever preached, possesses the same divine vigour, unaltered, unimpaired, by the lapse of centuries. I. a. Now the great advantage possessed by the Apostles in their attacks on Satan's king- dom was no doubt the wo^-'king of miracles — an advantage, moreover, to compare with which modern missionaries have nothing to present. This working of miracles was notorious, and no secret and mysterious art practised when none but those initiated or interested in the specula- tion were present. It was no more an after- thought with the Apostles than with our Lord Himself : the accounts of mighty signs and wonders are interwoven through the Gospels, the Acts, and Epistles, in a perfectly natural, but hopelessly inextricable manner. If they are eliminated, the whole fabric of Scripture crum- bles into the dust of a feeble human story. We can well undersand the cessation of miracles in countries where Christianity has taken root ; though even here, in Christian England, we are inclined sometimes to wish for some mighty miracle to waken the slumbering nation ; nei- ther do we believe that a miracle in the 19th I lo Corinth and Ningpo. century would be out of date. We cannot per- suade ourselves that intellects of the present en- lightened age are so infatuated, so self-blinded, as to resist the effect of such manifest marvels as met the eyes of the intellectual Saul, or such as, when wrought by his hands, met the eyes of the deep thinkers of Greece. But be this as it may, it is perhaps a fair subject for submissive wonder that in countries such as China, a new and untried mission-field, the power of working miracles is not granted for a season. 'These signs shall follow them that believe.' Is it from want of faith that this great power is withheld from the Church in these latter days 1 Is it . from a feeling of this kind that we find legends of miracles almost invariably introduced into the accounts of post-Apostolic and mediaeval missions and of Romanist missions in modern times .' During my itinerations through the cities and towns of China, I have felt again and again the unbelieving fear that nothing short of a sign from heaven could convince the staring apathetic crowds that the word spoken with stammering lips by a solitary foreigner was in very deed the Gospel of the grace of God. I have sometimes turned, on such occasions, and asked my catechists what effect they supposed would be produced by miracles on a Chinese crowd ; and we generally returned to faith in Corinth and Ningpo. 1 1 1 the word of God : a miracle might create excite- ment, and arouse inquiry, but would not touch one heart that was proof against the power of the story of the cross. But no doubt the power of working miracles in Apostolic hands was a very real, a very necessary, and a very mighty advantage in setting up Christ's kingdom ; and we have nothing to compare with it. The only engine which produces effects, infinitely inferior indeed, but of a similar nature, is the medical skill of Western nations. This skill, both sur- gical and pharmaceutical, is looked upon by many of the Chinese as almost miraculous ; and in some mission-fields — Cashmere, for instance — it is by the use of this benevolent sign alone that access can be found for the Gospel. Would that the Church Mission in China might be re- inforced at once by an efficient medical staff" ! j3. The gift of tongues is generally looked upon as the second great advantage possessed by Apostolic labourers in heathen lands ; and when addressing oneself, amidst the heat of a Chinese summer, to the gigantic task of the study of the Chinese languages, we are inclined to long for the gift of tongues, so that, by one instantaneous inspiration, we may speak with- out labour and without mistake to the Chinese, in their own language, the wonderful works of God. It seems, indeed, straining a point for the 112 Corinth and Ningpo. sake of supporting an idea, to suppose, with the writer of the 13th chapter of the 'Life and Epistles of St. Paul,' that, even on the day of Pentecost, this gift of tongues did- not neces- sarily consist of a knowledge of foreign languages exercised for the conversion of individual fo- reigners. Surely, under the view that they all understood Hellenistic Greek, the long list of nations followed and preceded by the exclama- tion, ' How is it that these Galilsans speak to each of us intelligibly in our own dialect in which we were born.'' is most unintelligible. But it is undoubtedly true that in the ordinary evan- gelistic labours of the Apostles this power, even though possessed, was not of necessity put into exercise. The confusion of tongues, that great obstacle apparently to missions, was counter- acted more by God's providential ordering of the political events of this world at the Apo- stolic era, than by the exercise of this miracu- lous gift of tongues. y. This was the third great advantage pos- sessed by the Apostles. By the conquests of Alexander the Greek language was spread far and wide; from Alexandria and Antioch, the capitals of the Ptolemies and Seleucides, Alex- ander's successors, the Greek tongue and civilis- ation pervaded the East ; to. j3ap(5aptKd role 'EXX»)V(K0(C KEpacrai Koi rrjv EAAaoa CTTretpat, Such Corinth and Ningpo. 113 was Alexander's mission — a mission designed in God's providence to prepare the way marvel- lously for the feet of the Gospel messengers. The New Testament was written in the dialect of Alexandria, and our Lord Himself, and His Apostles, appear to have spoken in that dialect, and to have been understood wherever they travelled. So universal was this Grecian element, that we find in the Apostolic writings the whole heathen world ranged as Greek, and all man- kind ranged under but two divisions, Greek and Jew. Much is said in these days of the remark- able spread of the English race and language. Missionaries in the Sierra Leone stations in Western Africa, amidst the trials of a deadly climate, have not for the most part to encounter the toils of learning a foreign language. The knowledge of English is spreading rapidly in India ; but this is an advantage which at pre- sent does not in the least degree affect our work in China. It may after a' few years be the great engine for evangelistic work among Chinese emigrants in America and Australia ; but for the vast masses in China Proper, unless that empire fall under the power of the Saxon race, neither the gift of tongues nor the English tongue will yield their aid to the missionaries of these modern days. 8. Coincident with this common language, I 1 14 Corinth and Ningpo. enabling the Greek-speaking Apostle to pro- claim his message far and wide, we must notice, though but in a word or two, the great advan- tage possessed by the Apostle Paul in the fact of his Roman citizenship. While the Greek lan- guage and culture were pervading all countries, all countries were being absorbed by the power of Imperial Rome. And wherever St. Paul tra- velled through his wide-stretching mission-fields the rights of a Roman citizen were respected and allowed, and they rescued him both in Judea and in Macedonia. We have something to correspond with this in China, where, until quite recently, the English name was held in awe, though not, perhaps, in affection. The treaty rights wrung from the unwilling Govern- ment by wars, over some of which we would gladly draw the veil of oblivion, yet secured for a British Missionary respect and protection in all parts of the empire. Even this advantage, by recent political action on the part of England, bids fair to be soon taken from us in China. £. The fifth and last advantage which I shall notice as possessed by the Apostles in their labours, arose from the dispersion of the Jews far and wide throughout the Roman Empire. These Jews, carrying with them their holy re- ligion, founding synagogues in every place, spreading the knowledge of the true God, and Corinth and Ningpo. 1 1 5 perpetuating the memory of the prophecies of the Messiah, exercised a mighty preparative influence with reference to the spread of the Gospel. They drew round them in every place proselytes from amongst the heathen ; and thus the Apostles in their itinerations found not merely places for preaching ready provided in the Jewish synagogues, but congregations of well-instructed worshippers, who, having heard from the voices of the prophets, and heard, without Jewish prejudice, the promise of the Messiah, were more ready than their Jewish teachers to receive with meekness and with joy the glad tidings of salvation. Would that we could believe that the dis- persion of the Anglo-Saxon race through the wide earth has prepared in a similar manner the way before the Gospel of Christ. It has not been so in China. The influence of a pro- fessedly Christian community in the great com- mercial centres of that empire has, I grieve to write it, produced on the minds of the heathen a feeling decidedly prejudicial to the work of the Christian Missionary. The viciousness of living in too many instances, and the general carelessness about communicating the holy re- ligion of Jesus to their neighbours, account for the fact, that the farther we get from foreign 1 16 Corinth and Ningpo. settlements the more success do we meet with in our mission work. On the side of the Apostles, then, we find these five grand auxiliaries to their missionary- labours — the power of working miracles, the gift of tongues, the use of one oral language, the universal power of one empire, and the ubiquitous character of Jewish influence. On the side of modern missionaries we have the great advances in the science of medicine, the great and increasing aids in the study of lan- guages, the spread of the English speech, the dispersion of the Anglo-Saxon race, and per- haps I should include in the list, also, the enor- mous advances made within the past forty years in the power of locomotion. But these six modern auxiliaries are at the best but secondary or negative. The Apostles stand out as pre- eminently superior to Missionaries in these days, as to preparation and training, and as to both natural and supernatural advantages for their work. Yet, as I shall now attempt to show, the seed is one and the same, the Gospel unchanged from age to age, and its triumphs in these latter days as divine and miraculous as in the first age of the Christian Church. Let us go to Corinth, 2000 miles eastward; Corinth and Ningpo. 1 17 and then travel onwards 10,000 miles towards the rising sun, to China. I might have chosen some other specimen of Apostolic labour for my comparative mission histories ; I might have compared letters written by Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society on furlough in Eng- land to their fellow-Christians in China, with the long list of salutations taken to Rome by the hand of Phoebe, one of these very Corinthian Christians. We have in Ningpo ' helpers in Christ Jesus.' I know there the ' first-fruits of that city unto Christ.' There are some, even among the heathen, who have ' bestowed much labour upon us.' Some of the Christian band in the city ' were in Christ before me.' Some I know, I honour, I love, as ' helpers in Christ,' as those who ' labour much in the Lord.' But, from the fact that we know more of the internal history of the Corinthian Church than of any other of those founded by the Apostles, we can- not do better than fix our attention on Corinth. Once the mihtary, and, in the Apostles' time, the commercial eye of Greece, Corinth may in some sense, though the idea is perhaps somewhat forced, be compared with Ningpo. The possession of the Acrocorinthus and of the fortification of the isthmus, implied the com- mand of the whole country. The occupation of Ningpo and of the adjacent Chusan Archi- 1 1 8 Corinth and Ningpo. pelago, instead of the island of Hong-kong, would give to England a position whence she might control almost at will the politics and commerce of the whole empire. She let go Chusan, which was actually in her power for many months, for the far less central and im- portant town of Hong-kong ; but, in the event of a scramble amongst European powers for the members of the great body of the Chinese em- pire, fierce will be the din of war around Ningpo and her sea-board. The view from the top of the Acrocorinthus is described as magnificent. ' A sea is on either hand ; to the eastward a clear sight is obtained of the Acropolis of Athens ; at a distance of forty-five miles, and as a background closing the eastern prospect, rise the mountains of Attica and Boeotia, and the islands of the Archipelago. To the west- ward lie the massive mountains of N. E. Greece, with Parnassus towering above Delphi. Im- mediately beneath the spectator is the narrow plain separating the seas — the city itself is on a small table-land connected with the northern base of the mountain on which we stand, and at the edge of the lo;wer level are the harbours which made Corinth the emporium of the richest trade of the East and the West.' I am reminded of the glorious prospect enjoyed by me eight years ago from the summit of the SERVANTS PLOUGHING AND GATHERING MULBERRY LEAVES. Corinth and Ningpo. 121 great White Mountain, in the immediate vi- cinity of Ningpo. This hill rises, though far less abruptly, to just the elevation of the Acro- corinthus, — ^the glory of Corinth. As I gazed, the sea lay simmering in the sun rays of the summer afternoon to the north-east and to the southward. South-west lay the lakes like a silver shield among the hills. Westward, amidst the haze of the tepid exhalations from the vast rice plains, an indistinct view could be made out of the dark mass of the city of Ningpo, the great Pagoda, 120 feet high, standing up like a pencil through the mist. The twelve-miles' course of the river going from the city to the sea was marked by numerous sails of native craft, and here and there by the snow-white canvas of a foreign vessel inward or outward bound. At the river's mouth rose the fortress hill of Chinhai, now dismantled, but once the scene of conflict between the English and Im- perialist forces, and commanding, under skilful engineers and with a bold garrison, all access to the harbour of Ningpo, as completely per- haps as ever Acrocorinthus could do. Opposite the river's mouth, at some six miles' distance, lay the broad and indented masses of the Chusan group; and the plain at my feet, dis- tinct with countless villages, stretched still crowded to Ningpo, and twenty miles beyond 122 Corinth and Ningpo. it, till the amphitheatre of rugged hills to the south and west checked the prospect. Such was the city of Corinth, which St. Paul entered in his Master's name one thousand eight hundred and seventeen years ago : such is the city and district of Ningpo, entered in their Master's name by missionaries of the Church Missionary Society twenty-two years ago. St. Paul spent scarcely two years in all in Corinth ; and ApoUos, Titus, and Timotheus were the only other missionary labourers of that period in the city. Church Missionaries are labouring now, and hope to labour on for many years, in Ningpo. What have been their comparative successes .'' If a moral exterior be an advan- tage to the Christian Missionary, Ningpo was, without doubt, a more hopeful field than Co- rinth. The very name of the Grecian city was moulded into the proverbial word ' Kopiv9(a^£<7- Sai,' to express an immoral life. Notorious for vice, even in that vicious age, Corinth needed a doctrine of a Saviour, a Regenerator, who could wash, sanctify, and justify her guilty sons. Im- morality does not, however, so unblushingly meet the eye in China. Outward morality can flourish without the culture and civilisation of the West ; and the polish of the arts and intel- lectual refinement of Greece was powerless to check vice. The worst vice of Ningpo, and a Corinth and Ningpo. 123 vice which has grown with fearful rapidity since our missionaries first visited the city, was a vice, if not introduced, yet at all events fostered and fed and cherished, by English hands — the vice of opium-smoking. But the Gospel was as deeply needed by Ningpo as by Corinth — by Corinth as by Ningpo. The proud Pharisee, not as other men in the West, adulterous, pro- fane, yet needs the Gospel as deeply as these very publicans and sinners. In what manner did these two cities receive the good news .-" The success of the Apostle was rapid in the city of Corinth. At the close of eighteen months St. Paul bade farewell to a large and flourishing church, the fruits of that short period of ' teach- ing the word of God.' The Lord had much people in the city. He stood by His servant. A man of note, the chief ruler of the synagogue, joined the church of the Nazarene. His conver- sion was followed by the baptism of numbers of the Corinthian citizens ; and the very Proconsul himself would not prostitute his ' amiable temper and popular manners ' to win the favour of the clamouring Jews by persecuting the Christians. We have no carefully tabulated statistics of St. Paul's converts ; the exact number of adults or of children admitted by baptism into the church during those eighteen months we fail to gather from the journal of the missionary, or from the 1 24 Corinth and Ningpo. pages of the Report. But this much is clear, that at the time when a missionary in China is stammering out his first comparatively intelli- gible address, just commencing to sow, and with but few thoughts of the harvest, at that period St. Paul, the faithful laborious husbandman, had already reaped a full harvest of souls in Corinth. One of the first missionaries of the Church Missionary Society to Ningpo, writing in the summer of 1850, speaks thus: 'After two or three years' labour the new missionary will be able to communicate, in a general discourse, with tolerable intelligence, the great leading truths of Christianity ; but when he comes to close quarters with the people, and has to meet their various objections, he is made to feel his weakness and inefficiency, and the necessity of the same unremitting attention to study as be- fore.' Just three years and one month after their arrival in Ningpo, our missionaries baptized their first two converts. They speak at that time (May i, 185 1) of two or three other hope- ful candidates. Since that date, in addition to the three then in the field, seven missionaries of the Church Missionary Society have from time to time joined the Ningpo staff". Of these ten labourers, three have been driven home by fail- ure of health and other causes, one has joined another mission, one is on furlough, one on his Corinth and Ningpo. 125 way back to work, two, after seven years' ab- sence in England, have recently rejoined the Mission, and the remaining two have been in the field scarcely three years. Yet the Mission, though feebly manned and weakly supported from home, has grown ; it has lengthened its cords, though the stakes were all too fragile in the centre. It has occupied the great city of Hang-chow, 140 miles inland ; and in the vicinity of Ningpo, within a radius of fifty miles, twelve out-stations are occupied by native agents of the Society. Eighteen men and women are em- ployed as catechists, school teachers, Bible wo- men, or as colporteurs ; there are some thirty boys and girls in our boarding-schools ; the whole number of baptized Christians is over 300, and the communicants approach 200. Yet these results of twenty-one years' labour, encouraging though they be in some respects, cannot, I fear, be compared, numerically at all events, with the ' much people ' gathered in by St. Paul after eighteen months' labour in Corinth. But let us draw nearer, and examine, not numerical statistics so much, as the record of the graces or of the inconsistencies of these Co- rinthian and Chinese Christians. I have noticed sometimes, amongst the Chi- nese converts, a tendency to attach themselves, in interest and affection, to particular mission- 126 Corinth mid Ningpo. aries ; and yet, amid regrets for such a state of things, we can hear over eighteen centuries the words of apostohc converts, ' I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.' We regret such a state of feehng, and in some other missions it has been carried to such an excess, as to raise grave doubts with respect to the true spiritual character of our converts. How it startles one, and yet imparts a mournful con- solation, to hear St. Paul thus addressing the Christians of Corinth, ' Ye are yet carnal, and walk as men.' I read lately with deep and painful interest the account of the conversion and baptism in the year 1856 of a man well known to my- self This man, after ten years of fruitless efforts to amass merit, and to quiet his con- science, known through his native district as ' the virtuous man/ yet without inward peace, came into contact with our missionaries during one of their itinerations. ' I know myself to be a sinner,' he said, ' and a great one too ; and my chief grief hitherto has been, that I know of no remedy for the removal of my sin. But if what you tell me of Christianity be true, then is my want to be satisfied, and my sorrow to be turned into joy.' He was baptized shortly after, and laboured for about five years as a catechist in the employ of the Church Missionary Society. Corinth and Ningpo. 127 In the year 1862, during the T'ee-ping inroad, his head was turned, and his mind wholly un- settled ; he was suspended from his employment as catechist ; he fell shortly after into gross sin ; and though an occasional attendant at church, he has been shut out from the holy communion for five years. He is suspected of a secret re- turn to the vegetarian sect, with which he was formerly connected ; and he remains still a man to whom our thoughts turn but with sorrow, shame, and well-nigh hopeless regret. And then we read the words of an apostle, ' It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you : ' ' many have sinned already, and have not re- pented of the uncleanness, and fornication, and lasciviousness which they have committed ; ' and though our sorrows and regrets are not removed, we feel yet the comfort of an apostle's sym- pathy : the rising fear that our work is all unreal is checked, — though sadly checked, — by the re- membrance that such fears may have crossed the minds of the holy Apostles of our Lord. Our hearts, during the past few years, have been cast down by the falling away, though we hope but for a time, of some of our most hopeful converts. One young man, whom I baptized six years ago, was at the time of his probation, to use the language of the catechists, ' mad on the subject of religion.' From morning to night 1 28 Corinth and Ningpo. he would sit with the catechist, talking on spiri- tual subjects, asking counsel as to questions of conscience, and learning Scripture truth. He was baptized. He ran well for a time ; but through pride, and the influence of his heathen father, he gave way at the time of his marriage to idolatrous practices. Another case of a pecu- liarly distressing and disheartening kind occurred last year at Hang-chow. The foremost in the little Christian band in that city apostatized for a time, fell ill, and died, though penitent we trust, yet under a cloud, and darkening by his fall the hopes of the Mission. There must be in all about twenty baptized adults, who have, in profession or in conduct, denied the faith, and gone back into heathenism and sin. I am ac- quainted with one case, that of a clever man, who, after baptism, was employed for some years as a schoolmaster. He has entirely fallen away, and has been seen bowing down to idols. And yet, when, after recording such sorrows in our journals, we turn back to the golden age of the Christian church, and read the noble acts of the Apostles, and turn yet further back to the record of our Lord's own evangelistic labours, are we not startled to find that ' many went back and walked no more with Jesus ; ' that Demas, the trusted helper, forsook Paul in his extremity, ' having loved this present world ; ' and that it Corinth and Ningpo. 129 was possible for St Paul, in writing to the Co- rinthians, to express the doubt 'except ye be reprobates ? ' I have known what it is to be distressed almost to despair as to the genuine character of Chinese Christianity, by disputes threatening to end in lawsuits among Christians of the same hamlet ; and the sad echo comes across the long centuries of this Christian era, Corinthian ' brother goeth to law with brother, and that before the unbelievers.' I have been grieved, and when friends lately arrived from England have been with me, I have been ashamed some- times at the want of order and reverence in some of our remoter out-station chapels, during the celebration of the holy communion ; a heathen crowd looking on at the entrance, and, within, scarcely room enough for minister or people to move or to kneel : but surely in the Corinthian church the irregularities and confu- sion rebuked by the Apostle must have been for the time tenfold worse. Are we disappointed sometimes at the slow progress which some of the native churches make towards self-support ? are we grieved at the backwardness of some well able to give, and surprised by the liberality of the poor ? St. Paul was obliged to press this subject of self-support upon the minds of his converts^ He implies a K 1 30 Corinth and Ningpo. suspicion in his Second Epistle to the Corin- thians, that the promised liberality of his people might not be fully realised ; and he encourages them by the example of the Macedonian Christ- ians, who, ' out of their deep poverty, abounded unto the riches of their liberality.' Are we anxious as to the future history of our Chinese converts ? will they hold fast that they have — will they ' continue in the faith grounded and settled ? ' What if a fiery trial, such as that which has been trying the Fuh-chau churches, were to burst on Ningpo ; would the Christians come forth as tried gold ? Would their Christian profession parch and wither be- fore the ilame ? Yet St. Paul, writing of this very Corinthian church, so full of dissension, disorder, and licentiousness, assures them that God, — the faithful God, — by whom they were called unto the fellowship of His Son, will con- firm them to the end, that they may be blame- less in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. And this thought brings me to the last im- portant point, as it appears to me, requiring notice in this comparative review of Apostolic and modern Missions. What was the post- apostolic history of the Corinthian church.' what may we expect as to the length of life and the future history of the Ningpo Mission .■' The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles tell Corinth and Ningpo. 131 us nothing of the full effect produced by St. Paul's faithful rebukes and Apostolic discipline on the offenders at Corinth. But from the first Epistle of Clement, the ' fellow - labourer ' of Paul, — an epistle generally allowed to be gen- uine, — we gather much which leads one to sup- pose that, through God's grace, a reformation and a revival took place during the Apostle's lifetime. Mr. Conybeare points out the fact, that the very virtues for which Clement praises the Corinthians as conspicuous in the golden age of the church, had their exact opposites in the vices denounced by St. Paul, — ' ripeness and soundness of knowledge,' ' purity and blameless- ness of life on the part of their women,' and, above all, ' freedom from faction and party spi- rit ; ' some realisation at all events of the glorious ideal in the Apostle's psalm of love. What deep joy and gratitude must such a change in this church of his planting and watering have given to St. Paul before his life of toil was closed by martyrdom ! Alas ! the very occasion of Cle- ment's first letter was a fierce outburst of un- christian dissension and rivalry ; and from the silence of ecclesiastical history as to the Corin- thian church after this date, we cannot but fear that Clement's letters marked the beginning of her decline and fall. Corinth still exists ; the modern Gortho, a little town of 2000 inhabit- 132 Corinth and Ningpo. ants, with a small export trade in dried fruits, wheat, oil, honey, and wax ; and amid this mo- dern degradation, as monuments of departed glory, still may be seen seven columns of a Doric temple, an amphitheatre, and some Ro- man masonry. The Corinthian church of St. Paul is no more, no love-feasts crowded with Christian guests, no assemblies where prophe- syings, and gifts of tongues, and interpretation of tongues, with all the spiritual gifts bestowed on the flourishing congregations, could be exer- cised decently and in order. There is no Apo- stolic succession of Gospel teaching in that once most blest of cities. It is silence there : the eloquence of Apollos, the fervent love temper- ing the indignant rebuke of Paul, are unknown in Gortho. It is still in name an episcopal see, but with a Christianity degenerate compared with that of Apostolic days, as the town itself is but as death and solitude compared with the glory of old. The Epistles of St. Paul and of Clement alone remain, monuments grander and more enduring than Doric columns or massive buildings framed by man, of the happy days of the church now no more. One would have thought that a Church planted by Apostolic hands would have struck its roots so deep, so firmly, as to outlive all storms of persecution, all blasts of evil; and Corinth and Ningpo. 133 would have been so cleansed and so defended as to defy the attacks of internal traitors and of mediaeval lethargy ; one would have fancied Corinth destined to live on, still green and vigorous, till earthly churches and Mission work shall be superseded by the coming of the King of kings. It has not been so. And must we expect that there in Ningpo and in our thirteen out-stations, where now the silver Gospel trum- pet is being blown, after some decades of years there will be silence, the churches in ruins, the Christians dead or forgotten ? Be it so : let us learn from Corinth's history, that such a fate would not imply failure or labour in vain. Corinth, the Apostolic church, may be dead : but are there not much people from that city safely landed in heaven } Some from Ningpo have crossed death's river also, and are even now before the throne of God. Is not this one great object and result of Mission work, to seek Christ's sheep, one by one, scattered through this naughty world ; to gather in the elect from the four winds .' The Corinthian church may be in decay, but Christianity lives on ; it has spread, and grown, and conquered, and is in full and immortal vigour after the long dark lapse of eighteen centuries. Greece herself — ' living Greece no 134 Corinth and Ningpo. more' — and with but a degenerate religion, is yet Christian in name ; and that very name is a proof of the death and obliteration of the old religions of classic story. The outward fabrics may vanish from places now occupied by Christ- ian Missions in China; outward organisation may be superseded ; and our present stations be sought for in vain : but the leaven will spread. Satan will be driven from his seat, the idols through the wide land shall totter and fall ; Confucianism, Buddhism, Taouism, shall take their, flight, and China shall be Christianised. God grant that it may be by the pure and abid- ing form of Christ's religion, purer than that which has leavened some parts of the West ; and that as the light of eternity begins to dawn, and the coming of the Son of man draweth nigh, the glory of the Gospel may not be darkened by superstition, by heresy, and by divisions such as those which stained the post-Pauline history of the Church ; but that in China, so long shrouded in mist and gloom, the light may shine yet more and more unto the perfect day. Alas ! then, I conclude' — alas ! for the des- perate wickedness of man — even the Apostles of our Lord met with failure, reverses, and op- position in their work. Thanks be to God, and all glory to the power of His Gospel and the influence of His Corinth and Ningpo. 135 Spirit, even we in these latter days find that our labour is not in vain in the Lord. ** The following note is from the pen of the Editor of the ' Church Missionary Intelli- gencer,' in which periodical the substance of the foregoing chapter first appeared : — We would desire to append a paragraph or two on the working of miracles. It is well ob- served by Mr. Moule that ' the account of mighty signs and wonders is interwoven through the Gospel, the Acts, and the Epistles, in a perfectly natural, but hopelessly inextricable manner.' It is this which renders the continuance of the miraculous power of the Church unnecessary .. ' No new miracles are needed, because' the original ones are extant upon the page of in- spiration, and thus retain all their force. They stand forth there in the records of the past in all their grand reality, as the footsteps of God's presence when He trod on earth, and as the imperishable memorials of His power. The reader of the inspired volume finds himself in the presence of these stupendous facts. He marks the reference which the Saviour makes to them as wrought expressly for the purpose of authenticating His divine mission, and they 1 36 Corinth and Ningpo. produce on him the same effect which the actual beholding of them did on the spectators of old ; they prepare him to receive with child- like submission the teaching of Christ and His Apostles as the revelation of God.' It is necessary, moreover, to remember, that the converting power resided not in the mira- culous power, but in the message which they delivered who used that power. The miracles accredited the agent. They were the creden- tials of those who were engaged in the great work of introducing the Gospel to the world. They showed that the men who were thus per- mitted to use the power of God, were com- missioned to reveal the mind of God. The exercise of supernatural power on their part proved that they spoke by inspiration. But the necessity of such credentials is now obviated. It is true that Missionaries, when they enter a heathen land for the first time, bring strange things to the ears of the people ; but they come from settled Christian systems : they are the Messengers of the churches, and the fact that the religion which they preach is not new to the world, although new to that parti- cular country, and has already proved its divine mission by the results which it has produced, in our opinion fulfils all that a continuance of the miraculous power could have effected ; so that Cormth and Ningpo. I'^y the Missionary to the heathen is in no way dis- advantaged by its discontinuance. The work already wrought, the churches already raised up, and by which he has been sent, sufficiently accredit him to the heathen. 138 CHAPTER V. CHINA AND OTHER LANDS. THE MISSION FIELDS OF PROTESTANTS AND OF ROME. The substance of the following chapter was read in January, 1869, at Ningpo, before the Conference consisting of the representatives of all the Protestant Societies at work in that Mission. Its subject was suggested partly by the occasion of the Meeting, the first irl the New Year, when a review of our losses and gains seemed most appropriate, — a review, moreover, which might be made more effective by a glance at the work of God in other lands ; partly, also, by the occurrence both in the weekly and daily newspapers published at Shanghai, as well as in the Missionary organ, the 'Fuh-chau Re- corder,' of articles which appeared to the writer extravagantly laudatory of Roman Catholic Missions, and unfairly depreciatory in their tone as to Protestant Missions in China. Some of the statistical details are a little out China and other Lands. 141 of date ; but I have been unable to correct up to the present year the valuable tables contained in Dr. Mullens' 'Ten Years' Missionary Labour in India,' from which much that follows has been drawn ; whilst from the fact that the ad- vances made in the Chinese and in most other mission fields have been tolerably even, the results of the comparison made below would not probably be much affected by more recent statistics. The remarks which I shall venture to make will fall under two divisions ; first, a comparison of our field in China, and of our labour and the fruits of our labour with other parts of the great wheat-field, and with the modes and the amount of harvesting adopted and acquired there ; secondly, a vindication, if it be possible, or rather if it be necessary, of Protestant Missions, with reference to the charges brought against them, argued from the supposed superior success attained by Roman Catholic Missions in China. I. Now there is a view of Missionary work, and of true Missionary success, which may ren- der such comparisons either futile or presump- tuous. The late Bishop of Carlisle in his An- niversary Sermon preached in May, 1868, before the Church Missionary Society on the text, ' Holding forth the faithful word,' speaks thus : ' Remember well what the Father's purpose in 142 China and other Lands. sending forth His word amongst the nations of the world really is. There is with many grievous mistake in this matter — grievous, I say, for it causes many hands to hang down, many knees to be feeble : conversion is not universal ; in many cases it is not even general. And over- looking the fact that Scripture told them before that it would be even so, and not conceiving aright the purpose of Jehovah, men take God's word, from what they see, to have none effect. But what is Jehovah's purpose .■" It is " to take out of the Gentiles " " a remnant according to the election of grace," " a people for His name." Viewed in relation to this purpose, it can truly be said that the Gospel has, in all generations, accomplished that which Jehovah pleased, and thus it has ever been found a faithful word, a word which may be trusted to compass its end — to accomplish its mission." And in this view we may add that here, in China, since after forty years of labour we cSn point to some 4000 adult Christian communicants, the word preached has not been fruitless — a people have been taken out of this great nation to glorify God's name. So far the Bible, as Calvin says, leads us by the hand, and we may safely follow. But when the thought arises. It is enough, there is no need for redoubling efforts ; failure is not to be as- cribed to man's mistaken plans, but to the secret China and other Lands. 143 plan of God ; we are on dangerous ground ; we are attempting to bridge over that gulf — the gulf between God's purpose and man's respon- sibility, across which no effort of hurrian thought nor reason- can fling an arch ; we are shirking the responsibility of our own negligences, ignor- ances, and offences, and are, in indolence or in unbelief, saying, ' Who hath resisted His will ? ' His will — ' This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Saviour, that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men ; for He will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth ; ' and strange enough, within a few days of the delivering of the very weighty and Scrip- tural sermon from which I have just quoted, instructions were read to Missionaries of the Church Missionary Society proceeding to seven different Mission fields, in which this other view of Mission work is brought forward — ' Go ye, therefore, and make disciples, or Christians, of all nations.' ' The object set before us,' says the author of these instructions, ' is not only to in- duce a few individuals of every nation to flock into the Christian Church, but that all nations should gradually adopt the Christian religion as their national profession of faith, and thus fill the universal church by the accession of na- tional churches.' 144 China and other Lands. Now these quotations serve to suggest two methods in which we may make this comparison which I have proposed for our consideration. We may speak first of numbers. What is the state of China Missions as to mere numerical results when compared with other Missions ? — ' Lord, are there few to be saved in China ?' ' Strive to enter in ' — strain every nerve to in- duce the Chinese to ' enter in at the strait gate.' And secondly, we may mark the effect, if any, of Protestant Missionary effort on the Chinese as a nation, compared and contrasted with the na- tional Christian movements in other heathen lands. a. Now in the Indian Missions (including Ceylon and Burmah) there were, eight years ago, just 50,000 communicants and 218,000 na- tive Christians. In China there are at the out- side 4000 communicants and 10,000 native Christians. India (including Ceylon and Bur- mah) has a population of two hundred millions. China contains within her boundaries about four hundred million souls. It would appear, then, at first sight, that Chinese Missions, as compared with Indian Missions touching the number of converts, have proved a failure. Pro- ceeding further to analyze these Indian statistics, we find that in Burmah, the provinces of Pegu and Tennasserim that is, with a population of China and other Lands. 145 1,436,208, there are about 18,000 communicants and 60,000 native Christians. I will not com- pare these numbers with the whole of China again, but take one district with, if I mistake not, a population equal to Burmah. I imagine that Ningpo city and the cities of Vong-hw6, Z-ky'i, Cing-hai, together with the great trian- gular plain of which these cities, Ningpo being on the base line, form the apexes, contain about one million souls ; whilst Yii-yiao city, with hither and further Scen-poh, contain probably 400,000 more. Now in these districts there are at the very outside 900 communicants and 1500 native Christians. Neither is the machinery and the distribution of the agents in Burmah very far different from those in this Chinese district. There are in Burmah some twenty-two Mission- aries ; in Ningpo and the neighbourhood there are fifteen Missionaries, ten of these being married. The Scen-poh district is divided between the Church of England and the American Presby- terian Missions, -and these two Missions have opened eight or ten stations in this great plain. In Soen-nen, the plain south of the hills, we all have chapels and machinery. In the city, and all round, with the sole exception of the great district south-east of the river Yung, and lying between Pao-dz6ng and Chin-hai, the rest of the country is pretty evenly worked, and L 146 China and other Lands. has been for some time well manned and widely- worked as a Missionary district ; yet the results, as compared with the results in the Burmese districts, would appear at first sight small and discouraging indeed. Take another instance. The peninsula of Sierra Leone, on the west coast of Africa, with an .area of three hundred square miles (smaller, that is, than the Ningpo plain), and with a population of 42,000 — not much more than Yii-yiao city used to possess^consisting mainly of negroes (with their descendants) res- cued from slavers by British cruisers, and re- presenting some one hundred of the native tribes in different parts of Africa, presents as the fruit of fifty years of labour the spectacle of a Christ- ian people, with about 10,000 communicants, fifteen or twenty native clergy, salaried by the native congregations, a native Bishop, and nu- merous off"-shoot Missions into the inland heathen districts ; numerically and apparently a greater success in that one little field, and amongst that little band of heathen, than has been achieved in forty years throughout the eighteen provinces and among the four hundred millions of China. Take another instance. About two hundred miles from Calcutta, on the western borders of the great plain of Bengal, Hes the broad table- land of Chota Nagpore. This district, inhabited China and other Lands. \ii^'] by various races of aborigines, the principal tribes being called Coles or Khols, contains a population of four million souls. German Missionaries, sent out by Pastor Gossner, com- menced work in the year 1845 (just the time when work commenced in Ningpo), and after much bitter persecution at the time of the mutiny, a rapid advance was made ; so much so, that six years ago, though there were but seven Missionaries in the field, they reckoned some 800 communicants and 3000 native Christians ; figures which approximate to the statistics of this province of Che-kiang, with its twenty- seven millions of people instead of four millions, and with our twenty or thirty Missionaries, in- stead of the seven zealous Germans. And once more : glance at the history of the Madagascar Mission. In that great island, with a larger area than Great Britain, and yet but 4,500,000 inhabitants, was commenced about forty years ago the London Missionary Society's Mission, which has since been so wonderfully honoured and blessed of God. After six- teen years' labour, two hundred of the Mala- gasies were baptized. The Missionaries were expelled by Queen Ranavalona, and for twenty- five years little or nothing was heard of the infant church; but when, in 1861, the Queen died, and the island was re-opened, the fruit of 148 China and otlier Lands. those labours, the harvest of that seed, sown in tears, watered by the blood of martyrs, tried and bent but unbroken by the blast of virulent persecution, appeared in a church of 10,000 in- telligent Christians.* Which of the veteran Chinese Missionaries can speak, as Mr. Tucker of Panneivilei in South India could speak, of having received, during twenty years' labour, 3100 souls from heathenism and Romanism into the fold of Christ .^ Startling and discouraging in some respects as these contrasts and comparisons may appear, I am inclined to deny in toto the accuracy of the conclusion that Chinese missions are compara- tively a failure. The Indian statistics which I have quoted above are all taken from Dr. Mul- lens' very interesting book, ' Ten Years' Mission- ary Labour in India ;' and that able and well- known authority in missionary statistics, during the visit he paid to Ningpo in the autumn of 1865, expressed in my hearing a very clear opinion that Chinese missions, all things considered, could compare most favourably with those in India. We must remember, when comparing the total results in the two countries, that Protestant missionary work — I speak not now of the work * The Report of 1869 returns the converts at 37,000 persons. China mid other Lands. 149 of chaplains, such as Ziegenbalg and Martyn — was begun actively in India ten or twelve years before Morrison struggled for admittance into China, and twenty or thirty years before any of the Chinese missionary districts were stirring from the winter sleep of ages. Neither is this difference of a few years so slight or un- important as some people may imagine. After a certain period, missions sometimes make sudden and continually increasing advances. In Bur- mah, for instance, in the year 1852, after about forty years of labour, there were 6000 commu- nicants ; in 1862 there were in the same mission 18,000 ; and since then the increase has been, I imagine, proportionably rapid ; so that we may very possibly be fast approaching a period in our Chinese missions when successes as rapid and as wide-spread as those in India may cheer and astonish us.* Neither must we forget the great difference between the two fields. I speak not so much of the so-called apathetic and unimpressible character of the Chinese mind, as compared with the African races for instance, or with many of the Indian tribes ; for there are almost as great varieties of character amongst the Chinese * 20,000 hearers were added to the Madagascar Churches in 1869. 150 China and other Lands. themselves. I draw attention rather to the re- lation in which foreigners in the two countries have stood to the natives. After admitting and deploring all the faults and wrongs which have marked the growth of England's power in India ; notwithstanding the blush of shame and the glow of indignation which we feel when we re- member that up to 181 3 no Christian Missionary was allowed to reside in the territories of the East India Company; notwithstanding the de- plorable timidity or apathy which have checked anything like Governmental promotion of Christ- ianity up to a very recent date ; yet since the year 18 13 the country has been entirely open for missionary work, far more effectively than China is at .the present ; and protection has been af- forded and redress obtainable for both preacher and convert. The rule of England has brought blessings and not curses to the people of India ; and the placing of that bright jewel in the Brit- ish crown is, we would fain hope and believe, one means by which God designs to set and cut and polish it, that it may flash and glitter for evermore in the crown of the King of kings. Neither is it hard to imagine the blow which would be struck, if not at Indian liberties and prosperity, at any rate at Protestant missions, were the Russian eagle — hovering, so some think, for a swoop — to overshadow with its China and other Lands. 1 5 1 wings and clutch in its talons the long-coveted prize. But it has been, and it is, far otherwise in China. One is ashamed of one's nationality in China. Foreign nations have brought curses, and not blessings, to the land — curses which the prestige of martial prowess, however thoroughly- conceded, cannot obliterate. The 'Arrow' wars, and all the miserable opium history, are known but too well ; and there are but few mission- aries who have not tasted at least a little of the bitterness with which that history has caused the religion preached by the fellow-countrymen of those who brought the plague to be received. Mission hospitals, opium refuges, — here in Ningpo the expulsion of the hated Taepings, as well as many individual cases of integrity and disinter- estedness in foreigners, have done something locally to atone for this evil, and raise the fo- reign name ; but in the national, and especially political feeling, I suppose fear and hatred, hatred and fear, rise and fall continually. And the weakness of the Government, making tolera- tion and protection in many cases mere empty words, has added greatly to the many serious difficulties which beset a missionary's path in China ; so much so, that probably any strong and vigorous government succeeding to the present one would favourably affect our po- sition. 152 China and other Lands. My conclusion, therefore, on this branch of my subject is that, all things taken into consi- deration — differences in political and social ad- vantages, together with differences in the length of labour in the different fields — the China mis- sions are not numerically a failure, as compared with those in other lands. /3. But those who take a wide and compre- hensive view of missionary work are not satisfied with mere statistics. We want to know not so much the amount of leaven introduced, as whe- ther it is leavening the whole lump or no ; not the quantity but the quality of converts ; not a mere roll of baptisms, but the influence of Christ- ianity on the Chinese nation, are subjects of most anxious interest. Have we anything in China to compare with what New Zealand, before, and we may almo.st say, notwithstanding the last lamentable war and the outbreak of the Hau- hau fanatical sect appeared to have attained to ■ — a nation of cannibals changed into a Christian land } Does any part of the Chinese desert bloom and blossom like the groups of islands in the South Seas .■■ Can any of our number speak of the Chinese field with joy and hope equal to that of the Indian veterans .' ' The Gospel seems to be gradually bringing the people around us,' says Mr. Williamson, one of the oldest missionaries in Bengal ; '.idolatry is evi- China and other Lands. 153 dently declining.' ' I think,' says Mr. Scott of Futtehgurh, ' that idolatry is fast losing its hold on the people.' ' I almost think I can see a change from year to year : very few of the educated natives seem to take any interest in the matter.' The faith in Brahminism is gone in the minds of the educated classes of Bengal, shattered and dissipated before the power and the light of Western science and Christian ethics. Clinging still to the past, these intelligent Hindoos have been forced to invent a new creed, under the name of the Neo Vedantists, or the Brahma Sabha, their tenets being a strange mixture from the old Vedas and from Christian books. And striking and emphatic indeed is the testi- mony of a native professor — a heathen — at Bombay: — 'Hinduism,' he says, 'is sick unto death. I am fully persuaded that it must fall. Still, while life remains, let us minister to it as best we can.' Have we anything of this sort in China .-' Is Buddhism tottering .'' Is Taouism sick unto death .'' Are the scholars dissatisfied with their old classics — tired of Confucius .'' Is the nation awakening .' Is the dough rising — the leaven working within .'' More so, per- haps, than we imagine. I have heard the opin- ion expressed, and I am inclined to agrefe with it, that we on the spot are not so well able to take comprehensive views of our work as 1 54 China and other Lands. outsiders, and friends of missions from a dis- tance. I believe, from my own experience, that in the districts round Ningpo there is at least a very general, though it may be a very super- ficial knowledge of some of the Christian doc- trines ; also a vague impression, sometimes as- suming the form of busy rumour, that the Emperor will soon be a Christian. The pro- clamation lately issued forbidding the repair of dilapidated Buddhist and Taouist temples is also associated in the native mind with Christ- ian influence at Court ; whilst the great and successful sales of Bibles in Scheuen and other inland provinces would seem to indicate a de- sire to inquire into a religion not unknown and not to be despised. Intelligent Chinese cate- chists have also given it as their opinion that pride and prejudice against Christian Missions are toned down and softened, that belief in idols is greatly shaken, and that there is far freer access into the houses, even of the upper classes, than in former years. II. I come now to the last division of my subject. Are Protestant Missions in China a failure as compared with Roman Catholic Mis- sions in China .'' An objection in limine may very possibly be urged against this comparison also, to the effect that there is no comparison between the two ; that they have nothing in WORKMEN REPAIRING A YA-MUN. China and other Lands. 157 common ; and that, therefore, no deductions of the kind contemplated in the question can be drawn from the failure or success of either. In theory I am inclined to admit the force of this objection. Writers in either the newspaper columns, or in the ' Fuh-chau Recorder,' all seem to admit that the Roman Catholics in the tenets they hold may have a ' considerable admixture of error.' It would seem, therefore, impossible, or, if a fact, a most inscrutable one, that God should have granted so far greater success to the alloyed than to the pure Gospel, that the Roman Catholic converts, compared with the Protestant, should be as 1 00 to i. I am inclined to feel and to speak far more strongly than the ' Protestant ' writer in the ' Fuh-chau Missionary Recorder :' 'Mingled, if you please,' these are his words, ' with far too much corrup- tion.' Mingled, I should say, with deadly error — error which in Rome, the fountain-head, at least, has turned the sweet taste of the essential truths of Christianity into bitterness — tares of error which, springing up and fostered by Popes and Councils, have well-nigh overshadowed and choked the growth of God's truth. It is the religion of Mary, not of Christ, which is pro- fessed at Rome ; her emissaries are Marians, not Jesuits. And the unblushing idolatry practised by that Church must be far more hateful to 158 China and other Lands. God than the idolatry of the heathen. Roman Catholic idolatry is a sin against the full light of God's written word : heathen idolatry is sin against the twilight glimmer of the book of Nature. Neither can any reply that the Ro- man Catholics worship the true God ; the hea- then false gods ; and that, therefore, Roman Catholic idolatry is infinitely more palliable than that of the heathen. They worship men and women as well as God. ' I went into one of their chapels,' said an intelligent Chinese gentle- man the other day : ' it was full of images. There was the image of God ; the Djiin-neng- ziang (" the image of the Almighty ") ; there, too, were M6-li-ziang (" the image of Mary") ; lah-seh-ziang ("the image of Joseph"); all wor- shipped and prayed to ; and I thought the scene much like that in our native temples. I was admitted after a while into an inner room, and there was a service going on for souls in purga- tory, and for our departed unconverted ances- tors ; all the world like our sacrificial ceremonies for the spirits of the dead ; and I came out re- solving, if I changed, to make a more thorough change than that.' Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree in part with ' Protestant's ' remark — ' It does not follow that Roman Catholicism is valueless.' It does China and other Lands. 159 follow in theory, it has not always followed in fact. One is led to believe that here in China, especially in some inland districts, the streams of Roman Catholic teaching, by long journeying from the fountain, have become in a measure filtered and purified ; and that, therefore, the successes of the diff"erent Roman Catholic Mis- sions must not be altogether shut out from com- parison with our own. Let me first very briefly state the comparison as regards figures ; and then as briefly analyse and review the phenomenon. The Roman Ca- tholics have missions in each of the eighteen provinces, also in Japan, Thibet, Corea, Mongolia, Manchuria, Cochin China, and Tonkin. Protest- ant Missions exist in seven or eight alone out of the eighteen provinces, and in two alone of the other countries and provinces (namely, in Japan and Mongolia) are there even tentative missions. The total number of Roman Catho- lic Christians in China proper, with Mongolia, is about 450,000; and in all the countries just named there are some 400,000 more, presenting a grand total of from 800,000 to 900,000 souls. The grand total of Protestant Christians in these countries is at the outside 10,000. Reckoning the population of China, with its dependencies, at 400,000,000 (there were 414,686,994 in the latest i6o China and other Lands. official census), we find that one in every 500 is a Roman Catholic, one in every 40,000 a Pro- testant. These are, as figures, startling. Let us ex- amine them. It is no wonder, say some, that the Roman Catholics have met with such suc- cess ; they have been in China 600 years, on and off, to our forty. This is true ; but the only notice I can now take of the argument is to say, so much more credit is due to them, so much more shame to Protestants ! Then, see their large staff of agents — 34 bishops, 348 foreign priests, 453 native priests, 18 colleges, 1000 day schools, 40 orphanages. All honour, then, to their zeal and self-devotion ; and let us confess with shame our apathy and cowardice. But these statistics hardly give a correct idea of Roman Catholic success in China. I am in- clined, in some respects, to doubt their accuracy. In ' Notes and Queries on China and Japan,' for instance, the number of Roman Catholic Christians in Che-kiang is put down as 1 5,000 ; in the ' Fuh-chau Recorder ' as 3000 ; whilst I myself, from the lips of a Roman Catholic na- tive catechist, heard 2000 named as the approxi- mate number. Then, as to the character of the majority of these converts : whilst we must not forget that some of them have passed through the fire of persecution unscathed in their stead- China and other Lands. i6i fastness and their faith, yet we have hints and positive evidence from unexpected quarters which make one entertain grave doubts as to the genuineness of the conversion of these con- verts and as to the value of these high figures. I quote a few paragraphs from the ' Supreme Court Gazette,' of November 14, 1868, which throw hght on the history and origin of not a few of these 800,000 Roman Catholic Christians. The writer commences by expressing doubts as grave as my own, but his refer to Protestant Christians : — 'We have grave doubts,' the writer observes, ' as to the reality of a large proportion of the so-called conversions to Protestantism in its va- rious forms. These doubts are based partly upon our experience of native Christians' (a few English-speaking hot-house Christians, I suspect, transplanted from mission schools and nipped by the cold), ' and partly upon the innately irre- ligious character of the Chinese mind. The Jesuits, who have been in every sense the most successful workers under the great plan of evan- gelising China, honestly confess that they have made few "converts^' if any; but they point, with just triumph, to entire communities in which Christianity has been hereditary for gene- rations. The seeds which have borne this fruit were sown by the Christian fathers who first M 1 62 China and other Lands. arrived in China ; and the soil they selected was the as yet untainted minds of children whom they had saved from death by exposure. To these children Christianity was exactly what it is to an European or American child. Their earliest ideas of morals were based on religious dogmas carefully instilled into them. They be- came Christians with no more credit to them- selves than is due to an idolater who has been brought up in idolatry.' These remarkable paragraphs, if true, throw a strange light on Roman Catholic missions. Is it a fact, then, that very few, if any, of these 800,000 Christians are converts, that is, adult con- verts .'' If so, then we poor Protestants, after all, may be found even numerically to surpass the Roman Catholics. We can point to 4000 living communicants at least, men and women, most of them converted in adult age. Is it the case, then, that most of these 800,000 Roman Catholic Christians are mere hereditary Christians — Christians from custom alone, and because their fathers were 1 This, though considered Christi- anity by many in England and America, is not the idea and standard of Christianity which Pro- testant missionaries desire to set before them. But surely the 'Supreme Court Gazette' (though from its decision there may be no appeal) is mistaken. I learn from ' Notes and Queries,' China and other Lands. 163 that between the years A.D. 1650 and 1664 Adam Schaal, who succeeded Ricci, baptized with his own hands 100,000 Chinese, some of whom surely must have been adult converts. The Jesuits have underrated their own powers, or Adam Schaal has overstated his triumphs. Both are right and both are wrong. By such means as Xavier, for instance, employed, and by the preaching of adulterated doctrines, they may well despair of making genuine converts. Adam Schaal may be right in numbers ; but it is not by might, not by power, not by crucifixes, pic- tures, and rosaries, not by the teaching now an Ave Maria, now a Paternoster, but by the Spirit of God alone, that souls are won. Neither are we left in doubt as to the nature of some at least of these 800,000 Roman Catholic Christians. Un- der the title ' Missionary Mistakes in China' the ' Pall Mall Gazette' exposes and condemns, in the most unequivocal manner, some of the re- cent proceedings of the Jesuits. Speaking of the accounts received from Thibet, Corea, Japan, and China, of persecutions and martyrdoms, the writer asks whether the uniformity of the pheno- menon may not indicate a corresponding uni- formity of the cause. He then describes the proceedings of Monsignor Faurie, Vicar-Apo- stolic of Kwei-Tcheou, in Hu-peh, which strik- ingly corroborate the opinion of the 'Supreme 164 China and other Lands. Court Gazette ' respecting Jesuit missions. ' Their agents are men of exemplary piety and devotion — their influence is deservedly great ! ' How, then, does Monsignor Faurie, a servant of the meek and lowly Jesus, comport himself? He describes himself as exercising the power of life and death, of imprisoning and setting free, of making peace and declaring war. He moves about the country with the ceremony of a vice- roy. Besides cannon announcing the nightly guard, each time he left his house or re-entered, three rounds of cannon announced the fact. ' I always eat alone,' he says : ' the principal chiefs, in full dress, stand round the table to serve me, while musicians at the door commence their harmony.' Now what do we learn from such proceedings } We learn, first, the cause of go- vernmental and official persecution ; for what can the officials surmise from such arrogance but that Christianity is a foreign political agency .^ and, secondly, we learn the cause of large num- bers of the natives becoming Roman Catholics, for surely such potent foreigners can protect from extortion and succour in lawsuits. Accord- ingly we find that thousands of villagers, noticing Monsignor Faurie's pomp and power, seeing, also, a comet in the sky, predicting the downfall of the dynasty, concluded that the empire was passing into the hands of the Christians, and China and other Lands. 165 offered themselves as candidates for baptism : whole villages, whose only pretension was the fact of their having learnt to make the sign of the cross, came forward to entreat the bishop's blessing. Now, though I think some of our veteran missionaries are far more worthy of volleys of cannon and harmonious bagpipes, each time they go out and in, than most of the Chinese magis- trates, yet I doubt whether any Protestant mis- sionary — as a missionary — has ever assumed or ever desired such empty honours and dangerous power. I do not desire to underrate the Roman Catholic successes. I would not for one mo- ment cloud the honour due to the many heroes in the Roman Catholic army. I am inclined to think that we may learn some lessons from their plans and proceedings, and might with advantage imi- tate their foundling institutions ; but if any large proportion of the 800,000 Roman Catholics be either mere hereditary Christians, or be of the same type with Monsignor Faurie's converts— if it be true that there is 'flexibility' enough in Catholicism (to quote ' Protestant's ' expression in the ' Fuh-chau Recorder ') to allow their con- verts to employ Sunday as they please after early mass — ^if, as is clearly pointed out in Mr. Venn's ' Life of Xavier,' there is an evanescent principle and a sure tendency to decline in all 1 66 China and other Lands. the foreign missions of the Church of Rome — then surely Protestant Missions have nothing to fear from a comparison with Roman Catholic Missions in China. 16/ CHAPTER VI. CHINESE BEGGARS. To be a beggar in China would seem in very truth to be what the Chinese themselves call it, ' pre- sent hell.' When we enter the ordinary houses of the poorer classes in this country, the utter want of what we are accustomed to call ' home comforts ' is painfullyobservable, — no fireside corner, inade- quate protection from winter cold, inadequate inlet for summer breeze, crowding and filth : these and many other features in Chinese homes make one think, that to be a poor Chinaman is the ideal of human discomfort. But what if you take away the tile-roof and the ill-closed win- dows, and live under a Hang-ding, — a rest-shed open to the four winds of heaven, with mos- quitoes tormenting, you in summer, and bathing or washing out of the question, lest you look too clean to excite compassion ; and in winter 1 68 Chinese Beggars. an old sack for a blanket, and the snow for a sheet ; and with no shoes on your feet, off you go at break of the frosty morning, with your sack-blanket still on, to plod and shiver through the streets; and then, as the short winter day closes, with hunger unsatisfied, and the sharp frost binding the ground, back you go, shivering, to your miserable home, and lie down under the same sack-blanket, and snow-sheet, and shiver and fail to sleep till morning ; and so all the year round, — snow and mosquitoes, mosquitoes and filth and cold, from hand to mouth, and that mouth never clean and never sa- tisfied, till you die and are drawn forth as a dog, buried under the city wall, unknown, unlamented, forgotten. Is not this a hell on earth ? No, in- deed, says, or seems to say, the beggar. ' Three years a beggar, who would be a king .'' ' ' The finest rice has not charms equal to a roving liberty.' Which proverbial expressions in mendi- cant colloquial would appear to imply that there are 'jolly beggars' to be found in China as well as in the West. I am informed, indeed, that there is a class of mendicants closely re- sembling the gypsies of other lands, in their roving habits, and free-and-easy mode of life ; whether there be any common origin I cannot pretend to determine. It is nevertheless my impression that beggar life in China must be, Chinese Beggars. 169 generally speaking, supremely miserable. The common saying, to which I referred just now, ' Three years a beggar, who would be a king ? ' speaks, I believe, more of inability than reluct- ance. The beggars will tell you with a sort of miserable nonchalance, that after three years of continuous beggar life their bones and sinews are loosened, their skin dried, and, consequently, they are quite unequal to those exercises in deportment which must be gone through by Chinese gentlemen and Chinese mandarins. How can those poor shrivelled, shuffling, shiver- ing beings, ever bear the thought of sitting straight and erect on a chair of state for hours, with legs arranged according to propriety, and clothing falling in legal folds .'' how can they ever rise and return salutations with benignity and decorum } I believe I am right in stating that this exposition of the proverb is the correct one. The beggar is a miserable man as a rule ; and he knows it. In summer time, — when, as Syd- ney Smith expresses it, one desires to take off one's flesh and sit in one's bones, — ^the beggar having no flesh, merely skin, bone, and a piece of matting, may occasionally afford to smile at the corpulent panting grandee ; but his life in cold and rainy weather, — his life, indeed, during say 300 days of every year, — must be supremely miserable ; a hell upon earth. 170 Chinese Beggars. Foreign residents in China welcome the fresh and exhilarating north breezes, which tell of the change of monsoon and the heats of summer gone ; but the beggar then looks out on a dreary, comfortless prospect. Yet there is evidently a fascination about the life of a beggar. I met a member of the class a few months ago near the North Gate of the city of Ningpo. He was a snake-catcher, — one of the mendicant trades. He extracted the fangs and poison-bags, and sold them to medicine shops and in private houses as a good eye spe- cific. After inspecting some of his maimed snakes, and presenting him with a few cash, I asked him how long he had been a beggar. ' Eighteen years,' he replied. ' Why don't you work .■" ' I asked. ' I haven't " capital " enough.' ' How much do you require to start in the trade you would think of adopting .'' ' I asked again. ' Two thousand cash,' he rejoined. Two thousand cash only, — only eight shillings of our money ! And could he not in eighteen years' time, by catching an extra snake or two daily, scrape together that small sum } I felt inclined to give him the capital required on the spot, in order to rescue him from the filthy, com- fortless lodgings which I afterwards visited ; but I knew that, were I to do so, from that shed a host of his brethren and sisters would have Chinese Beggars. 1 7 1 emerged, all longing to engage in trade, — all beggars for eighteen years, — all desiring two thousand cash, — all steadfastly resolved, Avhether they succeeded or no in their petition, to live and die beggars. I forbore, therefore, but moralised on the event. It is time, however, that I cease moralising, and come to some particulars about the history and the general condition of the beggar class, which will, I trust, prove to be not without interest. The beggars of Ningpo and the neighbour- hood may be divided into three main divisions ; each one miserable, dirty, and designing; but with differences, — differences, too, which must excite and demand pity in varying degrees. One class, — the most numerous perhaps, most powerful, best organised, and most pro- lific in resources, is the class of those who are under a head man, a gipsy king- — the k'di tow. This man is raised to his high dignity on ac- count of his superior talents as a knave and extorter of money. I was given to understand some time ago, by one well qualified to speak on all Chinese matters, that the presence of foreigners at the ports has either drawn the beggar community from the interior to the coast, or has not improbably tended greatly to increase their numbers. Be this as it may, the 1/2 Chinese Beggars. beggar class is not a plant of recent growth. If we may believe the statements of a Chinese romance (according to the translator, 1600 years old), the condition of beggars in the capital of the Che-kiang province at the time of the Council of Nice was not materially different from that of beggars in Ningpo at the present day.* The father of Yuh-noo (the heroine of the tale) was ' Twan Tow,' or ' Round Head,' a nickname for the beggar chief ; and the descrip- tion given of him in the first chapter of this novel (I quote from the late Mr. Evans' trans- lation in the ' China Magazine ') holds good to some extent for beggar chiefs in Ningpo at the present day. ' Whatever the beggars procure by begging,' says the native writer, ' is given up to him ; and in time of rain or snow, when they cannot follow their calling, their chief provides them with food, and supplies them with clothes.' In Ningpo (and I gather from Mr. Doolittle's * A native tells me, however, that for 1600 years we should rather read 600, or at most, 900 years. He says the beggar-girl lived in the Southern Song dynasty, ex- tending from A.D. 960-1320 ; not in the Northern Song, which extended from A.D. 420-478. He says the family were originally from Shaou-hing city, which was hardly founded in the earlier dynasty. Not having seen the original, I cannot speak positively on this point ; but we will hope that the earlier date will after all hold good, so as to add more interest and romance to the tale. Chinese Beggars. 173 book on ' Foochow,' and from what I learnt lately in Shanghai, that it is much the same throughout the country), the head man's duties are to estimate the wealth and resources of the chief shops in the city, — shops of tailors and other artisans being exempted. To these chief shops he goes, and haggles long till they come to terms which satisfy him ; upon which two papers, one green and one red, are stuck up in the shop ; with this k'ii-tow's name, the amount agreed upon, and the days of payment enume- rated, and (so says Mr. Doolittle) the sentence subjoined: 'The brethren must not come here to disturb and annoy.' The shop is thus gua- ranteed against molestation from this man's tribe; whereas, if the shopman refuse to come to terms, woe be to him ! The crowd of ragged, filthy, brazen-faced, stentorian-voiced beggars, is let loose upon him ; and he most gladly adds now to the sum refused before. The larger shops give from seven to eight thousand cash a-year ; and there is a large grocer's shop near the small Parade Ground in Ningpo which is said to give 36,000 cash a-year to these head men. Only men are admitted into their clubs ; and no entrance fee is, I believe, required. They merely enter their names, the cleverest and 1 74 Chinese Beggars. most promising rogues obtaining preference in the eye of the chief rogue. Sharp beggars can rely on some 10,000 cash a-year from this resource alone ; the duller mendicants gain but 1000 or so per annum. This resource is, how- ever, far from being their only one. The beg- gar's bow is many-stringed, and is continually twanging. Hi ching sang tsdf — ' births, mar- riages, and deaths,' they speak of as the beg- gar's time. Is there a wedding in progress, the beggars appear. Haoii kaoii, yung hwa foo kwei, kin yuh mwdit tdng, ilrh sun pih wang kaoii kaoii haoii : which may be thus rendered ; ' Good luck ! ' ' Wealth and honour now behold ;' ' Houses full of gems and gold ; ' ' Sons and grandsons manifold ; ' ' Good luck, good luck ! ' So they chant on the first day, and gain a few cash to secure their speedy disappearance. The next day,, after the feast, they come again ; and after uttering some more pleasing sentiments, demand the fragments that remain. Much the same takes place after funeral feasts ; and on some such occasions (so says Mr. Doolittle) a considerable sum is distributed among the beg- gars before they will allow the burial or the ancestral sacrifice to proceed without interrup- tion, and with the desirable solemnity and si- lence. On one occasion, when a native Christ- ian was being buried near Foochow, a com- Chinese Beggars. 175 pany of beggars and lepers gathered round the grave and demanded 20,000 cash, or 4/., as the condition of allowing the coffin to be lowered into the grave. One of the rabble actually got down into the grave, and thus prevented the lowering of the coffin. After waiting till nearly dark, and finding that there was no special luck connected with special hours in Christian fu- nerals, they gladly accepted 800 cash, or 3J., and ceased their clamour. Another resource, though, one would fancy, a very precarious one, is occasionally productive of profit. When a peculiarly irate creditor is weary of his debtor's delay, and cares more to annoy the man than to possess his money, he sometimes gives his bill to these beggars, com- pounding perhaps for part of the spoils, and sends them day by day to worry the miserable debtor into compliance. It is the office of beggars also to bury crimi- nals after an execution, and for this they receive, I suppose, a paltry fee. Others, again, feign themselves shipwrecked mariners and so on, and spread before them on the ground a paper or piece of white cloth, with a description of their past, present, and future sufferings. They bend over this narrative, shaking and lament- ing ; and occasionally, by successful effort, let- ting drop a tear or two. Others sit shivering in 1 76 Chinese Beggars. the cold with a warm garment before them, to which is attached a wisp of straw ; which wisp intimates that so great is the poverty and hun- ger of the owner as to lead him to be willing to sell this his only garment to buy food. Others attach wisps of straw to their children, implying that they too are for sale, such is the distress of the parents ; though not improbably these very children had been before hired to be daily pinched and made cry in order to excite pity. These people are called Gee tung, ' moved with grief,' or Pa di fan, ' spread out wares on the ground ;' and all, I believe, belong to the first division, which is directed by a head man. Another class, which goes by the name of Kaou hwd tsze, resembles this first class in many respects ; but they are certainly a grade lower in the estimation of the people, though from their name, ' High-flower people,' they seem to have a high opinion of themselves. They live in the outer courts of certain temples. They consist chiefly of refugees, the dregs of those who were so numerous in the days of the Tse- ping rebellion ; and they have the character of being thieves as a rule. These wretched people, like the first class whom I have mentioned, have some regular sources of revenue. In the middle of the seventh month, when sacrifices are offered to the spirits from the tombs, who are THE RANSOM OF PRISONERS ; THE "WAY TO ACQUIRE HAPPINESS. N Chinese Beggars. 179 then supposed to be maliciously using their brief month's holiday in sowing sickness broad- cast, these poor beggars assemble and claim the remains of the feast; which, although equal in amount to the original repast, — spiritual mouths alone having partaken, — is yet miserably scanty. These people also, as well as beggars generally, may beg from shop to shop, though with vary- ing success. Their importunity is, I fancy, sel- dom totally fruitless ; though I have once seen a turner throw a handful of shavings into a beggar's face and completely dishearten him. There was in old times a tax called teen fei levied on shops, professedly to defray the ex- penses connected with the supply of ornaments and face-powder for the females in the emperor's palace : China is large, and her shops innumer- able ; and had the tax been rigorously enforced and faithfully expended according to the original design, face-powder sufficient to bury domestics, wives, emperor, and all alive, would have been yearly procurable. The tax is not now exacted ; but, by a sort of mutual consent, the beggars take part of the king's remitted dues. At certain seasons — chiefly, I think, about New-year tide, — men of this second class may be seen half stripped, their foreheads covered with mud, and moustache affixed of straw, going from house to house with a confident mien de- i8o Chinese Beggars. manding money as protectors against evil spi- rits. At the winter solstice also they go about under the title of cho tsaou wAng, ' expel kitchen king.' Tsaou wang was a literary man, who had nearly attained to the degree of shdng yn^n (the ' senior wrangler ' at the central examination of the three degrees, kii-jin, tsimsz, and han-lin), when small evil spirits at night so scratched, and clawed, and disfigured his face, that the reigning emperor, who lived about looo years ago, felt unable to give him his degree. The poor man's spirits sank low ; but, as a consolatory measure, the emperor gave him a knife three feet long, wherewith he should rule, and, if possible, extir- pate all evil spirits. These beggars undertake in his name to do this, especially with reference to evil spirits lurking in the kitchen, for all who will give them a bowl of rice. Each house will give to three, but not more than three, of these protectors. The boatmen who remove manure and ashes reserve a small portion of their rice for these ravenous beggars. Fortune, in the second volume of his ' Tea Countries of China,' gives an amusing account of the river beggars who at- tend in boats of their own on country-boats com- ing to the city, so as to collect this tax of rice. The third class is that for which an asylum, the koo laou yuht, 'asylum for the fatherless Chinese Beggars. 1 8 1 and distressed,' or yang tsk yuin, ' asylum for relief,' — is provided by native liberality. The members of this class are all afflicted in some way ; blind, or lame, or maimed, or with wounds, in many cases self-inflicted. Dr. Lockhart re- lates the case of a man who called at his hos- pital in Shanghai with violent inflammation ot both eyes, having the lids enormously swollen. He stated that he was a plasterer, and that some lime had accidentally fallen into his eye. Further inquiry, however, showed that the man had intentionally filled both eyelids with lime for the purpose of destroying his sight, so as to ex- cite compassion ; and he had succeeded, for the eyes were totally destroyed. This plan is not unfrequently resorted to by beggars, when with sound eyes they cannot earn a livelihood ; they will sometimes blind their children in eariy life by means of lime, or by puncturing the eyes with a coarse needle. The following plan is, how- ever, the most extraordinary one that has been met with. Four men were seen one day crawling on their hands and knees, having lost their legs a few inches below the knee. They asserted that their eight legs had all been burnt off in a fire. But it was ascertained that in the southern part of the province of Shantung, beggars have their legs taken ofl" by a professional beggar-surgeon ; his plan being to tie a piece of thin string round 1 82 Chinese Beggars. the middle of the calf, drawing it closer day by- day till mortification of the lower limb ensues : after a while the bone is exposed, sawn through, the wound closed up, and the beggars sent forth amidst the congratulations of their friends, as in a fair way to obtain a beggar's fortune. Num- bers, however, sink under the tortures of the tedious operation. Mr. Wylie, of Shanghai, tells me that a man used to sit in the Shanghai tea- gardens day after day, contemplating his own foot, which lay dry and blackened on a stone before him ; this foot having probably been am- putated in the same way. Devices which re- mind one of Western rogues are sometimes re- sorted to. Mr. Cobbold, who was formerly a missionary in Ningpo, in his very entertain- ing book, ' Pictures of the Chinese,' relates an act of charity of his own. A man came to his house with his wrist fearfully wounded — hacked through, as he asserted, by pirates. Mr. Cob- bold called a chair, and hurried off to the dis- pensary of a missionary doctor. It was pro- nounced a case for amputation. A Buddhist priest was engaged as nurse ; the surgeon set to work to remove the bandage ; the patient shrieked in a becoming manner ; roll after roll of the bandage was removed, until at last the wrist was disclosed, perfectly sound and whole. So ingeniously was the imposture contrived, Chinese Beggars. 183 that it thus at first deceived even the practised eye of a foreign surgeon. In Ningpo, deformed, disfigured, and dis- eased mendicants live in the range of buildings on the east bank of the river Yung, to which I referred just now. There are about one hundred small houses. They live under the direction of a head man ; and admission to these almshouses is obtained at the price of a sumptuous feast. Those who cannot afford this feast may also gain admission, but cannot lay claim to so large a share in the revenues of the place. The em- peror allows from eight to nine dollars annually to each inmate ; and those who can go out daily to beg generally excite more pity, I should fancy, than the unmaimed, undiseased, professional beggar. Rich men in the city will occasionally be charitable on a large scale, distributing clothes in winter and fans in summer to all comers. In the winter of 1832, which was re- markably cold and rainy, a Chinese lady in Can- ton caused 500 jackets to be distributed amongst the aged and infirm beggars of the city. There is a large division in the beggar host whose character is low, even in the estimation of their friends. They have mostly been thieves in former days, and though set at liberty, they yet carry the badges of their crime about with them ; whether as a punishment, as a sign 1 84 Chinese Beggars. of penitence, or as a means of exciting compas- sion, I am not prepared to say. They are called ' mandarin beggars.' Some wear a very small wooden collar, a model of the cangue borne by convicted thieves in the streets. Others carry a heavy stone on their shoulders from morning to night, their crimes being greater than the first class. Others, again, have a heavy iron spear padlocked to their foot and shoulder ; these are chiefly men banished from other provinces. Others, more light-hearted and less burdened by manacles, whirl bowls of water round with juggler skill, they are called, ' Shake the falling sky.' Others go through all the exercises of the noble art of defence, only beating the air, not boxing a brother beggar ; and begging priests of the Buddhist and Taoist type — sang taou — are frequently met with, — not true mendicant friars sent forth by the monastery abbots, but priests without a home, either outcasts from temples or fictitious characters. There is a class of beggars somewhat different from those I have already mentioned, consisting of strolling singers (called 'Sing lotus-flower gentlemen,' or ' Sing fall of the lotus,' CKhdng Vein hwa Idng' or lo). They expect a much more liberal largess than falls to the lot of ordinary beggars, demanding and often getting 200 or 300 cash, instead of the single cash, the ordinary beggar's fee. These beggars are Chinese Beggars. 185 occasionally employed by the 'mandarins as a sort of detective police; as they go singing through shops, tea-houses, and taverns, they keep their eyes and ears open, and often get on the track of some absconding miscreant. I have been told that some of the lowest of the opium dens depend almost entirely upon the custom of beggars. This is, I fancy, a re- versal of the true story. Beggars do not sup- port opium shops, — but opium-smoking brings many a man to beggary. Beggars in Ningpo have a strange habit of disappearing and suddenly coming into light and life again. One is inclined to hope that, after all, they do not die very often. Some old friends of mine I have missed from one street, and supposed them dead and gone ; but unex- pectedly I stumble over them in a different quarter of the city, alive and as well as usual ; still drawling the same cry, still knocking their foreheads against the pavement, still surviving the shock ; and the pleasure and surprise are mutual. Feast-days at different temples, or the course taken by the idolatrous processions, will draw them hither and thither. They have a de- vice also of begging very late at night when it is very dark and rainy, and when even the most hard-hearted passer-by feels almost compelled to pity and help. 1 86 Chinese Beggars. The number of beggars of all classes in and near the city of Ningpo amounts, on a rough estimate given to me by one of their charity almoners, to about 10,000. There are nearly 1000 living in the almshouses on the eastern bank of the river ; 360 having their names regis- tered, the remainder being wives and children and hangers-on. As far as I can ascertain, genuine and re- spectable beggars are such as old women who go from door to door, and not to shops, and who seem ashamed and grieved to beg; and the opinion of one native to whom I have spoken is that such need not, and, as a rule, do not suffer from extreme want. There used to be a beggar-woman outside the south gate, who went by the name of the ' Small-footed beggar.' She never actually begged, though in great distress ; but went from door to door, and in the course of conversation, in a casual way, men- tioned her circumstances. She was so generally respected, pitied, and helped, that she is now, I believe, no longer a beggar ; but with her hus- band and children in independent circumstances. I have made some inquiries as to whether tra- ditions exist of beggars rising to actual affluence and rank, but, with the exception of the story of the beautiful Yuh-noo, in the romance I no- ticed above, and similar stories in novels, I am Chinese Beggars. 187 not aware of any reliable instance. I fear there are few beggar-damsels in China (unless it be the fabulous Yuh-noo) who have been sung, or will ever have a chance of being sung, by a Chinese Tennyson : none who can vie with Cophetua's queen, — ' Her arms across her breast she laid, She was more fair than words can say, Bare-footed came the beggar maid Before the King Cophetua ; In robe and crown the king stept down To meet and greet her on her way; " It is no wonder," said the lords, " She is more beautiful than day." ' As shines the moon in clouded skies. She in her poor attire was seen ; One praised her ancles, one her eyes. One her dark hair and lovesome mien ; So sweet a face, such angel grace, In all that land had never been ; Cophetua swore a royal oath : " This beggar-maid shall be my queen." ' A question of difficulty, but of great import- ance, will suggest itself to my readers. Ought Christian residents in China to help these beggars at all .' And if so, how can it best be done .' We have seen that a considerable pro- portion of the mendicant community consists of rogues ; but there are a very great number remaining of human beings, men, women, and 1 88 Chinese Beggars. children, with bodies and souls, and yet living, from year's end to year's end, in abject and un- changing misery. This misery is sufficient to excite native sympathy, proverbially slow to move, and to lead to the foundation of native charitable institutions, however poorly managed. Should we be behindhand in such charitable labours .' We have no cause to fear the wrath of the beggar class if we refuse help ; neither are we under the slavish dread of the hidden mischief caused by beggar ghosts wandering for lack of burial along the banks of the river Yung. But the freedom from such fears, as it makes our charity more pure, so should it by no means be allowed to check such charity. One of our catechists suggested to me the erec- tion of a few small houses for beggars to sleep in during the winter months. He says that formerly in Peking the Government supported such places, which were called ' feather houses,' being furnished with quantities of feathers for warmth. I have heard also of an institution where one vast bed-coverlet is provided, which at nightfall is elevated (by machinery, I suppose) ; in creep crowds of beggars, down falls the coverlet, and there they lie till break of day releases them. I have, through the courtesy of Mr. Butcher, the Chaplain at Shanghai, obtained some statis- tics of the ' Home for the Chinese Poor in Chinese Beggars. 1 89 Shanghai,' which was in active operation there during the early months of 1868. Its objects, namely, first, to clear the streets of beggars, and, secondly, to afford relief to the deserving poor and to drive impostors from the settlement, were excellent. During three months 401 patients were ad- mitted into the home, of whom only two were women. 847 dollars were contributed by fo- reigners, and 444 dollars by natives. I am sorry to say that the greatest number of beg- gars from a single place was from Ningpo (91). Regular work had been planned for the in- mates, such as basket-work, rope-making, &c. They were daily employed in cleaning the buildings and improving the swampy ground near, in dragging the municipal roller, and so forth ; but the summer set in, and the whole attempt came to a close before the experiment could be fully tested. An amusing and interesting notice of some papers in the ' R^vue des Deux Mondes,' by M. Maxime du Camp, appeared in the columns of the ' Daily News,' a few weeks ago ; and it is strange to notice the strong family likeness between mendicants in the East and West. ' Mendicity,' observes M. du Camp, ' is an evil hitherto incurable, and which seems inherent to human nature, and common to all latitudes and 190 Chinese Beggars. to all civilisations:' a remark which the fore- going facts and incidents connected with beggar life in China tend to illustrate and confirm. If, however, it be a mark of civilisation to repress mendicity by severe measures, China must confess for once that the ' outer barba- rians ' ■ have outstripped her. ' In no country,' says the reviewer, ' is mendicity more severely interdicted than in France ; although she has no poor-laws such as those of England. At the present time, any beggar caught in the act within a certain distance of a house of refuge is liable to a pensflty of from three to six months' imprisonment, and after the expiration of that term is lodged in a house of correction, to be set free only after earning enough to make a fresh start in life. But in former ages French law has been yet more severe on the beggar race. In 1524 it was decreed that beggars should be whipped and expelled the country : in the following year, that they should be hanged: in 1532, that they should be chained in couples, and employed upon the open sewers: in 1561 they were sentenced to the galleys for life : in 1554, and again in 1607, a special guard of archers was stationed at the city gates to prevent beggars from coming in. More merciful counsels, however, prevailed later in the century, for, in 1656, the General Hos- Chinese Beggars. 191 pital was erected ; and 40,000 beggars, who then infested Paris, after a solemn warning by the public crier, were swept within its gates ; and, in 1674, the H6tel des Invalides removed the last of the beggars, the old soldiers, from the streets. Yet, fourteen years later, mendicity is as rife and as reckless as ever. Again, beggars are threatened with the galleys for life, and any one found giving alms to a beggar is fined fifty livres. Transportation was the next experiment tried by French political economists; but the press-gang went too far, and bagged not only beggars, but servants and artislns. Paris was alarmed, broke out into riots, and the Govern- ment were obliged to be content with the branding and the galleys again.' The great Revolution failed to revolutionise the thoughts and doings of beggars. Charitable workshops were set on foot in 1790, when 12,000 beggars were usefully employed. Mendicity was treated as brigandage under the Republic; it lifted its head and shared in the prevailing license under the Directory; under the Consulate beggars were consigned to houses of detention at Saint Denis and Villars Cotteret, the one a house of correction and the other of refuge. Yet, not- withstanding all the terrible penal laws of past ages, and the humane laws of later days, men- dicity lives and flourishes in Paris. Last year. 192 Chinese Beggars. 2,588 beggars were arrested in the city, and to these must be added 14,055 vagabonds. Whether the measures suggested by M. du Camp would be more effective, whether the utilization of the seven million acres of waste land, by employing on them the forced, but paid, labour of these sturdy rogues, would effect a radical cure for the disorder, are ques- tions to be solved only after extensive experi- ments. But the passages which I have quoted from the columns of the ' Daily News ' will be sufficient to prove that the Chinese, though they have never, I believe, had recourse to penal laws (whilst, as I have shown above, some pal- liative measures have been adopted by them for the cure or relief of mendicity), yet have hardly been less successful than their beggar- plagued friends in the West in remedying this great social malady. I must not follow M. du Camp through his interesting list of the ' Various orders and de- grees of professional mendicity.' He gives in one place an amusing counterpart to the Chinese ' small-footed beggar,' whom I have described above. M. du Camp's hero being described as ' the cleverest beggar he has ever seen, in his mastery of the art of receiving alms without asking;' and, indeed, every branch of the Pa- risian beggar-trade might find recruits, or even Chinese Beggars. 193 drill-serjeants, from the ranks of the beggar-host in China. Perhaps there is no class of society in the world more apparently excluded from the influ- ence of Christian missions than the class of mendicants in heathen lands. The eager readi- ness with which, for a trifling gratuity, they would make an evanescent profession of Christ- ianity, causes the Christian missionary to turn from a beggar audience sometimes, as almost beyond the reach of hope ; and the apparent impossibility of testing, by ordinary means, the sincerity of mendicant inquirers, leads one to conclude, too readily perhaps, that they tnust be all insincere. Yet, if Christian effort seem paralysed in the presence of such human beings, surely Christian pity should be warmed and aroused. A life spent either in literal, and, if I may say so, honest misery ; or a life spent perhaps with occasional and secret luxurious indulgence of ill-gotten gains; yet, if so, spent undoubtedly in one long course of deceit and imposture ; with a future unlighted by the hope of relief or a glimpse of permanent ease, and a gloom pierced by no ray of forgiveness, nor scarcely of hope or wish for pardon ; is not such a life a ' hell upon earth } ' 194 CHAPTER VII. ON CHINESE PROVERBS. ' The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are dis- covered in its proverbs.' This is Lord Bacon's well-worn remark; although, indeed, only well- worn because of its truth. ' In them,' it has been further said, 'is to be found an inexhaustible source of precious documents in regard of the interior history, the manners, the opinions, the beliefs, the superstitions, and the customs of the people among whom they have had their course.' I make bold to borrow these opening para- graphs from the Archbishop of Dublin's ' Third Lecture on Proverbs,' as an introduction to a few specimens of Chinese proverbs ; and I shall endeavour to tread in the Archbishop's steps, and range my specimens under the different heads of proverbs which show wit or wisdom, selfishness or philanthropy, with a few words On Chinese Proverbs. 195 also on those which, under a Chinese dress, evi- dently belong to all nations. In Pr^mare's ' Notitia Linguae SinicE,' a large collection of 165 proverbs may be found ; and he remarks (if we may imitate his- some- what antiquated Latinity), ' The Chinese speech doth acquire no little gravity and strength by means of moral sentences and ancient proverbs. Wherefore, whatsoever of the like I have skilled thus far to collect, I will bring together in this place ; and whatsoever things have not come to my view as yet, these I gladly leave to the pen of other men.' I shall borrow, therefore, few, if any, from this list ; but availing myself of his permission, I shall mention those which I have not merely met with in Chinese books, but which I have heard used in Chinese conversation, and the effect of which on a Chinese audience I have frequently observed. It is scarcely necessary to remark, that a free and apt use of such sayings is of the greatest effect in preaching to the Chinese. Not a few proverbs in common use have been transplanted into the colloquial from the book-language of their sacred writings. The writings of Confucius consist, indeed, so very largely of apophthegms (differing in this respect from the more elaborate philosophical disquisi- tions of Mencius); those apophthegms, moreover. 196 On Chinese Proverbs. are, generally speaking, so short, they contain so much good sense, with not rare grains of salt, and they are likewise zo popular (if universal re- verence and acquiescence may be called popu- larity), that, according to some of the definitions of a proverb in Archbishop Trench's book, the whole of the sayings of Confucius might be said to stand on the very verge of the proverb re- gion. And in this respect there is a difference, perhaps, observable between the Chinese pro- verbs and those of other nations. Shakespeare delights in proverbs ; but he gleans from the nation's talk. The Chinese language teems with proverbs, but they are gleaned, in many cases, from the writings of their sages. If, however, we consider the Chinese classics (as sound criticism leads us to do) rather in the light of their native scriptures than as mere liter- ary relics, we find a marked parallel to the num- ber of our English proverbs which are borrowed from the Bible. Amongst the sayings which stand thus on the border region of apophthegm and proverb are such as the following : — ' S hoe ts nen kyi^ hj-iiong-di yije : ' Within the four seas all are brethren : Or this, — On Chinese Proverbs. 197 ' T'hegn woo urh jih min wo6 urh hwang :' Heaven has not two suns, the people have not two emperors. Proverbs which I have often heard quoted with effect ; the first against the exclusiveness of Chinese politicians and their dislike of foreign- ers, the second against polytheism. The Chinese are fond of rhyming proverbs, as, for instance, — ' Hao si feh si To ky'uoh bah nri.' Or this one, — ' Feh kying Jing-ming Dsen t'ing le sing;' which may be rendered thus,— Fear'st thou not God ; be still, O soul, And listen to the thunder roll. A proverb which is sufficient to acquit the Chinese nation of any indiscriminate charge of Atheism. Many such proverbs must be local, for the rhyme is lost or impaired when the proverb is rendered into another dialect ; and I give them, therefore, generally in their Ningpo form. 198 On Chinese Proverbs. Wit is not wanting in many Chinese pro- verbs. Take this one, in which wit and good theology are combined. I am not acquainted with the conciser form in which it is sometimes quoted, but in the colloquial of Ningpo it runs thus, — ' Yiu liang-go hao nying, ih-go si-de ih-go \va m-neh sang : ' There are two good people ; one dead, the other not yet born. A proverb expressing the conviction of the peo- ple's conscience, ' There is none righteous, no not one.' Or this again, — ' Sing hao t'in t'a-bing ; 'O yiiong ngao ts'as-keng : ' All's well when once the heart is right ; What use these cabbage-stumps to bite '? A. protest uttered by the people's voice against the Buddhist priesthood and Buddhist devotees, who, under the garb of diligent outward obser- vance, as eating nothing but vegetables (their form of fasting), too often hide looseness of liv- ing and a bad heart. There are other proverbs which, with a dash of sarcasm, contain yet weightier truths. This solemn one, for instance, for whose origin one is On Chinese Proverbs. 199 inclined to look westward, towards the first home of the oracles of God, — ' T'heen tang yeu lod woo jin tsow ; Te ytih wo6 mun, tsang ching k'heu :' Heaven has a shining path ; none walk along it : Hell's gateless wall to scale, the nations throng it. Or this again, which I give in its Ningpo dress, — ' T'in iang nying cong kweh seh, Nying iang nying bi ko kweh : ' Man fed by heaven grows fair and strong ; Man fed by man is skin and bone ere long. Or this one, which is all wisdom, with no vein of pleasantry, — ' T'in feh sang vu loh ts jing ; Di feh sang vu keng ts ts'ao : ' ' Earth bears no rootless plant on hill or plain ; No human life but has some hidden root of gain.' And this one, — ' Kang san k'ho e ; Sing tsing nan kae : ' Go shake yon mountain range ; But Nature, who can change ? 200 On Chinese Proverbs. Here is another, whose original meaning I cannot determine; but I have often heard it applied by native preachers to earth and this passing life, — ' Ziah-z liang-ding se hao, Feh-z kyiu-dziang ts c'ii : ' which may be rendered, or rather paraphrased, thus, — A rest-shed by the weary road, 'Tis good, while blows the cooling breeze ; But call it not a dwelling-place, A life-long home for tranquil ease. The following proverb is applied as an an- swer to those who unthinkingly murmur against nature's daily appointments and the interchange of seasons, — ' T'in zong vu tsiu yia, Di '6 vu ng koh.' Or again, — ' M lang m nyih, Ng koh feh kyih : ' which may be roughly rendered thus, — No day, no night. No harvest bright. On Chinese Proverbs. 201 No cold, no heat, No rice to eat : Or more smoothly thus, — The tranquil march of nights and days, The changeful seasons, hot and cold. Bring forth the harvests of the earth. And clothe the boundless plains with gold. There is one proverb which requires a dis- tinct and separate notice. It runs as follows : — ' Hao si feh si, To ky'iioh bah mi : ' You're old and ought to die by right. You eat our rice from morn till night. Now, considering' the fact that the Chinese are remarkable for filial duty, this proverb would at first sight seem to present an instance of the extremely rare phenomenon of a national saying springing from the immoral, and not from the moral, side of a people's thoughts. There is always, however, a strong presumption against such an origin for any maxim that has fairly passed into popular use. And it is a suggestion worth making, that this proverb in particular may be an instance of the ironical humour of the Chinese rather than of heartlessness. To my own mind it appears not improbable that it 202 Oil Chinese Proverbs. took its rise in the grim realities of some period of famine. It would then be perpetuated in an ironic sense, and would be used humorously with what has well been called the irony of affection, even by the most filial and dutiful lips. At the same time, as it is always liable to the charge of a literal interpretation, we need not be surprised at finding, what is matter of fact, that a Chinese audience will sometimes express strong dissent from this proverb, and dissa- tisfaction at its place among their popular sayings. Here is another proverb of a similar kind, and capable perhaps of a similar explanation, which seems not at first sight to speak well for the courage and conjugal affection of the Chinese, — ' Fu ts'i peng-z dong-ling nyiao Da naen tao Ise koh-z fi ; Ng dao tong ngo dao si.' Of which proverb the following gives the spirit, if not the exact meaning, — Man and wife, In tranquil life. Sit like birds upon one bough ; Trouble comes, They shake their plumes, ' Sauve qui peut,' their language now. A MOUTHFUL OF RICE CONCEALED FOR THE CHILDREN. On Chinese Proverbs. 205 One flies west, As he thinks best ; One flies east, Where'trouble 's least. I know, however; of one proverb at any rate which breathes the tone of magnanimity. When exhorting a Chinaman on one occasion to let bygones be bygones, and at least to receive in a friendly way a man with whom he had a dis- agreement, he replied, ' Of course I will.' ' Tao kw'a feh sah zi Ise ts jing : ' The knife is sharpened ; but not to slay the man who comes alone and of his own accord. There is a large proportion of proverbs com- mon to all languages, only (as Archbishop Trench points out) dressed and coloured ac- cording to the varying climes and customs. Our common proverb, for instance, which speaks of ' faUing between two stools,' in China, a country where boat-travelling is the one mode of locomotion for so many millions of her people, takes this form, — ' Kyiah dah liang deo jiin: ' One foot in this boat, one in that ; They both push off, and you fall flat. An excellent proverb this to quote in illustra- 2o6 On Chinese Proverbs. tion of the text, ' How long halt ye between two opinions ? ' The Scripture proverb, ' Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth ; ' and that other, ' Let not him that putteth on his armour boast himself as he that putteth it off,' in Chinese appear thus, — ' Kying yis t'eh-diao 'a teng mah Teh cu ming jih c'iin feh c'iin : ' You doff your shoes and hose with night's return, But who shall say you '11 don them with the morn ? Or thus, — ' Tsao zong peh cii moen-zong z : ' You can't tell in the morning what will happen at night. Our common saying, ' To-morrow never comes,' is almost repeated in Chinese. Nyih 7iyih yiu ming-tsiao, say they : ' Every day has its to-morrow.' Our meteorological observations find their counterparts in China. The country saying, that snow-drifts under hedges are wait- ing for more snow to join them, reappears in Chinese country talk, — ' SeuS t^ng seu6,' say they. Snow waits snow. On Chinese Proverbs. 207 Our weather-wise saw, ' If it rains before seven 'Twill shine before eleven, in Chinese runs thus, — ' K'ae meng yii Veen 'eo zing : ' If it rains when you open your door 'Twill shine when your breakfast is o'er. And that phenomenon which most EngHsh observers must have noticed, namely, a short cessation of rain during rainy weather, and a brief sunshine just at noon, followed by heavier and more persistent rain, has not escaped the notice of the Chinese : ' Hyih hyih tsiu Loh nyih ts'eo,' they say. At noonday, if the pattering stops, Till next day's noon descend the drops. One solemn proverb occurs to me, showing the fear the Chinese have of future punishment : ' Tso ts'in nyin kyii feh jU tso ih nyih nying : ' One day's earthly life is better than a thousand days in hell. 208 On Chinese Proverbs. In terrible contrast this to the Psalmist's desire, 'A day in Thy courts is better than a thousand ;' ' I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.' These specimens, but a few out of a store which must be exhaustless, will be sufficient, I hope, to draw attention to the interest belong- ing to this, as to every subject connected with the ancient land of China. For any mistaken theories which I may have started, I can but plead a Chinese proverb in extenuation. I trust that those who follow me will do better, for ' Zin jiin we 'eo jiin ngaen : ' The front boat is eyes for those behind. APPENDIX. The following little Pieces were, with the exception of the fifth and sixth, contributed to the ' Church Mission- ary Gleaner,' between the years 1862 and 1870. The Missionary Hymn of Fraise is by the Author's bro- ther, the Rev. H. C. G. Moule, and appears also in his ' Poems on the Acts of the Apostles' {^published by Messrs. Deighton, Bell, &= Co.). ■ CHINA, A.D. I. [These lines were suggested by a Chinese Buddhis- tic legend, referring to the introduction of Buddhism into China in the first century of our era.] They say that in that wondrous time When heathen oracles were dumb ; When earth, as tired of sinning, looked And longed for Him that was to come ; P 2IO Appendix. Eve after eve, as sank the sun From China's boundless plains to rest, Strange, radiant, rainbow-tinted clouds Hovered above the fading west. Again and yet again, as rolled The fires of day toward the west. Those radiant clouds of mercy hung, And beckoned China to the Blest. Here by bright cloud, and there by star, Far shining with benignant ray, The outlooking. silent skies would point To where their infant Maker lay. Passed that strange month ; again the sun Sank to his rest in burning gold, In pallid mist or rolling cloud. And evenings faded as of old. One rose, and, wandering westward, sought Old India's temples, rich and rare ; And heard, up-breathed to gods of stone, The Buddhist Bonze's muttered prayer. Back to the Flowery Land he hied. With priest and charm and idol-form ; Uprose the land to greet her guests : The sun went down 'mid circling storm. Appendix. 211 Ah ! had he farther pressed, to where, Beside the Gahlaean sea. He spake as man ne'er spake before ; Ah ! had he pressed to Calvary ! Enough ! the blind who would not see, Nor heed the beckoning hand of heaven. Who chose man's handiwork for God, — To them long years of gloom were given. The gloom is breaking : come, oh, come, From yon dear land of Gospel day ; Let China's centuries of tears In rainbow glory pass away. LIN-DAH'S DREAM. Extract from the Rev. A. E. Moule's Journal : — ' About three weeks ago I visited our out-station, Dao-kong-saen, a town on the borders of the lakes, lying some twelve miles south of Ningpo. Here we have six Christians, and among them is an old blind woman. On this occasion I asked her how she did. " Pretty well," she said, " but I can't see yet. I dream every night that when morning comes I shall see." " So you will," I answered ; and then I talked to her about this dark world, and the land of light to which we are journeying.' 212 Appendix. Night fell upon the lake's calm breast ; The aged woman sank to rest, And closed her sightless eyes. She dreamed ; an Angel gently spoke ; He said, that when the morning broke She'd see with glad surprise. The morning smiles across the lake ; The gentle ripples flash and break Upon the peaceful shore ; And can old- Lin-dah's dream be right. Blind 'mid the early sunbeams bright That through the window pour ? ' Fear not,' I said, ' your dream is good And true, if rightly understood ; Though yonder sun rides high, 'Tis night still in this world of woe, Nor know we yet as we shall know In bright eternity ! ' And I, with seeing eyes, am blind. And sightless all are all mankind, And hidden their delight : Sometimes, like lightning cleaving heaven, A glimpse of jo)^ to come is given. Then falls a deeper night. ' We cannot tell the way we go ; God's plans of wisdom who can know, Appendix. 2 1 3 His justice and his love ? We grope and stumble in the gloom, And yet we hope beyond the tomb To see, to know, above. ' Jesus, the Sun of brighter skies. We cannot see with these blind eyes, Yet can we catch His glow ! Can feel His love like sunbeams pour. And hear, like ripples on this shore, Life's river softly flow. ' Fear not, the night will soon be gone ; Methinks I see the blush of dawn, His voice is on the wind ; And you shall see Him as He is, And greet, in that first flash of bliss, The Healer of the blind.' So spake we, and when prayer was done I left old Lin-dah in the sun. Waiting for dawn of day ; The hour when weariness and pain, And darksome fears lest hope be vain, With night shall pass away. And, parting, as I gazed around On towns and villages that crown'd 214 Appendix. The margin of the lake, I thought, old Lin-dah's dream shall be True, too, for us, and we shall see, When heaven's fair morn doth break. As when the battle roars at night, We cannot see how goes the fight, Which side begins to yield ; But with the dawn, when comes our King, The shout of victory shall ring Through all the iattle-fteld. Or, like sad sowers, blind with tears, We labour on through doubts and fears, All fruitless our employ ; But when God wipes the tears away. At breaking of the eternal day, Then we shall reap in joy. THE TIDAL WAVE ON THE DZAO-NGO RIVER, CHE-KIANG, CHINA, NOV. 12, 1867. At noon, while slept the fitful breeze, The dull sail flapping by the pole, We struggled with the ebbing tide. Far off the goal. Appendix. 2 1 5 There came a sound as of the sea ; Above, a rush of gathering wind : We turned, and saw the tidal wave Towering behind. Round swung the boat to meet the shock, The wave's crest struck and struck again ; We tossed and rolled as when the storms Shake yonder main. But soon the troubled stream grew calm. Full, strong, and flowing swiftly on ; We turned, and on its bosom reached Our goal anon. Through the wide earth thy kingdom. Lord, Scarce battles with the opposing tide ; Far off the heavenly breezes breathe ; Thy foes deride ! Oh feeble faith and faint desires, That cry not for Thy saving might. With Hell's gate yawning for Earth's tribes, With Heaven in sight ! Oh let Thy grace, then, like the wave Come from the eternal ocean in ; And break the calm of earthly love, The glare of sin. 2i6 Appendix. It may be that thy coming, Lord, ' By tribulation's angry roar Pre-heralded, shall shake the world From shore to shore. Yet come, and on Thy mercy's breast Through storm or calm, through weal or woe, Carry us thither, where the storms No longer blow. T'lN DONG. ' The dark places of the earth,' says Asaph, ' are full of the habitations of cruelty.' In China it may be said that every lovely spot in the country is filled with the habitations of idols. The religions of China are not cruel religions. Yet China is a dark land ; gross darkness covers the people; and benign and placid as the Buddhist idols and Buddhist priests ap- pear, what cruelty is worse than that of spending one's life in rendering deeper the black cloud of error which shrouds the land, and in riveting more firmly the chains which Satan has bound round the mUHons of China ? I have felt this very much while spending a few days during the hot and unhealthy season in this lovely spot. The scenery here is most enchanting. Noble hills rise on either side of the monastery, which are covered with trees and brushwood to the very summit. Numbers of mountain streams flow Appendix. 217 down amongst the thick foliage, and the fresh, pure water is carried by bamboo pipes to every part of the monastery. Plantations of noble bamboos skirt the hills with a fringe of bright green. From the hill-tops the sea is visible ; and from the highest point the whole Chusan Archipelago, with the long windings of the Ningpo river, a large inland freshwater lake, and the wavy ridges of beautiful hills rolling away into the distance, well repay the toil of a good stiff climb up the rugged paths. But a gloom hangs over this lovely spot. The monastery is there, picturesque indeed; but, to quote the words of Mr. Fortune, while gazing at a similar scene, ' it is a temple to an unknown god, and therefore a cloud, darker than a thunderstorm, broods over the scene.' God is speaking loudly by His beautiful works ; but the priests and people look not to nature's God. The history of this monastery, which lies in the bosom of hills about fourteen miles south of Ningpo, is a curious one. In days gone by, when pirates ravaged the whole coast line, one of the hermits, who used to inhabit these hills, gave himself up to such intense devotion, that he omitted to provide for his daily food. He would have perished from hunger had not a heavenly messenger been sent, who supplied him' with food and praised his devotion. The hermit asked how he could show his gratitude to his bene- factor, and he was directed to build a temple to Buddha, and to call it after the name of the messenger 2 1 8 Appendix. (' T'in Dong,' ' Heavenly Boy.') This establishment soon became very celebrated. An emperor visited it ; and now more than one hundred priests reside here. Should not Christians offer up special prayer for these strongholds of idolatry, that light may penetrate the dark, self-satisfied minds of these teachers of error, of these deluded men, whose life is spent in doing that abominable thing which God hates ? The name of Jesus is not unknown in T'in Dong, but ' we natives,' is the reply of the priests, ' have a different religion from yours.' It must seem strange' to them, and it seems strange but gloriously certain to us, when we tell them that the time is hastening on for every knee to bow at the blessed name of Jesus Christ our Lord. His love in dying in our place seems to strike one and another. Oh, pray, pray for China ; and pray for those who, few in number and helpless in their own strength, are the messengers of the churches to China. God grant that they may be also the glory of Christ ! Year after year the mountain brooks Run singing to the vale below ; Year after jear the gifts of God From heaven to earth unceasing flow. The priest and peasant drink and go. And heed no more the rivulef s chime : They take with open hand the gift. But to the Giver never lift Their praise at even or hour of prime. Appendix. 219 Year after year the mountain trees Put on their leafy April-crown, Or scatter in the autumn winds Their shower of gold and scarlet down. ' Life from the dead,' in springtide hours. The green woods whisper up the hill : ' Death after life,' the falling leaves Rustle, and float on the downward rill. Unheeding sit the monks below, And mutter prayers to senseless clay : Lord, wilt Thou open their slumbrous eyes, And hasten the dawn of eternal day : And lift beyond these hill-tops fair, Their praises to Thy fairer throne ; And, while heaven's harps responsive ring. Cast every tottering idol down ? Year after year along the hills The sea-mist hangs, the thunder-cloud lowers ; When will the mists of idolatry burst, The whole creation no more be curst. And Christ's beams shine thro' this world of ours ? Written at T'in Dong, Aug. 1862. 220 Appendix. TO THE HOLY SPIRIT. A MISSIONARY HYMN. O Holy Ghost, our God, our Lord, By all the hosts of heaven adored. Stoop down and teach us how to raise, With human voices, songs of praise. Thou, with the Father and the Son, Lord God of Hosts hast reigned alone. Without beginning, change, or end ; Our Maker, Comforter, and Friend. Thou givest life to all, and we Receive our second life from Thee ; This world of wonders was Thy plan ; O raise Thy fallen temple, Man. When at Thy word the winds set free Tossed into life the slumbering sea, Thy praise was sounded in the roar Of waves first breaking on the shore. The wind swept through the world, and swayed The woods in foliage fresh arrayed ; They clapped their hands, and joined to raise To Thee, blest Spirit, songs of praise. Appendix. 221 And when the winds assuaging curled The watery waste that drowned the world, When one by one rose up the trees, And laughed once more in sun and breeze ; When man's voice echoed o'er the plain. And birds sang to the hills again ; The risen world combined to raise. To Thee, blest Spirit, songs of praise. Like shapeless earth and darkened sea. My heart was waiting. Lord, for Thee ; Thy coming moved the waters' face. Up rose the Sun of Righteousness. Thou lead'st me on from strength to strength. In Zion I shall stand at length ; So from my pilgrim-house I'll raise. To Thee, blest Spirit, songs of praise. In ruins by sin's rising sea The nations lie, remote from Thee ; And error whelms them like the wave, Nor voice nor arm of man can save. . Come, Holy Spirit, breathe again, The breath of life on drown'd and slain. Stir the dead dust, bring bone to bone. And raise a people of Thine own ! 222 Appendix. So choirs of angels and of men Shall make heaven's arches ring again ; And shout through everlasting days, To Father, Son, and Spirit praise. WRITTEN AT LIN-HWO-EN, IN THE CHE-KIANG HILLS, APRIL 1865. Is this the world on which the curse Has laid its black and withering finger ? But sure among the ruins yet The bloom and breath of Eden linger ! For see, in beds of many hues. All up the hills azaleas glowing ; And, odour-laden from the south. The breeze of Spring is gently blowing. The woodman sees from year to year The hills in floral beauty burning, And binds the flowers amongst his load. No thankful glance to heaven upturning. The stones cry out, for man is dumb ; Above, the fair Westeria bending. Below, the borage azure-eyed. Their silent notes of praise are blending. Appendix. 223 How comes it that a world so fair Is ruled by Adam's race hard-hearted ? Unthankful for the flowers of Spring, Unthawed by Winter's frown departed ? How is it ? but that He whose hand Clothes the old hills in gorgeous raiment, More than His other works loved man. And lived, and died, and rendered payment ; And purchased for the frost-bound world A spring time of eternal glory ; — Earth's beauties and the bloom of heaven. Go read their cause in Calvary's story. A MISSIONARY HYMN OF PRAISE. Chief Shepherd of Thy people. We own with joy the union Of souls that know, where'er below. The Spirit's blest communion. Our voices join the concert. The strain of rapturous cadence. That springs and rolls between the poles Swift as the solar radiance. 224 Appendix. When o'er Pacific billows The Sabbath wakes in glory, Their praises due Thy scattered few In China sing before Thee : They sing : and westward ever The daylight speeds the chorus, From Burmah's shore to far Lahore, From Araby to Taurus. Anon awakening Europe Begins her loud devotion ; Her song that flies from Lapland's ice To Moorish gates of Ocean : And hymns from Britain mingle With voices gathering ever Where rises bright Leone's height, Where Niger pours his river. Soon as the arch of morning Atlantic waves embraces. From zone to zone before the Throne Ascend Columbia's praises : And onward swells the echo. On southern waters flying. To blend with songs of island tongues. From rock to rock replying. All, all as one we praise Thee, Great Giver of salvation ! Whose equal grace nor time nor place Nor language knows nor nation. Appendix. 225 We praise — and wait imploring Thy hour of final favour : Call in Thine own ! Reveal Thy Throne ! And o'er us reign for ever ! H. C. G. M. LONDON • Strangewavs and Walden, Printers, 28 Castle St, Leicester Sq. y:?-i,wj-fcH;,'^;:.^f'Jjw;,V>j^>o*¥ Si: W iyft^p4fH>'?* ■'w :i> * ^ »>» . J?y»»>^^^^4^*!>W4V:?MiM*e;*«»««>»^ IliilCilGTiillPPI