Report on THE CHINA MISSIONS of the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, ROBERT E. SPEER, Secretary, \ PRINTED FOR USE OF THE BOARD AND THE MISSIONS. \ (Tbe JSoarD of jforelgn /Hblsstons of tbe Presbyterian Cburcb In tbe "Gl. S. B. 156 Fifth Avenue, New York. 1897 S', ri , PRINCETON, N. J. % Presented by W\ T"^ ;^\(SX .VVs6^ \A- \ c7\r^ A BV 3415 .37 1897 Speer, Robert E. 1867-1947. Report on the China mission] of the Presbyterian Board ANALYS IS OF REPORT. ^%g^J^^' I. — Introductory and historical 3-4 II. — Present extent and condition of the wurk 4-16 1. Evangelistic 5-8 2. Educational 8-11 3. Medical Ii-i6 III. — Difficuliies and conditions .. .. 16-21 t. Magnitude of country and population. .. 16 2. The language 16 3. The Chinese classical education 17 4. The popular religions 17 5. Chinese exclusiveness 18 6. Chinese character . 19 7. Is China awakening ? 19-21 IV. — General problems of the whole field 21 1. Problems of the Church 21-37 a. How to present Christ to the Chinese 21 b. Terms of entrance 22 c. Church discipline. ... 23-25 a', flow to train the native Christians 25-27 e. Native workers ... 27 /, Organization and simplicity 27-29 g. Self-support 29-34 h. Ecclesiastical relation of missionaries 34-36 t. Methods of direct evangelization 36 2. Problems of the school 37-55 fi. The aim of mission education 38 b. Character of training . 38 c. Theological instruction. 39 d. The use of the C hinese classics 39-42 f. Teaching English .... 42-46 /. Self supp-)pic element in Missions 59 4. Comity 60-63 5. Property... 63-65 6. 1 he Shanghai Press 65-72 7. Use of political influence 72-75 8. Financial 75~76 V. — Problems and policies in special Missions 76-82 1. Canton Mission 76-78 2. Hainan Mission 7S 3. Central China Mission 78-80 4. Shantung M issions 80-81 5. Peking Mission 81 VI. — Missionaries 82 1. Furloughs and vacations 82 2. Spiritual life 83 3. Salaries, homes, etc ... 84-87 4. Language study 87 5. Independent Missions 88 VII. — Conclusion 88-90 I. Introduction. I submit herewith my report on my visit to the Board's Mis- sions in China. During the four months April, May, June, and September spent in China I visited all of the seven sta- tions of the Central China and East Shantung- Missions, and of the eight stations of the Canton, Hainan, and Peking Missions all but three, one in each Mission, but was unable in the time available to visit any of the West Shantung stations. I was present at some of the sessions of the mission meetings in Central China and Peking. Four months are totally inade- quate for a thorough study of the mission problem in China in all the details in which that problem is developing in the great Empire, but I have tried by the use of every available resource, and with the most generous help of the missionaries of our own and other Churches, to describe to the Board some of the funda- mental elements of the problem as they present themselves in connection with our own work. Nothing could surpass the kindness of our missionaries as we visited their stations and travelled to and fro. There was nothing they could do which they did not do. They laid bare their work and all its diffi- culties and problems as thoroughly as the time would allow. There is something most stimulating and reassuring in the way the missionaries everywhere challenge scrutiny and criti- cism from any one who wuU be friendly and who will try to be just. Our own work has come to be, in the fifty-five years of its history, representative of all the conditions met with in mission work in China. It <|egan, in a sense, in 1837, when, in less than two months after Me organization of the Board, Mr. Orr and Mr, Mitchell sailed for Singapore to work among the Chinese there while awaiting an opportunity to establish a Mission on Chinese soil. These first missionaries never reached China, but in 1842 the Rev. Walter M. Lowrie and Dr, J. C. Hepburn removed from Singapore, the treaty of Nanking, made the same year at the close of the Opium War, having opened Can- ton, Amoy, Ningpo, Foochow, and Shanghai to foreign resi- dence. Macao, then as now a Portuguese colony independent of China, was the starting point, and it was decided to estab- lish stations at Canton, Amoy, and Ningpo. Dr. McCartee successfully established the latter in 1844. Though Morrison had come to China in 1807, there were in 1844 less than a score of missionaries in the country; in Shanghai, Amoy, and Hong Kong missionaries of the L. M. S.; in Amoy and Hong Kong, of the A. B. C. F. M. The American Episcopalians were in Amoy, and in Hong Kong the A. B. M. U. had several mis- sionaries, among them Issachar J. Roberts, subsequently so romantically associated with the rise of the Taiping rebellion. In opening our station in Canton, Dr. Happer and Mr. French secured a residence in 1847, but they were able only by stealth to visit neighboring streets, and only two years later did they suc- ceed in renting a chapel "in a long, dark alley." After a few years the station in Amoy established by Dr. Hepburn in 1843 was abandoned. In 1 850, however, Shanghai was occupied from Ningpo, and when the treaty of Tientsin in i860 brought to a close the "Arrow War," legalized Christian Missions, recognized the rights of converts, and opened new sections of the country, other stations were established, at Hangchow by Dr. Nevius in 1859, at Tungchow by Dr. Nevius in 1861, and at Peking by Dr. Martin, who had played an important jjart as interpreter in the negotiations concluding the war, in 1863, and at Chef 00 first by Dr. McCartee in 1862 and then permanently by Dr. Corbett in 1865. Our remaining stations were occupied as follows: Can- ton Mission, Lien Chow 1S91, Kang Hau 1892, Yeung Kong 1893; Hainan Mission, as a branch of the Canton Mission, 1885, now has two stations, Hoihow (or Kiung Chow) 1885, and Nodoa 1889; Central China Mission, Soochow 1871, Nanking 1875; West Shantung Mission. Chinanfu 1872, Wei Hien 1883, Ichow- fu 1891, Chining Chow 1892; Peking Mission, Paotingfu 1893. The first inquirer was baptized at Ningpo in 1846. The first church was organized in 1845 at Ningpo; the second in 1861 at Yu Yiao; and the third in 1862 at Canton. In the half- century which has passed, and in the lifetime of Dr. McCartee, who established the Ningpo station, and who is now connected with the East Japan Mission, this little work has spread from Kwangtung to Chili, and includes now 185 missionaries, 511 native workers, and 72 organized churches with a membership of 8,000. The whole mission enterprise in China has moved forward proportionately. Dr. Baldwin, of the Methodist Church, says that when he came to Foochow in 1859 there were II members of the Methodist Church in China; now there are 13,000 Christians in the Foochow field alone. When Mr. Lees, ot the L. M. S. at Tientsin, came to his station thirty five years ago there were not, he says, twenty Christians north of theYang- tsze; now there are not less than 30 000. When Dr. Muirhead came to Shanghai in 1847 there were not twenty Christians in all China; now there are 80,000. The tide is slow, but there is nothing on earth that can stay it, and it is a tide with no ebb. II. Present Extent and Condition of the Work. Our Missions lie in the provinces of Kwangtung, Che- kaing, Kiangsu, Shantung, Chili, and the island "of Hainan, and all their work is in these districts, with two exceptions. From Lien Chow, in the Canton Mission, itinerating trips are made into Hunan; and from Nanking, in the Central China Mission, journeys are made into Anhm. Other agencies are at work in all of these fields. In ten of our nineteen stations other missionary bodies are working, but all of these ten, except Tungchow and Chefoo, are great cities, and all of them give access to vast populations — 17,000,000 in Kwangtung, 26,000,- 000 in Chekiang, 37,000,000 in Kiangsu, 28,000,000 in Shan- tung, 28,000,000 in Chili, 2,000,000 in Hainan, with 34,000,000 in Anhui and 18,000,000 in Hunan. It would not be mislead- ing to say that, from a comparison of the different agencies, we may be held responsible for 50,000,000 as constituting our proportion of the multitudes in these fields. The inadequacy of the attempt to discharge this responsibility with 185 mis- sionaries and $175,000 for the support of themselves and their work annually is sufficiently evident. A brief general survey of the great departments of the work will be desirable, though the division lines must not be pressed over-much. I. Evangelistic. The following table will indicate the force devoted to purely evangelistic work in the different Missions: Com- Ordained Ordained Unordained muni Ministers. Women. Natives. Natives. Churches. cants' Canton 7 4 3 78 16 1^651 Hainan 4 2 . , 2 i 3^ Central China... 10 8 17 20 19 1^254 East Shantung. . 4 i 5 39 12 1,155 West Shantung. . 9 5 4 38 o 3520 Peking 5 4 3 7 4 373 I have not included those married women whose hands are filled with home cares, though their influence weighs powerfully in the sphere in which it is felt. The evangelistic force uses every method — street chapels, preaching in the street, in shops, at markets, on boats, house-to-house visitation, sale of litera- ture; itineration by boat, cart, chair, mule litter, donkey, or afoot; ragged Sunday-schools, inquirers^ classes, evangelistic day-schools, museums, English classes. It avails itself of everything — the government examinations, dispensaries, fre- quented temples, the farmers' season of idleness, crowded passage boats, ferries, and inns. Its business is the oral teach- ing of the Gospel. It is not a simple business. The heredi- tary, ingrained notions of the Chinese make the Gospel difficult of understanding, and repugnant when understood; and it requires great patience and pluck year after year to press the same simple truths upon unresponsive streams of stolid men in chapels or on the street, as it requires grace and sacrifice to spend months away from home among the villages in an at- mosphere of utter depression and despiritualizing deadness, declaring the Gospel to men to whom its fundamental ideas are either entirely novel or seem manifestly untrue. That so large a proportion of the mission force has, in spite of all the difficulties, continued in the direct evangelistic work is very encouraging. As products of this work, aided by the medical and educa- tional work, 72 organized churches have been developed, with 286 out-stations where Christianity has gained effective ground. It may fairly be asked, however, whether the Christians enrolled in these churches and out-stations are genuine. A just reply would admit (i) that there is among the Christians com- paratively little deep moral sense of guilt or conviction of sin. There is a mental assent to the Scriptural teaching, but little deep experience. (2) The Gospel is the *'daoli," thedoctrine, to the Chinese Christians. They regard it as a new teaching, a system of truth which they have accepted as an external code rather than as a personal life in Christ, a personal walk with the Saviour. (3) Many of them have brought over into the Church much of their old opinion. Especially the Con- fucianists have done this, and a great deal of exposition of the Gospel on the part of the Christiansis tinged with Buddhism or Confucianism. Many of them believe they are holding only old truth. To a remark of Dr. Nevius to one such, an old man, " I am very anxious for you,'' the old Christian, who believed Dr. Nevius was in danger of slighting some truth, replied: "And I am very anxious for you." (4) There are many sad failures and disappointments, even trusted preachers proving false. And these failures hurt the Church. In at least six different companies of native Christians the first answer to the question. "What are the objections of the heathen to Christianity?" was: "The lives of some Christians. '^ (5) Among the Christians devotional habits, family worship, personal efforts to bring others to Christ, are greatly neglected. (6) Unworthy motives are at the bottom of much apparent inquiry about Christianity and of some profession of it. I asked the summer class of preachers and teachers at Chefoo about these, and they enumerated: the hope of employment or gain, the desire -for prominence in the village or reputation as the head of the new religion, desire to have in the courts the supposed advantage of Christian influence, wish to spite some relative or to avoid the payment of debts. But could not most of this and much more be said against Christians at home ? While, on the other hand, scarcely any tests of Christian faith and life are met by home Christians which are not exceeded in severity by the trials Chinese Christians are meeting con- stantly and with joy. We met in Lien Chow a Christian who had been with Mr. Lingle in the persecution in Hunan when he was arrested and threatened with the loss of his inheritance unless he would abjure Christianity. This he refused to do, and was constant, though he was forced to sign away his prop- 7 erty and was nearly sawn asunder. And thousands are meeting the far severer test of the duty of a quiet, godly life. The general judgment of the missionaries seems to me to be tem- perate and just, that in zeal and in sincerity the native Christians are not behind, and may even claim a place in advance, of Christians at home. " Few as they may be when all told," says a rather sharp critic, Mr. Michie, in " Mission- aries in China," "and mixed as they must be with spurious professors, it is a gratifying fact which cannot be gainsaid that Christians of the truest type — men ready to burn as martyrs, which is easy — and who lead ' helpful and honest ' lives, which is as hard as the ascent from Avernus, crown the labors of missionaries, and have done so from the very begin- ning. It is thus shown that the Christian religion is not essentially unadapted to China, and that the Chinese character is susceptible to its regenerating power." The great majority of the Christians live in the country and have been reached by itinerating work or through native evangelists. The field for such work is unlimited. From the top of one hill in " The Four Districts " in Kwangtung I counted 7S9 villages. A circle drawn around Soochowas a centre, with a radius of thirty miles, would contain, it is said, more than 10,000,000 people. Wherever such work has been done thor- oughly and systematically the greater results in our work have been obtained. The Canton, Ningpo, Wei Hien, and Chefoo fields are the four most successful fields, and their success .has been due to their patient, resolute evangelistic work. I under- stood the secret of the success in Shantung when, within one week after his return from America, I saw Dr. Corbett start off on a three months' evangelistic tour. The general relation in which our evangelistic work stands to that of the other larger societies at work in China may be seen from the following table, the figures being from the China Mission Hand-Book. They are not wholly accurate and are not the most recent, but will serve for a comparison, with this im- portant reservation, that the remarkable movements in Fuh- kien and Manchuria are not accounted here as yet: Ordained and Unordained Ordained Unordained Comrauni- Missionaries. Women. Natives. Natives. Churches. cants. L. ^i- S 34 14 8 97 76 5,117 A. B. C. F. M 39 14 9 43 25 2,379 Presb. Bd 41 34 24 130 45 6,097 CM. S 32 53 17 119 12 3,547 M. E. North 37 16 77 193 139 11,501 English Pres 19 19 11 79 43 4,150 C.I. M 219 316 12 116 134 4,234 Of the C. I. M. male missionaries only 31 were ordained. 8 The work has grown away from these figures, but they illus- trate the general relation of the Missions before the publication of the Hand-Book in 1896. 2. Educational. The following table will show the force engaged in educa- tional work: Men Native Missionaries, Women. Teachers. Canton 2 5 46 Hainan i 3 4 (?) Central China 5 7 60 East Shantung 3 2 83 (?) West Shantung 2 2 102 (?) Peking i 2 11 The educational work may be set forth as follows: Boys' Bdg. Girls' Bdg. Day Schools. Pupils. Schoolsr Pupils. Schools. Pupils. Canton 2 126 2 200 35 704 Hainan i 20 2 16 i 17 Central China. . . 5 177 3 99 42 1,001 East Shantung. . 3 156 i 34 42 346 West Shantung.. 2 78 2 ■li'h 1°° (?) 1,116 (?) Peking I 40 I 35 8 79 The Boys' Boarding Schools are located at Nodoa, Lien Chow, Shanghai, Soochow, Hangchow, Nanking, Chefoo, Tungchow, Wei Hien, Chinanfu, and Peking. There is also abnormal school at Chefoo, and the Presbyterial Academy at Ningpo, under native control, but aided a little from mission funds, should be included, while the Canton Christian College, which has absorbed our old Fati school, still stands in such relations to our Mission as should not preclude its consideration too. These schools vary greatly in equipment and develop- ment, and less in grade. In all of these respects the Tung- chow and Hangchow schools stand easily first, unless in the matter of buildings the Hangchow school is more unsatisfac- torily supplied than the Canton College. Too much credit cannot be given to Dr. Mateer and Mr. Hayes in the case of Tungchow, and to Mr. Judson in the case of Hangchow, for the patience, the ability, and the sacrifice by which "they have worked out such results. Much of the apparatus used by them in_ teaching the natural sciences — and the schools are well sup- plied — they have made with their own hands. A general view of the work of these schools can be gained from this incomplete table, in which the cost is given in Mexi- cans: From Christian homes. Chris- tians. Cost of school to the Board. 28 60 $I,COO (gold) ^"~' 300 in 19 10 800 — 800 5 16 950 48 18 37 21 1,100 870 42 935 876 — — 725 95 100 3,200 34 19 1-177 Pupils. Canton College 106 Lien Chow 12 Nodoa 20 Shanghai 46 Ningpo 35 Soochow 30 Hangchow 53 Nanking 35 Wei Hien 4^ Chinanfu 30 Chefoo 50 Tungchow 1 03 Peking 40 That all the detailed facts may be before the Board, I present also the following table, also incomplete, as to the Girls' Board- ing Schools: Canton Seminary 155 — — 2,110 Lien Chow 20 — — 150 Shanghai 24 16 14 976 Ningpo 43 42 17 1,123 Nanking 26 — 14 725 Chinanfu 9 — — 311 Wei Hien 24 — 23 605 Tungchow 39 26 24 800 Peking 35 26 23 1,014 The other girls' schools at Kiung Chow and Chinanfu are small and embryonic as yet. Of all these the True Light Seminary at Canton is the largest but not the oldest, and as a thoroughly evangelistic school should probably be ranked first. No better educational work is done in China than is done in our schools. None of them pretend to be more than they are, and many of them are far more than they pretend. Whatever their grade may be, they are doing, as a rule, thorough, sub- stantial work. Their general character is consistent with what I would say of the Tungchow College. That institution has led, and leads still, the higher education of the whole Empire. For solidity of work, definite Christian results, and wide-reach- ing influence no other institution in China can compare with it. What it has done and is doing, and what it is, are magnificent monuments to Dr. Mateer and Mr. Hayes, and not less to Mrs. Mateer, who has sunk her own life into the lives of the scores of students who have passed under her influence. No more appropriate sentiment was ever expressed in this land of sentiments than the one inscribed on a large blue tablet in gold letters and presented to Mrs. Mateer by the Christians of Tungchow on her sixtieth birthday anniversary, " The Vene- rable Nourishing- Mother of Heroes." I gained at Tungchow a new conception of what can be accomplished against inde- scribable difficulties by a few lives of definite aim and indomi- table will. The keynote of the College and its work has been thoroughness. It has never tolerated shoddiness or superficial- ity. It has been uncompromisingly and avowedly Christian, and has never graduated a man who was not a Christian. It has been built up for the good of China, and not for the benefit of foreign merchants or the petty government service, and so has done its work in Chinese. " We have not taught English," said Mr. Hayes, " because we don't turn out compradores and tele- graph clerks. We are not doing that kind of work." As a consequence the Tungchow graduates are sought for far and wide as men of solid acquirements, commanding the respect of the Chinese as well as of those seeking knowledge of Western sciences, and this lighthouse on the Shantung coast is shooting its rays through China's darkness from Manchuria to Kwang- tung. All of these schools are unqualifiedly evangelistic. They aim at the conversion of every non-Christian boy and girl, and the production and development of Christian character. They are quite expensive, and there are problems connected with them which I shall discuss later, but they are carried on with positive missionary spirit and aim and result. The True Light Semi- nary was founded in 1872; since then 1,500 women and girls have been enrolled. Many of these were Christians when they came ; 241 of the others united with the Church, 145 have been employed by our own or other Missions as helpers, teach- ers, or Bible women. One of the graduates is the wife of Li Hung Chang's physician. Others are in positions of usefulness, not only in China but in Portland, Vancouver, San Francisco, St. Louis, Washington, Honolulu, Moulmein, Penang, and Singapore. In the Lowrie High School, Shanghai, established in i860, 200 boys have studied for periods ranging from ten months to twelve years. Of those who were not Christians when entering, 93 were admitted to the Church, 11 are in mission employ as preachers and teachers, and 14 are in the Press, including the compradore and foreman. From the Tungchow College, established in 1864, there have been 92 graduates, almost without exception in active Christian work, and a score or more of men whom the College acknowledges, though not graduates, similarly engaged. Since its founding in 1845 at Ningpo, the Hangchow school has sent out 63 graduates and 16 "irregulars." Almost all of these have been mission helpers. In the Fati school, founded in 1885, of the 300 boys or less who were in it from '85 to '96, 65 were taken into the theological course. Of these, 27 took the full course for preachers, while 13 took the medical course under Dr. Kerr. These are illustrative. Of the 814 added to our churches in China last year, 84 were reported as being pupils in our schools. The following tables, adapted from the China Hand-Book, will present a suggestive comparison. The first is for education of boys: No. Day Schools Day School Chin. Teachers. Pupils. No. of Bdg. Schools. Bd. School Chin. Teachers. Pupils. Pupils. Total. 1763 1582 1257 3292 1063 Total Teach- ers, Chin & Foreign L. M. S C. M. S A. B. C. F. M. Pres. Board. Meth. North. 47 128 52 159 33 50 113 52 160 33 1757 1435 946 2621 568 5 5 10 14 9 9 17 42 41 137 3" 469 53 126 99 240 104 The second is for education of girls: L. M. S . . . . C. M. S A. B. C. F. M, Pres. Board. Meth. North. 18 22 792 — — — 792 16 12 243 5 II 227 470 10 10 103 II 17 423 542 50 50 948 10 32 587 11535 5 6 64 5 23 284 1 348 25 32 46 109 41 3. ]\Iedical. The Board has eleven hospitals for men and six for women in China. Women are received also into the four men's hospi- tals where the work is not complemented by distinct women's hospitals. The force of doctors at work in our medical mis- sions is as follows: Men. Women. Men. Women. Canton 4 3 Hainan 2 - Central China - i East Shantung ... 2 - West Shantung... 4 3 Peking 3 i I have not been able to include the large number of native assistants, medical and evangelistic, employed. It cannot be less than 75 or 100, As far as figures can do so, the following incomplete table will show the extent of the work of the hospi- tals and associated dispensaries annually: in- Dispens'iry In- Dispensary patients. Patients. patients. Patients. Canton 1,704 35,981 Wei Hien 371 11,617 Lien Chow. 94 13,457 Chinanfu 198 17,631 Hoihow 240 4,820 Chining Chow — 15,979 Nodoa 28 3,428 Ichowfu 150 11,300 Tungchow . 40 10,199 Peking 86 Paotingfu — 24,497 Women's. Lien Chow. . 51 7,949 | Peking Wei Hien .. . 158 2,851 Chining Chow. 1,874 It will be seen that 3.126 have been treated as in-patients, their confinement bringing them imder the constant presen- tation ot the Gospel at a time when their minds are most free from prejudice and most kindly disposed; and 161,583 have been treated in the dispensaries, where they have heard something of the Gospel while waiting, and have been brought in contact with the beneficent spirit of Christianity, Two other fruits of the medical work should be noted. One is the training of young men and women to be Christian doctors among their own people. Dr. Kerr has trained 79 — two of whom, one a woman, were admitted after severe examinations to practise as fully authorized physicians in the Sandwich Islands — Dr. Neal 10, and Dr. Atterbury 13, while each of the doctors has prob- ably one or more men, in different stages of advancement, who have learned to do efficient work as assistants. Dr. Kerr now has a class of 18 men and 6 women, Dr. Neal a class of 5 m.en. Dr. Coltman a class of 3 men. Some 200 in all have received a whole or partial course under Dr. Kerr. The second inci- dental fruit of the medical work is the preparation of a medical literature. Dr. Kerr has led in this, having himself translated or prepared nearly twoscore volumes, while others have con- tributed also. There was nothing to start with in this depart- ment. The conscientiousness and skill of this medical work cannot be too highly praised. Remote from literature and the rapid progress of medical science, working against inconceivable difficulties in the matter of cleanliness and obedience, poorly supplied often with instruments and facilities, the medical missionaries maintain a remarkably high standard of medical and surgical knowledge and skill, and there are direct evangel- istic results from the medical work, not to speak of the indirect results in promoting kindly feeling and disarming prejudice and dispersing superstition.' No table of these direct results can be presented, but these sample cases will serve as illustra- tions; they are all from the Canton Hospital: (i) Old man converted and now the centre of a C. M. S. station. (2) Another converted went home declaring that he would not worship idols any more. His son said he would follow his example. That was the beginning of one of the most flourishing stations of the Rhenish Society, (3) The work of the Alliance Mission in Ng Chow is beginning upon several converts from the hospi- tal, (4) A blind girl, with one foot gone and with leprosy, was converted in the hospital and committed to memory the New Testament. She is now a resident of the leper village near Canton and a teacher of the Gospel, (5) A patient was cook- ing his rice one morning at the time of morning prayers. Dr. Kerr saw him on his round gathering the patients in, and said: "There is something in there more important than rice; go in and see what it is." "Well," said the man, " I'll do it if there's anything more important than cooking rice." He was 13 converted, and is one of the strongest members of the First Church in Canton, (6) A woman, converted in the hospital named Ip-Kan-Ning-, carried the truth to her home, was the nucleus of a church which met in her house, over whose door, instead of the usual good-luck papers, were the words: '' The house of those who believe in Jesus." These are a few of in- numerable illustrations. The medical work especially commends itself, and the whole mission enterprise, often, to fair-minded men resident in the East. As a very practical instance of this. I report herewith to the Board a letter from Mr. J. H. Nightingale, of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs at Hoihow, Hainan, received before leaving China, and recommend that the Board express to Mr. Nightingale its sincere appreciation of his kind words and his practical assistance. It is no slig t thing that the medical work begets such confidence. HoiHow, Hainan, South China, August X3th, 1897. I. M. Customs. Dear Mr. Spccr: I make no apology for writing to you, as I believe my subject and reasons for so doing will interest you. During your recent travels you doubtless met many who were never happy but when they were loudly fault-finding with missionaries and their work. You can probably count on the fingers of both your hands those who found pleasure in defend- ing them and their work. I beg you will include me among the latter. An article of mine was recently published in the Hong Kong Daily Press (June 17th). I now enclose the part which refers to your Mission here, as I think you may like to hear what a friendly outsider has to say of the work on this island. I have lived in China fifteen years, and during that time have had a great deal to do with missionaries. Now to my point. I called upon the members of your Mission here recently, and then heard Mr. Oilman and Dr. McCandliss discussing the need of a few small wards where patients suffering with the more obnoxious diseases, such as dysentery, contagious fevers, offensive open sores, and those likely to die, etc., might be attended to. It was said that owing to the lack of such wards many Chinese who had come a considerable distance were reluctantly turned away. When I heard this the conviction was immediately thrust upon me that by turning away such cases the Mission was doing itself an obvious and almost irreparable injury, and was losing a golden opportunity of demonstrating to the Chinese people what Western medical skill can do. The Chinese have unbounded faith in the skill of a foreign doctor, so when they are turned away from the hos- 14 pital they very naturally conclude that their case is quite hopeless. They then resort to some so-called Chinese doctor, and, maybe, make a good recovery. In such a case what becomes of the foreign doctor's fame ? Then just imagine the disappointment of a man who has travelled miles of weary road, arriving tired and footsore at an hospital with some loathsome disease, only to find that no provision has been made for such cases as his. There is nothing for it but for him to turn his face homeward and carry the news that the power of the foreign doctor is limited. Imagine how heartsore a humane doctor must be when he must turn such cases away. He cannot do otherwise, for if he admitted them the other patients would no doubt leave. Besides, the hospital cannot be made a pest-house. As I listened I felt my heart glow with pity, and I decided to do what I could. I inquired how many dollars were required to build the wished- for wards, and was told that from four to five hundred Mexican dollars would cover the cost of such a place. As I took my leave I decided I would mention this great need to a few of my intimate friends, firmly believing that it was only necessary to point out the want, when the money would be given. The response to my appeal was at once both generous and cheerful. I therefore resolved to do my utmost to raise the whole sum. My faith was fully justified, for we have collected six hundred and six- teen dollars from foreigners and Chinese. I send you a list of the donors. You will see from it how very representative it is. In justice to the members of your Mission, I will here state that not one of them solicited a single cent. It was most amusing to see the look of astonished pleasure upon the face of Dr. McCandliss when I told him how much was collected. You are aware that this is a very small place, having but few foreign residents. He therefore had good reason to be aston- ished. I would ask you to believe that this money is a spontaneous tribute, not to any individual member of your Mission here, but to the good and steady work your Society is doing through them. As I have already said, I have resided in China fifteen years and have lived both in the north and south of this vast Empire, and this is the only instance I know of where money has been given to any Mission unsolicited by a member of it. You ought indeed to be proud of such men and women when they can inspire such a gift, for, remember, not one of the givers is a professing Christian. I claim no merit for my part, and my only reason for writing is that you may know how greatly your people here are esteemed. I will venture to say of Dr. McCandliss that he is one of the most modest men it has ever been my privilege to meet, and I am glad to say his name is a household word among the Chinese. The other day, when I visited some Chinese mer- 15 chants and told them what was wanted, they gave at once with smiling faces, saying: " This is true charity." It has been said that " if you wish to reach an Englishman's heart you must give him a good dinner." So if you wish to reach the Chinese and break down and remove the barriers which they are so ready and eager to erect, you must heal their sick, quite regardless of ingratitude. The doctor should in every case and at all times be given a free and full hand. I trust the American people will always give generously of their wealth to help on such real, soul-inspiring work. The average attendance at the religious services conducted by Dr. McCandliss in the hospital, both on Sunday and week days, is fifty to seventy. I have attended the service on several occasions on Sunday morning, and have found on each occasion the Chinese taking an intelligent interest in the instructions given. Thus you will see that Dr. McCandliss is making good use of his golden opportunities. The following is a copy of a letter received by Dr. McCand- liss on the 13th inst., and covering a check for ^2 los. : '' London, July 7th, 1897. " Lord Stamford, having heard from Mr. O. E. Paley of the good work which is being done by Dr. McCandliss, has pleasure in enclosing a small contribution toward the building of the proposed new hospital for dysentery, etc., with every good wish." Yours sincerely, J. H. Nightingale. The following table will show the comparative development of medical work in the larger Societies: Med. Med. Chin. Med. Hospital Disp. Men. Women. Asst. Stud. Hosp. Disp. Patients. Patients. Exp. L. M. S 8 4 6 24 9 16 2.393 79,365 $i5.6Si C. M. S 2 — I 5 2 3 1,272 30,760 7.649 En^-. Pres.. 7 1 10 iS 7 5 5.03S 54.254 7.533 A. B.C. P.M. 10 4 — n 2 10 1,690 52,107 1,120 Pres Bd 10 7 17 39 7 10 2,543 125.452 7.S64 Meth. North 6 5 2 I 7 6 1,692 42.26S 1,608 These figures are for the year 1893. There has been im- mense growth since then. The figures for dispensary patients, if reduced to first visits or distinct individuals, were as follows: L. M. S., 39,139; C. M S.. 22,772; Eng. Pres.. 19,349; A. B. C. F. M., 22,177; Pres. Board, 23,776; Meth. North, 5,064. Without touching upon the immense work of the press, translation or preparation of books, participation in Bible revi- sions, the great property interests of the Board, or the vast i6 machinery of our evangelistic, educational, or medical work, all of which will be treated in connection with the special problems of the work, I have sketched the main outlines of our enter- prise to show its extent and substantial character. I do not believe any Missions in China are doing- better work than our own are doing. The missionaries are a magnificent body of men and women; some of them of most exceptional abilities, and almost all of them of great devotion and sound and attractive character. I should instinctively trust their judgment. What- ever commends itself to them in the matter of mission method is entitled to a great weight of presumption in its favor. But be- fore proceeding to discuss the questions of mission policy which arise, something should be said of the difficulties and conditions of the work. III. Difficulties and Conditions. 1. The Magnitude of the Country and Population. — The area of China, including its dependencies, is over 5,000,000 square miles, or one-eleventh of the land surface of the globe. The Eighteen Provinces cover about 2,000,000 square miles, or two- thirds the area of the United States, while they contain a popu- lation at least five times as great, and this population is con- gested on the great plains and in the river valleys. An equal distribution of the ordained foreign missionaries would prob- ably give each a parish of 700,000 souls, while the apportion- ment of the people among all the foreign workers, including wives, would charge each with not less than 150,000. If the estimate of 50,000,000 people as constituting our responsibility is correct, then our ordained missionaries would theoretically have to care for 800,000 people each, or each foreign worker would have nearly 300,000. This idea is, of course, absurd, but the missionaries' sense of these multitudes and their utter insufficiency to reach them must be borne in mind in consider- ing their methods and the proportion their mission policy has assumed. That proportion is often the unconscious answer to the question : Is it worth while for me directly to strive to reach 150,000 people scattered over nearly 1,000 square miles? 2. The Language. — There is no common Chinese speech. There is a common written language, which an uncertain but insignificant proportion of the people can read and fewer still iinderstand. The ^Mandarin is the common official language, and is spoken in the large majority of the Eighteen Provinces; but Mandarin is broken into several great divisions, and these into innumerable dialects. Each of our Shantung stations, for example, has its own peculiarities, and each village or grade of labor, almost, has its characteristic patois; still there are four main divisions according to Mollendorff: Kwan,tjtung dialects— e. g.. Cantonese, Hakka etc. . . spoken by 20,000,000 Min dialects — e.g.. Amoy, Fukinese, Swatow, Foochow.etc." '' 20000,000 Wu dialects — c.g.,Wenchow, Ningpo, Soochow, Shanghai " " " 44,000,000 Kuanhua dialects — Mandarin " "300,000,000 17 The dialects differ in difficulty, but all are difficult enough, and out of this difficulty and the many questions arising from their multiplicity and confusion— r.^., the place to be given the Wen-li, or classical written language, which is not a spoken language at all, the use to be made of the written colloquials, the value of local dialect, etc. — influences have sprung which have had their effect on the development of mission policy. It is a great thing that, in spite of these difficulties and perplex- ities, an intelligent Chinese like Mr. Yen could say, "As the Chinese are more ungrammatical speakers of their own lan- guage than the average Western missionary, so are they worse teachers of it than the latter." 3. The Chinese Classical Education. — To the Chinese all wisdom is in the Four Books and the Five Classics of Confu- cius, and all education has consisted in the mastery of these, memorizing them and weaving them into the very texture of the mind, so that all thought and speech and conduct are in the terms and atmosphere of the Classics. To this for twenty centuries the Chinese government has given the powerful sanc- tion of the competitive examination system, which has given the government of the country into the hands of the men most saturated with the Confucian teaching and spirit, and has drilled the Confucian tone and idea into the minds of the Chinese people beyond all human hope of eradication. Every depart- ment of the mission work is affected by this. It presents a temper of atheistic materialism to the evangelist when it does not scorn him with omniscient pride. It erects an ideal of the scholar, drawing a line between the man who knows and the man who toils, which corrodes much of our education. " The graduate of the first degree,^' is its proverb, " without going abroad is able to know all that transpires under the heavens." Its conception of the responsibility of the teacher has its influ- ence on the native preacher. '* I do not open the truth to one who is not eager after knowledge, nor do I help any one who is not anxious to explain himself," said Confucius. " When I have presented one corner of a subject and the listener cannot from it learn the other, then I do not repeat my lesson." Mo- hammedanism is harder to break into, but the persistent pene- trating influence of Mohammedanism on mission method and native church life is as nothing compared with that of Con- fucianism. 4. The Popular Religions. — Confucianism is partly irreligious and unsuperstitious. and yet so full of good ethic that some missionaries think that one reason for the want of more rapid progress is that the people cannot be persuaded of their lack of what Christianity supplies. But a thorough-going Confucian- ist, as Bishop Moule says, is a great rarity. Even the best is deeply tinged with the superstition of the popular religions — Taoism, which from being a high transcendentalism has be- come a system of necromancy, and " in great part consists of a i8 monastic institute for reading liturgical books after the Bud- dhist fashion," and Buddhism, which from meditative quietism has degenerated into the grossest and most mercenary super- stition, and of which Ball says: "It excites but little enthu- siasm at the present day in China; its priests are ignorant, low, and immoral, addicted to opium, despised by the people, held up to contempt and ridicule, and the gibe and joke of the popu- lace. The nuns likewise hold a very low place in the popular imagination." It is not as an ecclesiastical institution or as an organized religion that these forces present themselves. Their power lies in the temper of mind they have produced, which is not disconcerted at all by the fact that it holds absurd or contradictory notions, such, for example, as the belief that the spirits of parents should be worshipped as parents, and that by transmigration these same ancestors may have been changed to snakes or pigs. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism historically are contradictory, but actually they exist together in the Chinese mind, which holds ancestor worship from the first, necromancy and idolatry from the second, and idolatry and fetichism from the third. With such an amalgam of ideas the Chinese are able to say, with reference to almost all Christian teaching: '' Oh, yes, we have that," and would gladly give Jesus a place in their pantheon. This difficult frame of mind, with its flabby or absent sense of sin and divine personality, explains in part the peculiar emphasis given to certain aspects of Chris- tianity. 5. Chinese Kxchisiveness. — The foreigner finds himself in a position in China wholly novel and disconcerting. Everywhere else he is looked up to. Even among Mohammedans, whose religion has dealt with the Christian once for all and given him a place of humiliation, the foreigner is respected and treated wath deference. The superciliousness of caste does not hide Hmdu respect. But in China the foreigner is made aware from the outset that he is the barbarian, the uncivilized, and what he brings is presumptively inferior and not superior, be- cause he brings it. Whatever change has come about has not made this untrue of China as a whole. It is not an aversion to missionaries and Christianity. It is a sense of superiority to all from without. As the Emperor Yung Ching once said to a deputation of foreigners: " China will want for nothing when you cease to live in it, and your absence will not cause it any loss." Or as a Canton proclamation of 1S84 declared: " All dealings with foreigners are detestable ; These men have no father or mother, Their offspring are beasts." It is unnecessary to speak of the way the opening of China tended to increase dislike of the foreigner, or of all the reasons which have strengthened the Confucian exclusiveness and self- sufficiency which have satisfied China with herself and do so still. I only speak of all this because of its influence on our (19 mission policy. It has led to the presentation of Christianity predominantly and primarily from the side of its charitable- ness and benevolence rather than from the side of its divinely authoritative message to the human soul. It has involved the missionary movement in political complications, both in the pro- tection of missionaries by governments and in securing native converts from molestation. It presented such a hard front to mission effort that what were thought to be unremunerative methods of evangelization have sometimes given place to the larger development of methods supposed, so to speak, to give greater grip or purchase. The pure selfishness and material- istic character of the Chinese people contributed to these developments. 6. A word should be said about these unavoidable products of Confucianistn. The Chinese are selfish. It is misleading to think that the altruistic nature of the missionary's mission appeals much to them. They do not understand it so. He lives, be it never so meanly, above them. He has come from a barbarian country to the Celestial Empire. At worst he is laying up great merit for himself in heaven. He has his ends to gain. The Chinese have theirs and will encourage whatever has profit in it for themselves, but a religion whose spirit is," It is more blessed to give than to receive," does not at first com- mend itself. At the same time the idea of charity is quite familiar to the Chinese. But it is scarcely like Christian chari- ty, for it almost invariably contemplates the earning of merit. Pure, unselfish benevolence is almost unknown. The Chinese are materialistic. Millions of them are pinched tight in the great struggle for life. Bodily hunger is a poor preparation for spiritual aspiration. The Chinese are imsentimental, without spiritual nerves, and with the affections of human nature chilled b}^ the artificialities of Confucianism. The 180,000,000 women of the land are servants with no place in true sentiment. The language has no word for kiss, and I met no one who would say that what we call love between husband and wife was more than the rarest thing. No human gospel could find such a foothold as Christianity has gained on such hopeless soil. On the other hand, there is no other race in the world that can compare with the Chinese in patience, cheerfulness, industry, frugality, endurance, capacity for work and suffering — qualities out of which the Spirit of God can make such a Church as has not been built up yet in the world. 7. Is China awakening? There are many who think so, and any one can enumerate signs of progress. A few years ago the railroad built from Woosimg to Shanghai was bought by the Chinese and destroyed. Now several lines are running in Chili province, one straight up to Peking, and the great line from Peking to Hankow and from Hankow to Canton seems certain in the near future. Telegraph lines, at first savagely destroyed by the people, now run between the more important 20 cities. A fresh demand for Western sciences and the English language has grown up since the war with Japan, and has issued, just as the ''Arrow War" produced the Tung Wen College in Peking, in government institutions such as the Imperial Tientsin University, which is on a solid basis, and in an imperial order to the viceroys to establish similar institu- tions in the more important pmvincial capitals at least. Some of the viceroys, like the reactionary governor of Shantung, refused to comply, but others have obeyed. In Hangchow a temple was confiscated, most attractively fitted up, and Mr. Mattox was invited to take charge. This he declined to do, on the ground that he was a missionary and would not leave the missionary work, but he has consented to organize the school and direct it. All missionaries testify to the new demand for English, and Mr. Hayes, of Tungchow, told me that the whole face of things educationally had changed since the war. There is said to be also a growing sentiment against the " Wen-chang," or artificial literary essay, which has been the crown and test of Confucian scholarship and the basis of award in the competitive examinations. A most significant sign has been the great scale on which educational books printed at the Shanghai Press have been pirated by native publishers, reproduced by the photo-lithographic process, and sold far and wide. The general testimony of missionaries also is that where any change is noticeable in the sentiment of the people it is distinctly more favorable to the Gospel. Commercially there does not seem to have been a specially great change. The old forces have just quietly developed, the Chinese every- where pressing silently forward. They already pay 92 per cent of the taxes in Hong Kong and own much of the land. In view of all this, many missionaries say that China has reached a crisis. They hear "the clamor for Western science, they see the establishment of native magazines under viceregal sanction, they read articles in native papers against bound feet, the throb of the railroad violates immemorial fung-shui and beats by ancestral graves. What can it mean but that to the cry of Xavier from Sancian. "O Rock, Rock, when wilt thou open to my Master?" China is at last answering, ** Now. Come in ! ' And they have the history of Japan and India before them and wish to forestall such results here. I would not depreciate the criti- cal importance of any hour or year, but I think it would be ill- advised to distort our mission policy in China under the stress of catastrophic views of mission work in the great Empire. There is undoubtedly a present stir, of which we should take advantage, but there will be no avalanche movement in China. Much was hoped from the Tung Wen Colleges opened in Can- ton, Foochow, and Nanking in 1880. Still more was hoped from the introduction of mathematics into the examinations for the first degree in 1883, in spite of the apologetic tone of the instructions : " Lest the students should think we ask them 21 to do a derog-atory thing in learning- from the works of the barbarians, let them know that the Western nations admit that their knowledge was originally derived from the East, i. ^., from China, so that the students are only receiving back again what was first obtained from us. All the European skill is derived from mathematics; in mastering that science you will acquire whatever knowledge the}^ have." Little came of all this, and the present tide will probably ebb. The common people are satisfied. The literati loathe the idea of change. The rulers have no sincere desire for progress. When a foreign agent in Peking, well able to judge, declares that any man who will spend $500,000 gold can own China, and has his judgment con- firmed by others competent to form an opinion, a condition of affairs exists among the ruling class (some of whom are chiefly responsible for the present stir, save that part of it which rests on the demand for commercial English) which forbids any hope of genuine and maintained encou.ragement of real progress. Yet China will move steadily forward, with her spasms, whirlpools, floods, and ebbs, and we will do best to lay out our mission policy on substantial, sober lines, in view of a critical struggle to last, maybe, for centuries. IV. General Problems of the Whole Field. The difi;erentiating features of the work of each of our six Missions are few and small in comparison with the features that are common, and though there are special lines of policy which are to be followed in each, the main general problems are not peculiar. I. Problems of the CliiircJi. {a) " The greatest of all problems," said one of the strong- est missionaries in Chma, "is how to present Christ to the Chinese, When I was in Shanghai last I met a missionary who said to me, ' Well, Mr. J., have you got any patent way of preach- ing the Gospel? You seem to be having more success than we are. ' ' Well, no,' I replied, ' but we try not to irritate needlessly, and we ground our teaching as far as we can on the reason and sense of man.' 'Oh, bosh!' he said, 'I know that nonsense. The world is damned. Believe and be saved, is my preaching.' It is the great problem. I am working on it constantly.'' As this conversation indicates, the problem is closely connected with the problem of the right attitude to be taken toward the Chinese religions. A few fiercely denounce them and tmquali- fiedly scorn them. At the other extreme are some who are content with kindly enlightening intercourse without much preaching of the Gospel. At all points between are the vast majority who speak respectfully of the Chinese religions, so far as they are sincerely held, as the best that the people have, who recognize and appeal to their truths, and who present lovingly but uncompromisingly the full orbed light of Christ, without concealing its condemnation of the errors which so greatly outnumber the truths it meets. In kindliness of spirit and faithful, effective preparation of the mind for Christ, missionary preaching seems to be admirable, but how to present Christ remains the problem whose solution many are seeking, but few are satisfied that they have found. The whole bent and equip- ment of the Chinese mind make the problem baffling. When Christ is grasped it seems to be in the line of Christ's own words : " Ye believe in God, believe also in me." The average Chinese Christian seems to come to Christ through God, rather than to God through Christ. (b) Terms of Entrance. — Our own missionaries, almost with- out exception, hold high ground here. Many of them have a period of probation for inquirers, during which inquirers' classes are held. The general plan and method of these classes, which might well be held even more generally, are well set forth in a paper presented by Mr. Whiting to the Peking Mission Meet- ing, and presented herewith. Baptism is administered as a rule only after instruction and sifting, and the assurance that in certain matters the inquirer is ready to conform his life to the standard expected in the Church. There are many mission- aries, not of our own Church, who pursue a different practice, and who will administer baptism without receiving an inquirer into church fellowship or to the Lord's Table. They say that baptism is an individual and not a social sacrament, and that they have no right to withhold it from an}^ man making a credible profession of faith. I am glad that our missionaries do not take this view. It may begin with a high notion of the sacramental character of baptism, which often borders, in the inquirer's mind at least, on the idea of baptismal regeneration, but it ends in cheapening the rite and leaving the Church weakened and impoverished. The need of in some way identi- fying the inquirer with the Church is desirable, so that he may be marked in his own mind and the mind of the people as a man who has broken with the old religion and life. But I have seen nowhere a better method of securing this than pre- vails in Northern Korea, where the candidate, at the beginning of his probationary period, stands before the congregation and solemnly commits himself to the Christian faith and life by answers to full, searching questions. At the close of his pro- bation he is received to baptism and the Lord's Supper. This secures the desired open separation from the old to the new far more effectively than it is secured by those who simply cheapen baptism and unwittingl}^ foster a papal view of it. It supplies successive stages of privilege such as are desir- able to encourage growth. It identifies Christianity from the outset, not with a formal rite, but with a holy life. In favor of a more liberal and unexacting entrance to the Church, there are many who point to the methods used in the conver- 23 sion of Europe, and who hold that these best answer to the broad principles on which social movement and human progress rest, or who hold that we have no rig-ht to shut out of the Christian Church any who sincerely wish admission to it. But we aim at something better in these countries than was se- cured in the conversion of Europe, and we shut no man out of the Church, which is Christ's body. As we strive to make our visible Churches like that, without spot or wrinkle, glorious, we take a strange course if we lower their standards or cheapen their significance. At the same time there is the danger that what we gain in negative scrutiny we shall lose in positive force. Such high views as those that rightly prevail in our Missions are likely to chill a new Church slowly growing out of heathenism, and will do so unless it is fired by the spirit of untiring, aggressive evangelism. (c) ChurcJi Discipline. — Those who hold liberal views of admission to the Church, as a rule, but not invariably, hold broad notions of discipline. For the rest, discipline is more faithfully enforced than in the Church at home. Still there is much difference of opinion as to the moral requirements of Christians. Almost all are agreed that no opium-smoker shall be allowed in the Church, although in Manchuria old men and women who cannot break the habit are admitted. A very few are willing to tolerate ancestor worship, but the great majority are utterly opposed to this as the very essence of Confucianism and the root of idolatry and superstition. The practice of Christians in different parts of the country, as to any participation in the ceremonies of the grave-worshipping season, differ. In some parts their participation is not dis- tinguishable to the heathen from their own ceremonies. In other parts — and this seems to be much wiser — the Christians are discouraged from going to the graves at the idolatrous season, but are urged to keep their tombs in such good repair throughout the year as to disprove the charge of irreverence and unfilial conduct, and as to shame the idolaters who are con- tent with one annual repairing of their graves. Very many of the best missionaries, while disciplining a church member for polygamy contracted subsequent to admission to the Church, are quite ready to receive and baptize polygamists whose second or third wives were taken before conversion. I am absolutely opposed to this practice. To recognize polygamy to this extent is to strike at the divine ideal of the family, wherein husbands must love their wives as Christ loved the Church, and is to becloud and destroy right conceptions of the Church. It is of the supremest importance that the visible Church, on a mission field, be kept free of such grievous blemish as po- lygamy. It is safer to err on the side of exclusion than inclu- sion. No man shut out from it is shut out from the Kingdom of Christ thereby. To press a polygamous candidate in this way is not to require him to do injustice to women and their 24 children. He must provide for all whom he has made depend- ent upon himself. It is only to require of him, as an unavoid- able condition of his entrance into the visible Church, that he shall sustain the relation of husband to but one wife. Great difference of opinion prevails as to Sabbath observance. In Manchuria, Shantung, and the missions of the L. M. S., strict Sabbath observance is not required. " Most of the Christians cannot read. They are simple, ignorant people, and, if they could read, would have no literature. To require them to re- frain from all work,"' it is said, " is to insure a profitless use of the day after the morning- worship. The people will only sit about and rehearse villag'e gossip. It is better to let the farm- ers go back to their work in the afternoon, and the shopkeep- ers to their shops, and be usefully employed." Where a choice must be made between spending the day in rehearsing small slander and useful manual toil, "the latter surely is profitable. But, undoubtedly, whenever the idea is given to the people that a lax observance of Sunday is allowed or regarded as unavoid- able, the people will be likely to accord. On the other hand, high ideals of Sabbath observance 'are likely to contribute to the creation of conditions making such observance practicable and profitable. Where the hearts of the people are warmest there seems to be least difficulty, even if they are simple and ignorant. The place of worship has a great attraction for them on Sunday, and when they leave it there is need and opportu- nity for them to spend the rest of the day in telling what they know of the Gospel to others. At the same time it should be said that some of the native preachers greatly overdo the matter, preaching that Sabbath observance is fundamental to Christianity and crowding Christ and His salvation out of their preaching by their vigorous vSabbatarianism. Naturally, differ- ent opinions are held regarding the use of liquor by native Christians or preachers. Temperance is preached, but in some of our Missions abstinence is not pressed on the mission help- ers, to whom there was nothing incongruous in the use of the customary phrase of invitation which, occurring in a notice of a church dedication, invited all " to come and drink liquor." It should be said that the use of rice whiskey or beer is universal in China and that drunkenness is uncommon. The Central China Mission has taken the strongest position in this matter in the rule, " No mission funds shall be used in support of pastors or other Christian workers who are given to wine (Rom. xiv. 2i) or opium, or who practise footbinding or allow it to be practised by those under their control. An exception as to bound feet may be made in case of a woman over 50 years of age." As to participation by Christians in heathen festivals, it may be said that Mr. Angell, when he was Minister to China, secured the release of native Christians from all levies for such purposes; but some would have Christians waive this privilege and pay their assessments to avoid trouble, though not actively 25 participating. Some persecutions have sprung from the re- fusal of Christians to do this. Such refusals may be made in an exasperating way, but when Christians have quietly but firmly declined to have any fellowship with idols the persecu- tions that have ensued have worked out good and not harm. These are fair illustrations of the questions of church morals which arise. In the main they work themselves out in sensible fashion on the field, but it seems to me that the missionaries are entitled to the view that the Church at home should par- ticipate in the responsibility of deciding the broad question, which is coming to be a very practical and vital question: What shall be the terms of admission and the standard of life in the Churches we are establishing? Shall we make them low, taking all who will come, into the Church as a school where the educational forces have fuller play than upon men yet identi- fied with heathenism, tolerating much that is imperfect and of offence in the hope that in time a purer product will be worked out. that children or children's children will start on a higher plane, and that meanwhile Christianity will have had opportu- nity to apply its broad social and moral forces to greater ad- vantage? This is the Roman Catholic view. So tolerantly have they moved in most matters that there are clear eviden- ces of their having allowed original idols to remain, merely re-christening Kwan Kung, St. Joseph, or Koon Yam. the Holy Mother. It is the view of many missionaries in India and China. Some say it was the view of Christ, who said: '^ Let both wheat and tares grow together until the harvest." On the other hand, it is urged that letting tares grow where their uprooting will tear up the wheat is different from deliberately sowing tares wadecast in the hope that they will produce wheat, and that a little work that is gold or silver or precious stone is far better than work that is wood and hay and stubble whose end is to be burned. I feel each year more strongly the force of the considerations on which the former view rests, but in their places I would do exactly what our missionaries in China are doing : try patiently, and with no feverish anxiety for results that are premature in God's provi- dence, to lay solid foundations, to build up slowly a Church of men and women who had been converted and were willing to lead converted lives. Instead of throwing the weight of our influence in favor of the loose view of Christianity as a social force, I would maintain strong emphasis on the individual truths and try to build up from the start a Church of pure life and warm zeal which could challenge scrutiny and show the fruits of faith. Only, as I have already suggested, this view will produce a cold and stiff though pure Church, unless it is accompanied with a fervid evangelistic aggressiveness, which, it is to be greatly lamented, is not a part of the genius of our Church at home. (d) Hon' to Train the Native Ciiristians. — Xext to the prob- 26 lem of larger evangelization ranks this one. In most of our Missions no provision is made for the growth and training^ of the converts. The Missions have provided them with native preachers, who have preached to them and given some instruc- tion, but no provision for systematic development in knowledge and work has been made save in a few stations. In some dis- tricts adaptations of the Methodist class system exist. Some such provision should be made everywhere. Gifts of teaching and service are not developed, and the native Christians, while more active in spreading Christianity than Christians at home, are rather a body awaiting instruction than a positive working force, albeit working in crude ways. In many cases the con- verts become stationary after baptism, whose mystery they look upon as a saving ordinance, with that conception of salva- tion, b}' act or merit, which centuries of Buddhism have ground into them. Insufficient provision is made for the growth of Christians. In one station conference the following plans for training were suggested: (i) Lay responsibility upon church members to teach inquirers and to bring inquirers, and to teach the inquirers to teach, being content with much rough work in the process. (2) Have definite scheme of operations for individ- ual churches and groups of churches, taking time to hold Bible conferences, bringing spiritual pressure to bear upon Christians and having them do actual work. (3) Einphasize Bible reading and study, and introduce the Christians to it practically. (4) Have those who can read teach those who cannot. Prefer to believe that this is possible rather than at once surrender to the objections to it. (5) While men are in the inquirer stage lay on them the responsibility of reaching others. Emphasize the idea of service and evangelization as much as the ideas of know- ledge of doctrine, abstinence from external sin. or conformity to the moral standards of the Church. (6) Have the native preachers organize training classes in their churches, for the training of the people in stud}^ and effort for the unsaved and for growth. In many stations the Christian Endeavor Societies have been useful in awakening slothful Christians, but the necessity of introducing these societies, it seems to me, is to be deprecated. When Dr. Nevius returned to China in 1892, some one asked him what he thought of the C. E. Society as an auxiliary to mission work in China. He replied that it was on the princi- ples of Christian Endeavor that his work and that of the Eng- lish Baptists were carried on, although not called by that name — the principles, i.e., that every convert should be a worker and that his work should be to bring others in. He did not see the need of a new organization within churches that were just being organized and which could be started on right principles from the outset. In many of our stations the Chris- tian Endeavor Society is not a special societ)^ for the develop- ment of the young people, but is the whole church organized 27 under a new name to do precisely what the church shoitld her- self have been doing. Membership in the Church involves all the responsibilities of Christian life and service. Membership in something else cannot increase those responsibilities. We should not foster the idea that it can. "We should train our church members, as church members, to be as intelligent as they can and as active in soul-winning. {e) To do this an element needs to be supplied in the train- ing of our native workers. As a body these workers are good, earnest men. They have their faults. Many have been and many will be disappointments, but they are worthy of confi- dence. In character and capacity they are not surpassed by any body of native workers in China. The large majority have been well trained in our schools, where many have received also some Biblical and theological instruction. The Fati school was a real Bible school. In the Central China and Shantung Missions there are theological classes which are composed of picked men and given thorough instruction. Four classes have been trained in Shantung. The first was composed of nine old Confucian scholars. They never got the Confucianism out, and only one remained in the ministry. The second class was made up of men who had been out in the field at work for eight or nine years. These developed into splen- did men, some of whom the missionaries rank above them- selves in efficiency. The third class was composed of men who had just graduated from the College. This class is esteemed a failure. The men had not had enough rough experience. The present class, which Dr. Calvin Mateer is teaching at Wei Hien, is made up of graduates of the College who have also had experience. Our native workers, whether pastors or evan- gelists, are well prepared intellectually. The needed element is practical. They need to know how to teach the people to study the Bible, and how to organize the people for work and to set them at work. They can only learn this by object lessons given in humble, normal-school fashion, and by coming to feel that they are part of a movement driven by the impulse of a powerful, dominant, aggressive evangelism. (/) The preservation of the greatest simplicity of organiza- tion will contribute to the efficiency of the native Church and the native workers. It is a misfortune to build up the organization or the form more rapidly than the life within will bear. It is far better to let the outer forms come as the irresistible re- quirements of the life within. Dr. McCartee says that at Ningpo they organized a church before they had a convert, and they organized a Presbytery before they had a church. This was an extreme case, but others involving the same principle might be presented. The consequence is that the church and Presbytery are developed from the point of view of ecclesias- tical form rather than of aggressive evangelism. Is it not bet- ter to err on the other side, to keep the organization simple 28 and in the rear of the life developed? I believe that it is, and that it will be a mistake, for example, to freight the infant, feeble church in Hainan with a Presbytery, as some propose, when the only necessity for it is possible ecclesiastical emer- gency which can easily be provided for by some such simple, elastic device as the " session " in Korea. Let the Hainan Presbytery grow out of the real life of the native Church, and not be imposed upon it as an ecclesiastical form which will have a warping influence upon its development. It is most desirable to avoid anything like premature ordinations and premature hardening of organizations. Life, life, life is the great need. This was the core of Dr. Nevius' contention as to mission method. The financial element seems prominent in his views, but it was only negatively and because he felt that the abusive force entered largely there. He believed in building mission work up from the bottom rather than down from the top. The premature development of the organization in the Ningpo field, and the employment of such a large staff of settled pas- tors by the Mission, seemed to him detrimental to the best in- terests of mission work, and he went to Shantung holding such opinions as were expressed at. the last Shanghai conference by Griffith John: " Keep the staff of paid agents as low as pos- sible " ; and by G. L. Mason: "Too big a ratio of preachers to people, too great a ' weight of clergy,' leads to a dry ecclesias- ticism rather than that ideal Christian community in which every soul is a priest of God, As converts increase, the num- ber of those eating foreign rice should decrease." The main points of his policy were the training of the whole Church to worship and work and the slow development of organization, rather than speedy organization with a paid preacher over each little group, relieving the members of the necessity of work and of personal effort for growth. Those who knew most of Dr. Nevius' work and who sympathize with his principles say that it needed, as their own experience has shown, to be guarded in several ways, (i) "The untutored zeal of new converts will not suffice to meet the assaults of trained Confucianism. Therefore the presence of trained teachers from time to time is necessar3\" (2) "New converts cannot maintain worship that is edifying and build themselves up in faith without much assistance. Therefore thorough and constant supervision is necessary." (3) "In fine, a trained ministry and regular church organization are required. Therefore men should be prepared in time for this work." But Dr. Nevius' work was pioneer work and his policies were fitted to pioneer condi- tions, and they readily lend themselves to such adaptations as these. As to the results of Dr. Nevius' work, they were absorbed ten years ago in the work of other stations and have been de- veloped in connection with their work. Although modified in 29 the directions indicated, the views which he held are parts of the policy of the Shantung Missions: (i) To train the whole Church in worship and work; (2) to lay responsibility upon the people, and not to provide places of worship or school houses for them; (3) to support no settled preachers, to support only itinerating, superintending evangelists; (4) to keep the number of paid helpers as low as possible; (5) to support no pastors, but to have such called and supported by the people; (6) to have the initial idea spiritual, and to keep the spiritual idea uppermost. The Central China fission gave expression to this same policy of simplicity and life at its meeting just before we left China: " Resolved, That every Christian be expected to bear witness to Christ and to labor for the extension of the Gospel volun- tarily without pay in his own neighborhood, according to Christ's command and the example of the early Church, and that the Mission depend more and more upon such voluntary service for Christ. '* That at first groups of Christians in separate villages be formed into classes, with leaders chosen from among them- selves; and later, when the local Christian community grows stronger, that churches be organized and elders ordained, such leaders and elders to serve without pay until such time as the church may be able to call and support its own pastor." To define these ideals is a great gain, but it is not their at- tainment. That will depend on the spirit of unresting, in- domitable evangelism in the Mission. [g) Self-support. — Some would solve this problem by carry- ing to an extreme some of the principles that have been sug- gested, using no foreign money and employing no native helpers. While not himself going to this extreme, the reasons that would lead one to do so are well set forth in Mr. Fenn's paper on " Self-support " presented to the Peking Mission and sub- mitted herewith. The wise use of money with native workers is so difficult that a man who is scrupulously conscientious in such matters cannot avoid fear and hesitancy; and even in those Missions where it has been used most a strong feeling has grown up in favor of greater caution, due to the experience of the evils of expenditure on work that is not suifeciently controlled by the missionary or on native laborers who are not adequately superintended. There is a limit to the amount of money which any Mission can use wisely, as wisely as money given as mission funds are, should be used. But there is cer- tainly a right use of money in the employment of native agents, however difficult it may be, and it is wrong to attempt to solve the question of self-support by denying that there is such a right use. It is right to expect Christians to assume the responsibility of providing the means of their own religious worship and life. But we cannot expect unconverted people to 30 support the means of their evangelization, and it is right for Missions to employ suitable native agents to assist them in this work. Yet, though the support by Christians of their own institu- tions of worship and life is a correct principle, it is difKcult in the present circumstances to secure its practical acknowledg- ment. Some of the difficulties in the way of the practical at- tainment of self-support may be enumerated, (i) Outside of the cities the Christians are usually scattered, so that the sepa- rate companies are not strong enough to support the institu- tions regarded as constituting the church. (2) The people either are or are supposed to be too weak to stand without the support of a trained teacher or preacher, for whose mainte- nance they either are not or are supposed not to be able to pro- vide. (3) They are exceedingly poor, in many parts of the country cultivating every foot of ground at its maximum power of produce, utilizing every scrap of food, grubbing every weed and blade of grass for fuel, (4) The preachers and teachers are trained men who could often earn ample salaries in secular employment. Such temptations are increasing with the influx of the forces of civilization and with the increasing cost of liv- ing in many places, as expressed in silver. At Nanking the purchasing power of a dollar is not three-quarters of what it was when the station was established. (5) Buddhism in China is so purely mercenary that from the outset the Gospel was pre- sented as free. Native preachers and Bible women have been accustomed to urge, " You have advantages as Buddhists, You pay for them. You can have greater advantages as Christians, with no priest to pay nor any temple to support." The people are only learning in many places to give. (6) Want of uniformity in policy among different Missions in the same field. Some believe in using money lavishly and in holding the question of self-support in the background. For another Mission in such a field to press the matter is to lose sometimes its preachers and people, who prefer to be associated with a Mission which is more indulgent. (7) The Chinese aversion to regular benefi- cence. They are not accustomed to give as we give. The business genius of the people runs instinctively to endowments. Instead of systematic giving, they almost invariably suggest that they save up until they can buy some land or get a sum that can be invested at interest. (8) Our native workers are good men, but they have been educated as the helpers and em- ployees of the Missions, which they serve conscientiously; but their idea of sole responsibility to the Divine Master is rarer, and the thought that they are the founders and servants of a native Christian Church rarer still. Indeed, there are instances of distinct aversion on their part to this last idea. Some would rather serve a Mission, with its sure and often liberal pay, than a weak native Church, sharing whose hardships their pay would be frugal and uncertain, (9) Misunderstanding, When 31 missionaries try to introduce the right principles in this matter they are often regarded as unsympathetic and stingy, and op- posed to the kindly, liberal spirit of the days when, perhaps, all was done for the native Church and it was pressed to do little. (lo) The indistinctness of the line of demarcation be- tween the functions of the Mission and the functions of the native Church. In too many cases the Mission has assumed both and relieved the native Church of those responsibilities on whose discharge, though faltering and feeble, the true growth and life of the native Church depended. This confusion has be- come part of the heredity of the Missions, save in Shantung, and it is painful work eradicating the taint. These difficulties are great but not insuperable. How can we attain something better? (i) By holding right aims and distinctions in view, and not allowing slow growth to obscure or destroy them. The native Church has its responsibilities. Let it bear them from the beginning. Let native Christians be made familiar with them in the inquirer stage. Let the Mission give all the spiritual stimulus possible to the native Church and its workers, but let it not become their paymaster or financial or political patron. (2) Let the beginnings of the Church be close to the homel}^ life of the people and be laid as far as pos- sible on their charge. Self-support will always be harder on the Canton policy of renting chapels with mission funds and locating mission-supported helpers in them, though it is dis- tantly possible on this policy,' than on the Shantung policy of having the people provide the place of worship, though it be but a humble home, and supervising them by an itinerant evan- gelist, to whose support they shall be induced to contribute as ' Mr. Fulton's plan is to have each native Christian as he comes in meet one-tenth of the rent of the chapel. Ten Christians would pay the full rent. Then they can go on toward the support of the preachers. Where the rent is high the proportion has to be reduced, and where it is very high, as in cities, self-support is long postponed. This table shows the con- dition in his field: Salary of ^ preacher By whom Rent of Chapel Bv whom People Place. per month. paid. per year. paid. accessible. San Ni 6 Mission. $26 People 250,000 Lai Ngok 6 " 18 Mission. 40,000 Ku Tsing. ... S People. Mission owns. People. 45, 000 SanCheeng... 6 Mission. 26 " 100,000 Chang Wan... S " 14 Mission. 30,000 San Ning 10 People. Church owns. People. 100,000 Chang Lan 7 Mission. 20 Mission, 30,000 NgShap 8 •' 24 People. 40,000 No Foo 7 " 20 •• 30,000 Y an Ping 6 " Mission owns. " 50,000 ShingTong... 6 " 24 Mission. 40,000 Shun Kok 6 " 14 " 20,000 TsungShee... 6 " Mission owns. People. 15,000 YeungKin 5 " 18 Mission. 20,000 Pak Sha 6 " 24 " 40,000 32 soon and as liberally as possible. '* Yes," said an older native preacher in one of our conferences in Shanghai, *' things could be carried on on a self-supporting basis if the3^had been started that way; but we began on another basis and it is hard to change.'' (3) As to the organized churches, each of our Mis- sions should make a careful study of the individual condition of each and form a definite policy for it as well as for their work in general. Many of our churches would be self-support- ing to-day, where the}- are dependent, if they had been organ- ized and superintended with a definite plan. Often the changes in stations have broken up such plans, or they have been formed but never carried out, as in the Ningpo field, where there are churches organized thirty or forty years ago and still drawing from the oMission as much as at the beginning. As one of the Ningpo pastors said: "The doctrine has been preached for a long time, but we have had no plan or method and are still as children." (4) The plans that will be adopted for individual churches will differ with their peculiar conditions. The vital thing is to establish a relation of genuine pastoral responsibil- ity between preacher and people, which shall deliver the Mis- sion from the abnormal position of paying the preacher on the one hand and being responsible for the people on the other. A church which cannot support its pastor after patient training should fall back into the grade of Christian congregations under the supervision of an episcopal evangelist. In my report on Persia I suggested the possible advantages of making a lump sum grant to the organized churches among the Nes- torians on the Oroomiah plains, where the field is compact, the people are closely unified, and leading men are constantly mingling; this grant to be guarded by certain strict conditions. It may be doubted whether the conditions that would make this plan a success are present in the China Missions. When there was but one Shantung Presbytery all the native contri- butions were paid into one fund, and preachers and evangelists were paid from that. The plan was abandoned because it was found that the people would give better when they knew they were giving directly to the one pastor from whom they were receiving. On the other hand, something like such a fund seems to work satisfactorily in the English Baptist Mission in Shantung, one of the most effective Missions in China. Their general policy was thus described to me by Mr. Jones: "The work is opened up with evangelists paid by the Mission or with the missionary, but as the work develops these quietly with- draw and the burden is left on the people. The idea is made plain from the outset: every believer a preacher and no pay for preaching. When there are eighteen baptized believers in one place it is called a station. Twenty stations or so consti- tute a pao, with its pastor supported by the stations. No pao or church is formed until it is self-supporting. In each station is a deacon who cares for all money, and a teacher who is a sort 33 of ruling elder and lay teacher. These leaders meet once a month for the session meeting with the pastor. The pao has also a steward who cares for the general non-pastoral interests of the pao. Stations are organized slowly. We avoid precipi- tancy. We are willing to wait any number of years, so as to make sure f)f the right officers and to train them. The unit is the pao. The Chinese can hardly be drawn into united finan- cial action over a larger district. They will not pay for what they can't walk to in one day. How do we keep the native workers active and moving and prevent their localization ? The rush and spirit of the Mission secure that. It is our heredity. Other Missions have a bad heredity and it affects all of their work, especially in the way of immobility, settlement, pay for work. It takes twelve years to get a bad heredity out. That was the time given by the Chinese Missionary Society in Fuhkien." In the Ningpo field the Chinese Missionary Society has a native Church fund, to which it contributes about $500, while the native Christians give half as much. This fund is in the control of a council consisting of the four native pastors, two laymen for each pastorate, and two foreigners, one of whom is chairman with veto power, the other treasurer. The chief troubles have been that the people were not trained to give from the begin- ning, and that they are indifferent to the election of new lay- men each year. Our own Ningpo missionaries are desirous of trying the experiment of such a fund in the hands of the Pres- bytery, to be made up of the contributions of the Christians and a diminishing grant from the Board, the pastors' salaries to be paid from this fund. It would scarcely be wise to force this plan now on the Ningpo workers, but, if they desire it, it may have the effect of increasing their sense of responsibility and stimulating their beneficence. Some of the native pastors in our conference thought the thirteen organized churches would be able to support seven pastors. If they were active men that number would be sufficient. One difficulty now is that each group of Christians has or thinks it ought to have its own localized pastor, irrespective of their ability or willing- ness to contribute to his support. Most of our pastors ought to be rather the bishops of many little groups of Christians. (5) By teaching the people the duty and privilege of giving. It is not right to require a pledge of tithing as a condition of baptism. By the observance of the Sabbath the new convert surrenders one-seventh of his income, often. But there should be careful instruction and training in giving. (6) Of all that is given there should be a strict account rendered to the peo- ple. They should have their own agents, who will regularly report and make the beneficences of the congregation clear to all. All should have a share in the gifts and their disposition. Regular meetings of each congregation to discuss church work should be held, {7) We should deal with the people quite openly and frankly. The considerations underlying this sub- 34 ject appeal to them, and they will invariably respond. The contributions of the First Church in Peking- increased four hundred per cent last year, simply because the matter was laid on the people in such a way that their own judgments approved. (8) There is need of great tact and kindness, as Dr. Corbett sug- gests, "among a people easily swayed by mercenary or selfish motives, or the Gospel will not appear to multitudes the free Gospel of the Master, which all may accept without money and without price. " They must be shown that the just discharge of their duties is for their good, not primarily because of cuts or to relieve American Christians, " Self-support should come, not as something forced on from without, but as something in- grained from the beginning," said Mr. Lowrie at Peking. The Chinese have their own psychology. To act precipitantly or forcibly is to make them ' lose face." Where the work has been carried on for a long time on the old dependent plan, a sudden rupture may be the necessary course, but it is not likely that it will be. The spirit of depend- ence, being the product of long training, can only be trained out by kindl}' but altogether firm education. There are many forces ready to co-operate in this education. The Chi- nese recognize that it impairs their testimony to be receiving foreign money, and a healthy sense of self-reliance is growing up. While it is not altogether just to say that the Christians formerly spent on idolatrous worship more than enough to make their churches self-supporting, the preachers still rec- ognize that the people are not giving to Christianity as they gave to the old religions and as they could give. And some- thing has already been accomplished. There are some self- supporting churches now — almost ten in our Missions — and the contributions last year for foreign missions and congrega- tional and miscellaneous purposes were $4,168 (gold), according to the Assembly Minutes. There is some danger of injudicious pressure of self-support at times. Wrong notions of it, or even right conceptions, may obtain a distorted place in the minds of the native Christians. But there is as great danger that any reaction against any over-pressure may lead to the easy tolerance of the very principles which are responsible for past mistakes. {h) Ecclesiastical Relations of Missionaries to the Native Church. — Between the missionaries and the native Christians personally, relations of the greatest personal confidence and friendliness exist. The warmth and sincerity of these rela- tions are delightful. A prominent diplomatic official told me that the reason Christian servants were imdesirable to foreign- ers was that they had grown accustomed, in their relations with the missionaries, to a friendliness and personal interest which were objectionable to foreigners in a servant. For the sake of such personal equality in part, the missionaries from the 35 beginning have placed themselves on equal ecclesiastical foot- ing with the native Presbyteries, and retain their membership in the Presbyteries even where the natives have grown suffi- ciently strong to care for their own church interests. There are now seven Presbyteries — Canton, Ningpo, Hangchow, Shanghai (including Nanking and Soochow), Shantung (includ- ing Chefoo. Tungchow, and Wei Hien), Chinan (including the rest of the West Shantung stations), and Peking. The native and foreign membership of these, according to the As- sembly Minutes, is as follows (not including licentiates or mis- sionaries withdrawn) : Native Native Foreign. Preachers. Elders. Foreign. Preachers. Elders. Canton, 12 3 32 Chinan, 709 Ningpo, } Shantung, 12 5 65 Hangchow, f Peking, 837 Shanghai, 11 5 16 Whether it had been better to delay the organization of any of these Presbyteries is a mooted question. Whether mission- aries did wisely in uniting with them, and whether they should continue to be members of them, are questions which the great majority of our China missionaries answer in the affirmative, on these grounds : ( i ) The desirability of identifying themselves with the native Church ; (2) the need of their help and coun- sel in training the native Presbyteries ; (3) the importance of their being at hand with full authority to check the errors of the native members. Almost all agree that in time the mis- sionaries should withdraw and leave the management of the affairs of the native Church in the hands of the natives. Only a few seem to think that in any of the Presbyteries this time has arrived. Those who question the wisdom of membership in the Presbyteries allege (i) that although it seems in the main to have worked well in China thus far, it has resulted in some cases in irritation, the natives feeling, not that the mis- sionaries are identified with them, but are exercising authority and undue control over them ; (2) that all the advantages of training and advice could be secured by the missionary's sitting as a corresponding member ; (3) that full membership inevita- bly confuses the line of distinction between the privileges and responsibilities of the missionary and Mission and of the na- tive Church, and that this confusion is sure to work harm; and (4) that conditions will be met, when the scholar class or men accustomed to authority come into the Church, which have not been met yet, and which can be better faced with right lines of division as to responsibility and sphere justly drawn. The best illustration of some of these statements is the Presbytery of Ningpo, which has grown into the exercise of authority which does not belong to it, while it has laid off responsibilities, which it should have discharged, upon the Mission. It would 36 be very helpful and instructive to see the experiment of this latter view regarding membership in the Presbj'^tery tried. The last General Assembly, in erecting the Presbytery of Hangchow from the Presbytery of Ningpo, established also the Synod of South China as distinct from the Synod of North China. The missionaries contemplate the separation of the Presbyteries of Shanghai, Ningpo, and Hangchow into the Synod of Central China in time. A united Synod of China is an attractive idea, but the diversity of dialects makes it imprac- ticable as yet. As it is, our work is well organized. Some missionaries of other Churches hold that ours is almost the most highly organized Church next to the Roman Catholic. But it is an organization of proper procedure rather than of energetic aggressiveness. The Chinese will probably introduce modifications into it. There are elements not in our s5-stem which they will probably need. (z) Methods of Direct Evangelization. — Very few of the younger missionaries seem to take up chapel preaching. Some older men, with superhuman patience, continue at it daily, but in the main it is done by native preachers now. There is gain in this, but there is also loss. The foreigner still draws the people more, and speaks with a persuasion, a life, a freshness and variety of teaching possessed by few native preachers. Chapel preaching seems to be regarded, though, as one of the least remunerative forms of work. Our Missions employ many Bible ivomen. A good Bible woman adds greatly to the effi- ciency and width of influence of a woman missionary, but many distrust the policy of large employment of such workers, though recognizing the excellent work which many of them are do- ing, unless their work can be thoroughly followed up and supervised by a missionary. But this should be said also of most native Jielpers. There are some who are as reliable and influential as the missionaries, but it is unfair to most of them to leave them in hard fields or positions without constant aid and counsel, and, most of all, spiritual stimulus from a mis- sionary As a rule a missionary's usefulness is to be measured by his capacity to impart spiritual gifts. I was impressed with the great need of more quiet personal intercourse between missionaries and helpers, with this in view. The labor needed to carry on the machinery of the work too often crowds this pre-eminent work of the missionary out of view. It is likely to do the same with that simple work of direct personal dealing with individual souls in which, with " mouth upon mouth, eye upon eye, hand upon hand, after the manner of Elisha," life is given. Where there is no full life to give, the missionary has lost his mission. Employing many native helpers is of no avail. They cannot give it unless it has been given to them and is given in fresh supplies constantly. Mnseums are proving in many places great attractions. Some of them draw hundreds of thousands of people annually and do not lose their fascina- 37 tion after years of use. These are good whenever they are held firmly to their place as means of evangelization. They involve a great deal of waste, and are scarcely legitimate for tis, though they are not without use, when this high purpose ceases abso- lutely to dominate them. We need in our Missions a large increase of definite evange- listic force. I am not prepared to advise the closing of any of our schools. They are doing a good work and are mission- ary through and through, but we have as much educational and medical work as we should need with three times the evangelistic agency at work. To make the work symmetrical, to utilize the enormous fund of opportunity developed by school and hospital, many purely evangelistic missionaries are needed. Especially are they needed for the itinerating work. There are some who depreciate this, but the oldest and best missionaries know better. " Follow up the people; travel; spend time in it," said one veteran just starting out on a long trip. " I would have the Board require of new missionaries that they should be willing to spend one-half of their time in the country," said another. No amount of money spent in in- fluencing children in central stations, or in employing native evangelists, can ever atone for the want of systematic, re- peated, thorough itinerating work of the missionary himself. And, m general, the time has come in the history of China — if, indeed, it ever was absent — for a vastly greater emphasis on the broad work of evangelization. As Dr. Ashmore says in a suggestive letter submitted to the Board herewith, " The art of evangelizing on a national scale has been a lost art. We are learning. We have had a century of experience. We have to undo very much. . . . We have switched off on to a good many side-tracks. , . . We have got things all out of proportion. We have exalted subordinate issues and allowed principal is- sues to become subordinate. We have splintered up missionary effort along the adjunct lines. , . . We have . . . come to lean too much on auxiliary agencies . . . to do the work which ought to be done by the living voice and the living man." Or, as Dr. Corbett declared, " The great aim is to preach the Gos- pel to China, having the definite evangelistic aim above all and in all and through all, and persevering in it whether there is fruit or not." After patient effort to get a justly balanced judgment of our work in China, this need of deeper, wider, fuller evangelization abides as a deep conviction. At the same time, it should in justice be added that the evangelistic work of our home Church proportionately is not comparable with the evangelism of our Missions. 2. Problems of the School. The school is a legitimate and necessary part of mission work. Individual Missions may be able to dispense with it because they enjoy the fruits of the educational work of other Missions. 38 It may be given a place and proportion to which it is not en- titled in the mission enterprise. But to decry the school in its proper place is to deny the principles in which we most firmly believe at home, the importance of which men are coming more and more to see, and the neglect of which on the mission field is to imperil from the outset the genuine growth and power of the native Church. (a) The aim of educational work is to raise up Christian leaders. It is not to dispose the people favorably to Christian- ity, to introduce Western science and civilization, to forestall the introduction of atheistic or agnostic education, to fill the places opened by the opening of the country with men kindly disposed to Christianity. These may be incidental results of the work, but they are not its aims, and to make them its aims will result in an imjustifiable development of educational work as a part of our enterprise. It is not " to give the pupils what we regard at home as a full Christian education," or " the highest devel- opment human nature is capable of attaining." The first of these may or may not be a good thing in China, and even if it were there are many good things which it is not within the re- sponsibility of Missions to imdertake. Whether mission educa- tion works with heathen material or children of Christians, whether it uses industrial work, Western sciences, or simply Biblical instruction, are other questions. Its one aim is to raise up Christian leaders. To produce men who will be esteemed for their intelligence, but who, though of Christian profession and sympathy, are not of positive Christian influence and ser- vice; or, on the other hand to produce men who are merely professional preachers and teachers, is not to fulfil this aim. Christian leaders are men who lead as Christians and who lead the Church in active effort. It is not enough that a school should lead to the conversion of the pupils. It should do this, but as a mere evangelizing agency this method is expensive. The mission school, as Dr. Mateer says, " has a wider scope. ... It looks beyond the individual. It contemplates the pupil's influence on others, on society, and on coming genera- tions." It is not necessary that all pupils should become preachers in a technical sense. " It is not to be supposed," says Dr. Mateer, " that all the pupils in a school will follow one profession, nor is it desirable that they should. Especially is this true of preaching. All are not called to preach, and an opportunity should be given for a divine call, which is the only true call." The right idea of a Christian leader is broad, but it is high and positive, and the school that is not de- veloping such is failing in its justifying aim. (d) The training given in our schools should be conformed to this aim; it should be adapted to training men to lead their own people; it should be unqualifiedly thorough, and it should be Christian in the highest missionary conception of Christianity. In some of our schools these requirements are not met. Boys 39 and girls are trained out of touch with their people and emerge unfitted for leadership, ignorant of the customs* and views of their people and too separate from them. In some schools boys are fitted only for positions which we ourselves create, and much of their education has been wasted if we do not find some such positions for them. In some, the boys are from the outset reliant wholly upon the Missions, and in most the train- ing has not been adapted to foster that manly spirit of inde- pendence and self-reliance which has been so marked in the Tungchow graduates, and for which Mr. Lowrie pleads in the excellent paper on Education which is submitted herewith. I think if we attempted less in some of our schools, and did it more thoroughly and with missionary ideals more fully before the students, and if we studied the individual pupils more and adapted their training to the precise work they are fitted for, and were less prodigal of general, indiscriminate education, the results would be better. (c) Men of great power and usefulness will often be raised up outside of the long course of regular educational prepara- tion, and we should be on the watch for such men. They know the people and how to move them, and by supplemen- tary training can be fitted for a greater work, often, than many school-bred men can do. Yet, as a rule, the testimony of the missionaries confirms Dr. Sheifield's judgment that " the preach- ers who know how to fit themselves to places and circumstances are the men who have had a good Christian training in their youth, and, like the missionaries, look upon their own people from the standpoint of a wider knowledge of the prejudices, superstitions, and spiritual needs of their fellows." To fail to raise up such men is to " fail to fit the native Church to hold fast to the best which it has received from the foreign Chris- tian teacher, and to propagate it unimpaired to coming gene- rations.'' For the training of these two classes of men, where there is need, there should be two grades of theological in- struction. (d) The question of the use of the Chinese classics in our mission schools is one aspect of the problem of adaptation of education to real needs. Chinese education is simply a know- ledge of the classics. Conforming to this ideal and desiring to have Christian education command the respect of the Chinese, and also because there is much that is good in the teaching of the classics and they are the basis of Chinese life and thought * ' ' The teachers should be taught something about their own people. One difficulty connected with our trained teachers in Hangchow was that they seemed to know nothing about the customs of the Chinese round about us. They had been taken into school young, kept there year after year, and at last sent out so-called trained teachers. Such men could have no oppor- tunity of knowing anything about the customs of their own people. . . . There is a danger lest by constant familiarity with our foreign books our teachers should get out of touch with their own people" — TAe Rev. A^ El win, C. M. 5. 40 and g-overnment, the classics have ever been taught in our mission schools. A great movement has gradually grown up against them. Their opponents urge : (i) The classics are full of superstitions and falsehoods. (2) Teaching them perpetu- ates the artificial, petrified follies from which China has suf- fered too long. (3) The memorizing of the classics dwarfs the mind. " Is it morally right to help the Chinese to commit men- tal suicide as they do now ? " (4) The classics are unmtelligi- ble and indigestible to the students. It is waste time to teach them. (5) It is in the classics that the offensive national pride of the Chinese and their contempt of foreign nations have their roots. (6) Men whose minds are saturated with Confu- cian morality are not safe men to preach the Gospel. That poison can never be wholly eradicated. (7) As long as students memorize the classics, the sentiment of them will affect every other layer of learning that may have been spread over it. (8) The writing of Wen Changs, the Chinese classical essay, is belittling and artificializing. (9) Wenli is a dead language. The time wasted over it should be used in teaching in English or in the colloquial. (10) " The use of Wenli in the education of the young unfits them for practical life. It is not the lan- guage of the heart ; it cultivates a stilted and unnatural style ; it is opposed to simplicity and lucid explanation ; it tends to cultivate pride, and it suppresses originality." On the other hand are men who say with Dr. Mateer, " I am not in love with the classics for their own sakes. I am ready to eliminate them as fast as practicable, and I have no doubt but ultimately they will be discarded entirely. As practical men, however, we must seek that which is practicable. We will oppose these classics just as fast and as far as we carry the Chinese with us. For the present they are a necessity to a successful education." Some of those who would retain the classics longer wish to stop the memorizing of them, and would have them taught as other subjects are, or a digest of them prepared for use. The more conservative ones contend : (i) " The Chinese system of memorizing ought to be regu- lated, but not overturned. Memorizing is the Chinese method of securing a scholarly knowledge of the language. Its evil is initsexcess." (2) " Until Chinese style shall essentially change its character, familiarity with the classics will be a necessity to a Chinese scholar." (3) "An educated man in China lives in the midst of those who know the classics and are constantly quoting them. He who is ignorant of them invites contempt. He who knows them commands respect. He is able to assail their weak places and to use the truth they contain to discom- fit those who believe in them. The best way to guard against the errors of the classics is not to ignore them, which, after all, is impossible, but to study them under the tuition of a wise Christian teacher, who will point out their errors and adminis- ter the antidote as he goes along. Throughout the Christian 41 ages the Greek and Latin classics, which are incomparably more heathen than the Chinese classics, have been freely used in Christian schools and for far less cogent reasons than in the case of the Chinese classics." (4) " The Wenli is the literary language of China, and we cannot put any other in its place. No matter how well a man may know Mandarin, that alone will not entitle him to be called an educated man among the Chinese." (5) "The written language of China is essentially a dead language. It is not and cannot be iised as a spoken language. Moreover, it has no grammar, and can only be ac- quired by imitation. . . . The Chinese acquire this written language chiefly by committing the classics to memory. For this method no adequate substitute has yet been provided." I have given the principal points at some length because this matter has been before the Board in connection with the pro- posals ot the Central China Mission : '• That we approve the omission of the Chinese classics from day schools wherever chose in charge deem it expedient. ' ' That the time has come when the memorizing the classics and the writing of Wen Changs may well be omitted from our schools. " That we feel the importance of emphasizing religious and Western studies and minimizing the time given to the Confu- cian classics in our boarding schools." And the Board discouraged the progressiveness of these plans. It may be well to move most conservatively, but the currents are running against the classics and the old Chinese methods, and they will never turn permanently back. The whole drift of God's providence and Nature's laws is against the old. The deepest opposition to them is not among mission- aries, but among the native Christians and the students who have had a taste of new and living things and methods. Mr. Tenney, President of the Imperial University at Tientsin, told me their students, few of whom are Christians, had little re- spect for the classics and the classics teachers. Elsewhere teachers have the same experience. The scholars of Confu- cianism, the beau-ideal scholars, need to be supported in order to command the respect of the pupils, and these often need to be driven to their work on the classics. At Hangchow and Tungchow the native teachers would gladly thrust the classics wholly out of the course or into a small place. It seems to me that at least these advanced steps might be approved : (i) Where possible reduce, and, if wise, discard, the memorizing of the classics in primary day schools. As the Rev. A. G. Jones says : "The children we have to deal with are largely the children of those who are in poverty and whose means are small. These children must soon go to work. Their time to learn is short. . . . They ought to have the ele- ments of religion as quickly and intelligently as possible while there is opportunity. Their time is needed for something bet- 42 ter than Confucianism. . . . Shall we use these few precious years in cramming them with the antique Wenli of these effete books, the meaning, construction, or traditional explanation of which they will probably not be at school long enough even to acquire ? Again I say, their years are needed for something better. . . , Let us give them as a basis what is able to make them wise unto salvation, give it intelligently, and not eat up their childhood with rote work." On the other hand, Mr. Hayes said, at the meeting of the Educational Association in 1893, that he "did not believe that the Chinese classics could be excluded from our day schools without reducing them to mendicant schools. The classics are the foundation of all Chinese literature, and a knowledge of them is neces- sary in order to be able to understand the text books used in our higher schools." (2) Employ no heathen teachers to teach the classics in any of our schools. That is simply taking men into our schools to undo what we are striving with all our might to do. (3) Where we teach the classics, have it done in the most intelligent and rational way. Let the teaching be thorough or else be dropped. Have each book accompanied by explanation, instead of the whole mass unintelligently gulped down. {4) While being careful not to go too fast, or to let the native desire for Western science and English prema- turely displace the classics, discriminatingly used, yet be care- ful also not to obstruct the certain movement toward a unified language,* the same both written and spoken, and toward liv- ing studies. (r) More pressing even than this question is the problem of teaching English. The two, indeed, are associated. It is the thirst for English that makes the natives so eager to secure for it the time now given to the classics. The example of the Emperor in studying English, the lesson of China's need of Western learning impressively taught by the war with Japan, the introduction more generally of telegraphs and railroads, the influence of the government, the greater intrusion of West- ern methods and consequent greater opportunities for employ- ment for men who know English, have all tended to a revival of the desire for English, and have created a widespread de- mand. Outside of the ports or the influence of the ports, this demand is but slightly felt, but by all who can hope to reach the ports or government service it is earnestly expressed. The Presbyterial Academy at Ningpo, which was in a feeble condition under native management, has sprung into new life through the introduction of English. Classes have been formed in many places, and in many of the ports enough young men * " It scarcely needs a prophetic vision to foresee that it (Mandarin) will ultimately displace the Wenli, being itself greatly enriched and elevated in the process." — Dr. Mateer. Per contra, " It is my opinion that Manda- rin will not be the book language of the future, but that easy Wenli will be."- The Rev. IV. M. Hayes. 43 are eager for English to supply means of support to any who will teach them. Tutors are employed, and voluntary schools have sprung up, as at Chefoo and Canton, where six churches of different denominations combined, employed a teacher from the Fati school, and have now a self-supporting English school with 48 pupils. What are the motives in this demand for English ? Dr. Henry stated these: (i) The genuine desire of some men of the better class to know Western science. (2) The reality of the existence of the desire for knowledge for its own sake. (3) Liberal attitude toward foreigners and foreign things. Wong Yuentsing, a graduate of the Tungchow school, now teaching at Lien Chow, said there were two motives: (i) Men who have learned some Western science want more than is available in Chinese text books. (2) Its commercial value. I think every one else I met in China set aside these higher motives as of small weight actually, and attributed the demand chiefly to the commercial or political value of English. It is not improbable that Dr. Henry had met some men of the higher type, but the mercenary motive is unquestionably the predominant one. What shall be our attitude toward this demand ? Those who are in favor of teaching English advance these arguments : (i) "It enables us to sift our students. . . . They are both mentally and constitutionally unfitted for manual labor when they have passed through our course of study; this foreign education is of little use to them outside of foreign employ . . . by having English, those whom we do not wish to use easily find employment." (2) It will furnish us with an influential laity. (3) It is a good test, through the more profitable open- ings it offers of a call to preach. (4) It is very useful to those who preach and those who study medicine. (5) There are many who will study English at the present time, and it were better that they study under Christian than under non-Chris- tian teachers. (6) It enables us to reach a class of students who will never come under our influence otherwise, (7) As the revival of Greek literature did at the Renaissance in Europe, as English has done in Japan, it will infuse new life into China. (8) It is desirable in order to teach science, which the genius of the Chinese language makes it difficult to teach in Chinese. (9) It has been a success. "As many have backslided from the Chinese-educated young men as from the English-educated," said Mr. Yen, of St. John's College, Shanghai. " We have now been teaching English for more than ten years," said Mr. Headland, of the Methodist University at Peking. " We began with a strong opposition in our own Mission. . . . Now we have not a single opponent in our own Mission. . . . We as a Mission have not suffered from it so far as I know, not even in a single instance, and our students have been benefited by it, 44 so far as I know, in every instance, whether they were worthy or unworthy to remain as helpers in the Church." Those who are indisposed to introduce English to this extent say: (i) To teach English is deliberately to lead the students into temptation. (2) English is not necessary to those who are to work as preachers or teachers among the Chinese, or who go back to other positions among their own people. To give it to them is either to waste time or to unfit them for that kind of asso- ciation and sympathy essential to leadership. Those who urge English teaching most strongly admit this. Mr. Hawks Pott, President of St. John's College, in whose college department fifteen hours a week are given to English and ten to Chinese, says in a pamphlet on the aims of the College: '* There is a great necessity for a training school which shall have as its aim the instruction of Chinese lads who are afterv/ard to serve in the capacity of teachers in the native day schools, or as catechists or evangelists to the heathen. . . . These youths must be instructed in the Chinese language only, as English will unfit them somewhat for the purpose we have in view." (3) " When we look at the history and literature of the Chinese langiiage, the idea that it cannot take in all the truth and all the new ideas that the Chinese need is a sheer absurdity." (4) If the sciences are not taught in Chinese, as they assuredly can be with perfect satisfaction, the students will not be able to communicate their knowledge to their own people. If we cannot teach them rightly in Chinese, how can they teach their people ? (5) The students who are made accessible by offering English are not the kind whom we can lead to accept the Gos- pel. They do not come with any idea of receiving that. Mr. Hawks Pott admits, regarding St. John's College, '*The great body of students who come to us are heathen boys belonging to heathen families. . . . Very seldom is a convert made from the ranks of the heathen boys; they come to us heathen, and when they leave they are still nominally heathen." (6) To teach English is to destroy the possibility of giving a thorough education As soon as the students learn a little English they leave to make it of commercial value. They do not stay long enough to get a thorough education in English, and the time given to English prevents their getting a thorough education in Chinese. Said the (Singapore) Straits limes some time ago: " The Governor of Hong Kong is apparently put out because the English education imparted to Chinese at the highly subsi- dized and extensively equipped Queen's College there has only resulted in an output of clerks. He seeks to remedy the evil by greater efforts at a thorough imparting of English to the pupils. But, your Excellency, the pupils look at the matter from a different standpoint, and only consider the commercial value of English. When they have learned enough English to qualify them for a clerkship, or even a salary, however small, 45 education has no further attraction for them. Our schools here (Singapore) find the same drawback, and at the best have but in the same manner contributed to swell the number of indifferent clerks. Teachers meet with sore discouragements, but it is hopeless to expect a change for the better until the masses find that higher education has a money value." (7) We can sift our men in other ways than by offering them almost irresistible inducements to turn away from Christian service to commercial or political life. The kind of educational efficiency secured by the introduction of English will have to be pur- chased at the expense of the direct missionary influence of the school as supplying Christian leaders suited for the humble missionary work needing and awaiting them. (8) The intro- duction of English will tend yet further to obscure those simple missionary ideals in our education of which we have already lost sight too much. (9) Our education has already erred in training men too much for our service rather than for the service of their own people whom we are here to bring to Christ. Shall we err yet further by training our pupils neither for our service nor for the service of their own people, but for the service of the government and the foreign merchant? This is the case "for and against. There is enough on either side to satisfy the man whose bias leads him thither. But what is the just and impartial view? (i) There are real dangers connected with the teaching of English. (2) There is no danger that it will take men out of the Empire and so lose them to the work. This is the great objection in Syria, Turkey, and Persia. (3) The other objection in these countries — that it tends to separate a man from his home conditions and humble sympathies — has much less force here, but it has this force: English will take men away from lowly and inland service and bring them into cities or the coast ports. (4) In schools which work in and for these ports it may be advisable to teach Eng- lish; but I would not do it in any of our schools to the extent to which it is done in St. John's and has been done in the Anglo-Chinese College, These institutions are doing a fine work and have their place, but I would not spend any of our mission funds in that way. Just because the Anglo-Chinese College of the Southern Methodists in Shanghai illustrated this and the preceding objection, was Dr. Parker transferred from Soochow to change its policy and to bring it back more fully to a Chinese basis. The similar institution of the Northern Methodists in Foochow had to be supplemented by a Chinese school because the former did not supply native preachers and teachers. (5) The great work of our schools should be done for the country and not for the ports, and to that extent Eng- lish is at present superfluous, to say the least. (6) Our schools should and will be increasingly schools for the children of Christians, and mercenary motives of any kind must not be 46 encouraged. Other inducements than English should lead Christian parents to send their children. (7) Whenever and wherever the teaching of English will contribute to the realiza- tion of the aim of raising up genuine Christian leaders, I would introduce it. (8) Probably any one of our larger boarding schools could be made self-supporting by introducing enough English and drawing the class who want it and will pay for it. But this would swamp the school as a training school for Christian leaders, would demoralize or drive away many of the Christian boys, and would save a few dollars by ruining our work. (9) Where English is taught in response to the merce- nary motive, it should be paid for. It is misleading and enfee- bling to give it. We may not choose to respond to this motive, but if we do we should charge heavily. The commercial motive is only suspected and not proven at Tungchow, but the conditions on which English has been introduced there seem to me commendable, {a) The Chinese course is eight years long. English is not given until the eighth year, when the Chinese course is divided and English given for half the time. This makes the full course nine years and secures the complete Chinese course, (d) It is taught thoroughly, the work being made as stiff and solid as possible, (c) Those who take it pay for it — 10,000 cash if regular students. In case any outside students are taken in simply for English, it is proposed to increase this charge fivefold. (10) While the Canton Christian College is not connected with the Board, it still represents so completely the educational interests of Canton that I feel justi- fied in saying that the introduction of English into the present course there, as English teaching was contemplated in Dr. Happers plans, means injury to all the purposes of the Mis- sion in the old Fati school. To preserve these purposes and secure any aid from the College in the supply of preachers and teachers, it would be better to organize a separate English de- partment which would have necessary affiliations with the Chinese course but would not interfere with its attempt to realize its proper aim. Such a division as this has been worked out practically in the Buffington College of the Southern Meth- odists in vSoochow. (11) Finally, I may say that I do not think the contention that if we do not teach English it will be taught by others of colorless or irreligious views, is entitled to much weight. It proves too much. {/) Self-support. — Great progress has been made in this matter since educational work began. At the outset children were practically adopted for a term of years. In order to obtain any for education, food, home, clothing, books, bedding, travel- ling expenses, and sometimes a little subsidy besides, were pro- vided. Gradually the value of education has extorted recogni- tion, and one after another of these aids has been cut off, until now food and shelter alone are provided in most cases, and in many food is provided in part by the pupils. Tuition is pro- 47 vided free. It would have been better, doubtless, if the schools could have been started on a foundation of Christian communi- ties sufficiently appreciative of their advantages to support them. There were no such communities, but we have worked gradually to them, and the time is coming when food will be provided by the pupils themselves and when something will be given toward the salaries of the native teachers. Wherever those in charge of the schools are ready to take a step forward, it is found that the people can be carried along. Of course there are objections: (i) That the people cannot pay for a child in school, who at home would contribute some labor and eat out of the general supply, the amount that child's board would cost separately. (2) That in America the pupils and their parents do not bear the expense of education, taxes or endow- ments relieving them of a great proportion of the actual cost. (3) That the government is debauching education by paying liberal salaries to students who are admitted to its institutions. (4) And, on the part of the people, that the Missions have long cared for their children in the schools and should not abandon the good old way. The native workers allege in the Hangchow field that when the Mission fixed their salaries and allowed each man fifty cents extra per month for each child not exceed- ing four, it was with the understanding that by the time they had more than four the oldest would probably be old enough to be taken into the mission school and supported. To require self-support in the schools is scarcely good faith with the old amiable understanding. (5) Some of the natives still feel that they are conferring a favor on the Missions by letting them have their children to educate, and that the responsibility is rather with the Missions to pay them. The movement toward laying the duty of supporting children in mission schools upon their parents is, however, recognized almost universally among the missionaries as a right movement, (i) Pupils and parents must make some strain, or the good effects of the education will be lost. As Mr. Meigs, of the Disciples' Mission at Nanking, declared at the last meeting of the Educational Association: "It will be found absolutely im- possible to make self-reliant men — men who shall know how to stand alone in life; men who shall be able to appreciate the cost of an education; men who can sympathize with the strug- gling masses; men who shall be able to teach the people by precept and example how to stand alone as Christians; men who know how to appreciate the benefits received from others sufficiently to be willing to give themselves for the salvation of their own people — out of students who never know what it is to want for food and raiment, and who have never made a struggle for their own maintenance." This is a strong statement, but there is truth in it. "If I had my way about it," continues Mr. Meigs, " I wotild not admit a single pupil who would not in some way, either he or his parents, and in such a manner as 48 to feel the weight of the burden, pay something toward his own support." (2) ''Free schools do not readily secure the best grade of pupils. . . . Not only the higher classes despise such institutions (charity schools), but even the middle classes." (3) " The Chinese will value the education more if they pay for it," said Mr. Couling, of the English Baptist Mission in Shan- tung. " Besides, we cannot educate all, and we should select the best in all respects, and this will include those who can and will pay for their own support. The boys who have eate.n good food all their lives will be more suitable to receive educa- tion than those who are physically weak from being brought up in very poor homes. Further, the family with land is tied to the land, and the boys educated from such families will be there years hence, while the boys we educate from families without land must either be employed by ourselves or will drift away in the search for food and be lost to us. We have nearly seventy scholars in our school, all of whom pay at least as much as their food would cost them if at home, besides pro- viding their own clothing and bedding." (4) Desirable girls and boys from poorer families need never be turned away. A promising pupil who can pay only part is better than an un- promising one who pays all. It is not self-support as an end that is sought, but as a means to self-reliance and just discharge of duty. (5) Those who can pay more should do so, while all pay something. In the Wei Hien Girls' School each scholar is charged according to the ability of her family, and this is gauged by the amount of land owned. (6) It is important to have soine plan and to deal openly and frankly with the pa- rents. When Miss Newton decided to take her last advance step in the Peking Girls' School, and found she was already far ahead of the practice in any of the other girls' schools in the city, she called a meeting of the parents and guardians of the girls and discussed the matter quite candidly with them. As a result, they fully agreed with her proposals. (7) The Chinese are poor and frugal, and necessity has taught them to take all that they can get for nothing as long as they can get it, and they can deceive even the shrewdest as to their ability to do for themselves; but what they want and can get only through efforts of their own they will have. This is well illus- trated by the way native Christians and others who have never felt able to help in the support of their children in school are suddenly able to pay liberally for the teaching of English. Yet it is to be feared that often this ability is in the nature of a mortgage on the earnings expected from the use of English. (^) Missionaries differ as to the number of pupils they can influence to the maximum. Some say 30, some 120. Mrs. Mateer thought she and Dr. Mateer, if they were alone, could influence 60. Beyond that an increase of pupils would mean a decrease of influence on individuals. Could any one else hope to influence more than Dr. and Mrs. Mateer? " The great 49 need is to select a few picked pupils and spend a great deal of time on them." To introduce into our schools large heathen elements is to introduce forces that will antagonize the mission- ary's influence and the aim of the school. " In the present stage of the evolution of the Christian Church in China," says Dr. Sheffield, "the association of Christian and heathen stu- dents in the intimate fellowship of school life, resulting in the operation of powerful secularizing influences upon the minds and hearts of the Christian students, does not supply the proper conditions for the training of young men who are to become the leaders of the native Christian Church. I believe that the theory that the characters of such Christian young men are strengthened by the temptations which they meet and over- come is not realized in experience; that their heathen associa- tions operate to weaken their religious life; that worldly motives are confused with their religious convictions, and thus man)^ of them turn to secular callings in which Christianity is rather a nominal than a vital thing, or, if they enter upon direct Chris- tian work, they bring to that work but a low order of spiritual qualification." {h) Girls' Boarding Schools have won their place in mission work, though there is still much difference of opinion as to their method and results. The training given to girls in these schools fits them to become teachers or Bible women, or to be the wives of boys educated in the boys' schools, but it does not fit them for anything else, and there is even difference of opin- ion as to its fitting them to be good wives. "Boys do not want to marry these girls from the boarding schools," said an expe- rienced educator at one of the Educational Association meet- ings. "They are impractical and have a distaste for house- keeping. They are not able to live off their husbands' salaries." " The reason young men do not want boarding-school girls is because their mothers are unwilling. These girls are trained and become independent, and do not obey their mothers-in-law so readily as the ordinary girls," added an educated Chinese. Those who hold this interrogatory attitude say: (i) That the girls trained in the schools have exceedingly bad manners, especially from the Chinese point of view. (2) That they are not ready for lowly lives. Mrs. Nevius tells of one of her girls, some years ago, for whom, though scrofulous and unattractive, a good husband was obtained, but who refused to live with him in the interior. When she was reminded of the thousands of Chinese women who lived so, her reply was: " Yes, but they were not trained in mission boarding schools." (3) That the standards of life and cleanliness in the schools unfit the girls for Chinese homes, " Missionary ladies generally represent a standard of cleanliness above the average of the nations from which they come. There are many artificial ideas on this sub- ject. It is largely a matter of custom. To inculcate and insist on our ideas on this subject oftentimes unfits the girl to fill 5° with cheerfulness her station in life." (4) That the girls do not know how to keep house, do work, and economize as a Chinese wife must know. There is force in these criticisms, and yet those who make them would not abandon this form of work, and I have found pretty general agreement on these points: (i) The aim of the girls' schools should be the same as that of the boys' — to raise up Christian leaders. To say that it is "to educate the girls and women of China " is to convey a false impression and con- fuse policy. Girls sent out should be real leaders in Christian faith and service. The women teachers needed must be pro- duced by these schools, and should be thoroughly trained to the extent to which they are trained at all. (2) Education is practically wasted that is given to girls who marry heathen or go back into heathen life. They are sucked into its currents and cannot resist. (3) "At this stage of the work the rule should be that only children of Christians be received as pupils, though there may be exceptions to this rule, and in all cases the parents should be required to pay what they can toward the supportof their daughters while in school." (4) "The time has not yet come,'' to quote Miss Cogdal again, "for us to teach English to the girls in our mission schools, and we think should not come until our schools are largely self-supporting and the ability to speak English not of such doubtful benefit to Chinese girls as it now seems to be. It takes too much of the missionary's precious time to teach English thoroughly, and, though even a little study of a foreign language is a good dis- cipline to the mind, a smattering of English has often proved a temptation and a snare to girls who had not Christian parents to protect them." (5) The girls should be kept more on the grade of their home life, and the temptation on the part of the missionary to introduce her social ideas, customs, and institu- tions should be resisted. " It is much better that the pupils spend two or three months of each year in their own homes, in order that they may not be educated away from their homes." (6) Some hold " No girl should be received who is not willing to unbind her feet and to keep them unbound, though we may thus lose some few girls whom we should otherwise be glad to receive. Foot-binding is an awful wrong, and should not be allowed in Christian schools. A strong sentiment should be aroused against foot-binding, and this is not at all difficult to do where the majority of the girls are from Christian families. " To this some say; "We ought not to hurl ourselves too rudely against the old and cherished customs of the people, but leave the reforma- tion of this and other unhappy customs more largely than we do to the influence of divine truth upon their hearts." To which the answer is made that no progress grows out of faint- heartedness, and that those schools which have tried the reform and had experience are thoroughly satisfied. {i) Country Boarding Schools. — In the Chef 00 field there SI were eight of these schools — three for girls, under native young women ; five for boys, two of which had each two teachers and the cook in addition. The native superintendent of the district had some oversight of these schools, and the missionary visited them twice a year. The schools did good work, and it was cheaper, of course, to educate children in the country than it would have been to bring them to the Chefoo schools. There were about two hundred pupils in these eight schools. At one place the people had put up good buildings, but in the main the Mission supported them. They were an expensive form of work, and they were hard to supervise closely enough to prevent all maladministration, while the sight of so much money being spent had a bad effect. The cut has been so distributed by the Chefoo station as to close all of these schools for the coming year. At Ping-t'u, in the Tungchow field, there is a country boarding school for girls, with seventeen boarders and ten day pupils. This was super- vised by the pastor's wife, and did thorough work, sending up its best girls, after three or four years' training, to the school in Tungchow. This school also will be closed. The fact that the missionaries include these schools in the work suspended indicates their feeling that without more thorough supervision they are not to be esteemed as the best form of work. To obviate this difficulty of supervision Miss Morton proposes, in the Ningpo field, to enlarge the experiment already made with such schools under her own care, holdmg for several months in the country churches or communities schools for boys or for women and girls, where people who are not wanted in the boarding schools and would be unfitted for their place in life there, may be given some training and stimulus. Such plans as these for vitalizing- native Christianity are good. (/) In many of our schools indentures are still made to bind the pupils to remain a certain number of years, recognize a certain degree of control, and, in the case of girls, contract marriage engagements only with the approval of the mission- ary. Some missionaries postpone the acceptance of indentures until some months' trial has shown whether the pupil is de- sirable. Others feel that now that Christian education has won its place and is no longer given as a full charity, inden- tures are out of place. While some who have had experience with them say that they are worthless; that those who will keep them will observe all their requirements without them, and that there is no way of enforcing them if any one wishes to violate them. Some form of agreement will long be neces- sary, but the indenture annoyance will pass away with many others as our schools come to rest more solidly on Christian constituencies which have an interest in them and do not re- gard them as foreign institutions for the foreignization of Chinese children. 52 (^) Day Schools. — We have 244 day schools, with 3,263 pupils, distributed as follows : Number for Boys. Number for Girls. Pupils. Canton 14 24 704 Hainan i 17 Central China 33 (14 admit girls) 9 1,001 East Shantung 39 9 346 West Shantung. .. . 75 25 1,116 Peking 6 2 79 These schools are of two kinds: (i) Evangelistic, designed to reach heathen children, and, through them, their families. (2) Primary schools for the children of Christians, designed to build up the Church and to feed the boarding schools. These two characters are often mixed, but one or the other is pre- dominant. There would be a great gain if the two kinds could be kept measurably distinct. There are many who are altogether opposed to the first kind, on the ground that they are unnecessary because there are al- ready far more evangelistic opportunities than can be followed up; that they are wasteful, as it is impossible to carry them on as they should be; that they are fruitless; that it is beginning at the wrong end; that whatever the theory may be, they do not reach the children and do not reach their families. The advocates of these schools contradict many of these statements. I must say, though, that my own observation is that many of these schools are very questionable agencies as practically carried on. To expect that an inefficient teacher without supervision, in a heathen atmosphere and with heathen children, will produce Christian results, is an unreasonable expectation. (i) The great need of all our day schools is efficient teachers. It is wrong to maintain schools taught by opium-smokers or men who are surprised worshipping with their pupils before the Confucian tablet, or who are mere parrot teachers of Chris- tianity. I agree with Dr. Mateer that intelligent Christian teachers are required; that "many very inefficient teachers are used because they are cheap, but I fear their inefficiency makes them dear at any price" ; and with Dr. Corbett, "A non- Christian teacher should not be thought of as suitable for a Christian school." It is folly to throw money away on a school for the evangelization of heathen children taught by a heathen and visited once a week or once a month by a missionary. It is equal folly to let a heathen teacher in a mission school teach the Chinese classics to the children of Christians. Our board- ing schools are for the purpose of supplying the right kind of teachers. (2) But even monthly visitation is not the rule in all schools. I heard of one school whose teacher, a non-Christian, was em- ployed "in order to get hold of the family to which he belonged." For two months he drew the salary and his school was never 53 visited. At the close of that time it was discovered that he had not held the school at all. Such cases are exceedingly rare, but there are many cases of want of visitation for long periods. Or often, when there is visitation, it is rather superficial than thorough and telling. " Unless schools can be properly cared for," declares Dr. Corbett, "and receive the personal care and inspection necessary to secure not only the enlightening of the intellect, but pre-eminently the building up and establishing of Christian character, making the pupils morally better, purer in mind and body, self-reliant, and better fitted for life, the work should not be undertaken." A fair criticism can be brought here against some of our evangelistic day-school work. Some of our stations have opened so many such schools that the mis- sionaries in charge, who have often other work which they regard as more important, can neither follow up the pupils into the homes opened by them, nor exert much influence on the pupils themselves. (3) A uniform curriculum for the primary schools in each Mission is desirable. The Central China Mission has such a course. First year: Christian catechism and books; primary numbers in arithmetic; object lessons in science; learning 500 Chinese characters and meanings; Chinese classics as deemed expedient. Second year: Life of Christ or two Gospels; men- tal arithmetic; lessons in physiology; write 214 radicals and give the meaning of the same; classics as deemed expedient. Third year: Old Testament history; written arithmetic, through division; primary geography; simple lessons in scienQe; read- ing, writing, and reciting Chinese as expedient. Other mis- sionaries would modify this, but it is a gain to have uniformity in a Mission. In the evangelistic schools the children change frequently. Many stay for but a brief term. Whatever of Christianity is to be given to them must be given at once and in full measure. Such schools should be held seven days in the week, and Sunday should be made a special day for reli- gious instruction, the children being taken to church and Sun- day-school where practicable. In all of these schools it should " be distinctly understood that all the education will be per- meated through and through with Christian teaching.' Those cases must be exceedingly rare at this stage of the work, if they exist at all, where it is justifiable to hold the pro- nounced evangelizing character of the school in abeyance pending the gaining the favor of the people by removing mis- conception and prejudice slowly. (4) The primary school in the native church can be very effec- tive. It gives the people a place where they can come and study and learn more about Christianity, and it develops a more intelligent and robust class of Christians. Every Chris- tian community should be led to desire such a school and to be ready to make sacrifices to secure it. (5) Where the school is purely evangelistic it will probably 54 be largely a charity school, attended by the children of the very poor. The attempt to make such schools self-supporting where the children come from homes that can pay, results, Miss Noyes said, in the threat, " If you make us pay we shall get a teacher of our own and not have any Christianity in our school." Where the school is a Chinese school it can be in a measure self-supporting from the start. The policy of the London Missionary Society in the North contemplates only this. '' All teachers must be men of good Christian standing. No heathen children to be admitted. Buildings and furniture not to be provided by the Mission. Grants in aid to be on the basis of a church request and effort. ■" In the Tungchow field the peo- ple furnish school room, fuel and furniture, and their own native books. This is in general the policy of the Shantung Missions. The Tungchow policy also is that the people shall pay from one-third to one-fourth of the teacher's salary, and that no school shall be opened, even in a heathen place, with- out such proportionate support. In the Ningpo field it has been found that when the teacher looks to the people for part of his salary he is more punctual and diligent, and brings in more scholars, while the people take more interest. When the teachers look wholly to the Mission they are tempted to be negligent and to let the work of the school fall off. At the very least, surely the people should provide the meeting place for the school. (6) There is reason to fear that some missionaries will do harm by setting before the students in boarding schools com- mercial ideals, or encouraging them where they already exist. " The workman is worthy of his hire," says one. " If insuffi- cient salaries are paid to secure and retain the best of teachers, my conviction is that this branch of the work should be left to others who value men and women of solid character and at- tainments and skill more than money. . . . When Chinese teachers understand that dead uniformity is not the spirit of Christianity, but that scholarship, efficiency . . . will secure better pay, the cause of education will gain immensely." " When we determine," says another, " to give a fair quid pro quo for services rendered, we will attract a better class of boys to our schools, and our best men will remain with us rather than go to the customs, the telegraph and other departments of government service for the remuneration to which they feel they are justly entitled." These seem to me to be mischiev- ous words. I devoutly pray that the young Chinese Church may not be nourished under these low and squalid ideals. Its mercenary bent is strong enough already without such foster- ing at missionary hands. All our teachers were trained in mission schools. All they are they owe to the mission work, which, in the main, made them what they are without any payment or sacrifice on their part. They were picked out of low social grades and given the keys of power. Are they now 55 to be bid for in open market competition with clerkships and petty secular positions ? Shall the missionary rule his own life by the highest Christian standard, and be content with raising- up a set of hirelings ? God forbid that we should aban- don at the outset the attempt to raise up a Church of missionary spirit, or to produce from our schools men of missionary hearts! It is not a matter of saving our dollars. It is a matter of sav- ing the souls of the leaders of the Christian Church we have trained, from the domination of that commercial passion which runs like a fire in the blood of the Chinese people. (/) Scores of men trained in our schools are now in the em- ployment of other Missions. Our Missions have pursued a very liberal policy, and have trained at their expense these men who are now doing faithful work in other churches. This is our loss, but it is the gain of the cause, and it may contribute to the speedier coming of the day of Christian and Church unity in China. There is not sufficient care taken in keeping track of these men and women, and of other students from our schools. Many schools have no registers and cannot tell how many students they have had or where their graduates are. There is much loss involved in this. " Keep your hold upon the pupils after they leave school," is Dr. Corbett's wiser ad- vice. " Look over the roll from time to time, so as not to for- get who they are and where they have gone. They have a special claim upon the Church's interest and prayers, and the Church has, moreover, a special claim upon them. A friendly interest shown in them and wise counsel inay do much to keep them in the right paths. ""^ In thinking upon the educational work in China, some are in danger of being led astray through comparisons of the present conditions with missionary history in India and Japan. These comparisons are uncertain. The educational work rests on solid foundations of its own in China, and it will be to the detriment of that work and the broad interests of the Church of Christ in China if energies are stampeded into education that are more needed for the sake of education itself in other chan- nels, A Church with a feeble head is bad, but a top-heavy Church has its disadvantages also. 3. Problems of the Hospital. (a) Our medical work is practically synonymous with hospi- tal work. With the hospitals are associated a number of fixed dispensaries, but there is almost no medical itineration. I know of only two of our medical missionaries who do much itinerating work. The reasons against it are the possible need of the services of the doctor by the missionaries in the station, the unsatisfactory character of medical work in the country, and the superior character of the opportunities in a hospital where the doctor can really carry out a course of treatment and also have the patient under steady Christian instruction. Some 56 doctors go so far as to say that for country medical work a man with a box of pills would do as well, and that their medical training will be unutilized save in a hospital. The medical missionaries in Persia and Korea do not speak in this deprecat- ing way of itineration, and I have observed that the warmer a doctor's evangelistic spirit, the more ready is he to see great possibilities of good in occasional itineration. I believe the doctors need it themselves. (d) The great problem in medical work is its evangelistic utilization. Throngs pass through the consulting room. A native preacher has spoken to them as they waited, but the doctor has time only to diagnose their disease and prescribe a remedy. Then the crowds in the wards demand the most care- ful thought, and the work becomes very fascinating and en- grossing, and thinking of the suffering and needy bodies, as one of the medical missionaries says, " the means become the end, and we neglect to press home upon our patients the offer of eternal life." The result is that thousands of patients pass through our hospitals each year, and the positive evangelistic results, at a time when the opportunity is unsurpassed, are small in proportion to the force and the expense, though a vast deal is done. Some reply to this that the work of the hospitals is indirect and preparatory. But after two genera- tions it ought to be more than that. There is a more candid reply. Our hospitals are not the evangelistic agencies they might be because they do not aim to be what they might be. One can readily understand and sympathize with the reasons for this. The weight of suffering and misery, which the phy- sician and he alone can relieve, burdens the medical missionary night and day. In the effort to do as much philanthropic work as possible, the evangelistic aim has suffered. The hospitals can attain the latter by curtailing the former. I think we should do this. We cannot and do not have it as our duty to relieve all the suffering of China. Our business is to plant the Christian spirit which will produce Christian fraits on a scale which we can never emulate with mission funds. Some of our hospitals can contribute more than they are doing toward this, if all the doctors will consider themselves, as many of them do, missionaries first, and will take fewer patients or otherwise lighten their work so as to be able to exert the maximum of spiritual influence on the men and women who come into their hands. In the London Missionary Society Church in Tientsin is a tablet to " John Kenneth Mac- kenzie, ... a most distinguished, zealous, and successful medical evangelist." He was not a missionary doctor. He was a medical evangelist. The hospitals will never be mis- sionary institutions, save as the doctors are missionary. If some other missionary or a native tells the patients of Christ, but the doctor does not, they will conclude that he who is the great man regards the matter as of small account, and they 57 will do so too. In arguing that the doctor himself should be the head of the spiritual work and make time for it, Mackenzie contended: (i) He can best iniiuence his own patients. (2) His assistants will be what he makes them. It is of little use for the doctor to urge them to Christian work while he is showing but lukewarm interest. (3) Unless he attends to it the full value of the medical mission as a Christianizing agency will not be developed. (4) His own spiritual life requires it. In his hospital all the time after two o'clock when the dressing and rounds were over was given to direct spiritual work among the patients by himself and the regular hospital assistants, as it was a part of his theory not to employ any special preachers, but to have the whole medical force actively missionary. Our medical work is done with fine conscience and tireless zeal. I would turn some of this from medical into evangelistic lines. Some of the medical missionaries think these ideas should be presented more clearly to candidates. I think this is done more distinctly than in former days. [c) 7 raining- Native Doctors. — An interesting article by Dr. Neal on this subject is submitted herewith. There is little dif- ficulty in getting applicants for training, but they come with the money motive. That they should become self- supporting and earn lucrative incomes is not to be deprecated. They are the better able to support the native Church institutions. But the general testimony seems to be that while retaining their faith and attending worship, many are of secular spirit. Our aim in medical training, as in all other, should be Christian leadership. If we do not attain it, developing good doctors will but poorly atone. {d) The great majority of the missionaries, including the doctors, are opposed to indiscriminate charitable medical treat- ment. Experience has shown that the people can pay, and that it is much better for them, and no worse for the work, that they should. They paid for their native treatment. All that they can pay will not meet the real cost of their foreign treat- ment. It will still have a large element of charity in it. It is not necessary to push self-support as far as has been done in the English Wesleyan Hospital at Fatshon, near Canton, which pays even the salary of the missionary. This has abridged the volume of its work, but has given opportunity to deepen its missionary quality. The Canton Hospital is supported by the Medical Missionary Society and the subscriptions it solicits. Last year $1,440.90 Mex. was given by the foreign community, and $1,404.04 by the Chinese ; $2,292.33 was received from fees, drugs, rooms, etc. Some oppose receiving or soliciting gifts from officials, as it takes from the Mission the credit of the hospital as a charity; but few hold this view. Most feel that it is but a just though very partial discharge of the debt of officials and others to the lower classes, of which the Chinese 58 proverb speaks : ''The big fish eat the little fish. The little fish eat shrimps. The shrimps eat mud." ( J3 S <1) (]> r^T-^ > ! bo u c ^.2 S ^ "% cS t « .» o •a a •a as o 1^ §5 tn -^ 3 ^ ^^ a - Z < ti a 2 " W aylonl liros. Makers Syracuse, N. \' PAT, JAN, ?1. 1908