I’o rpi_^^3['Tl^iyH10’l OOLiSniT ^Norlh tosrican Secllsn Eternal QuestiieaiEl The Orient and the Occident PROF. R. T. STEVENSON . D.D. CHAIR OF HISTORY OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY BOARD OF FOREIGN MISSIONS OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH 150 Fifth Ave., New York Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Columbia University Libraries https://archive.org/details/eternalquestionOOstev The Eternal Question : The Orient and the Occident PROF. R. T. STEVENSON, D.D. Chair of History Ohio Wesleyan University From Marathon to Manila is a far cry. Yet the two are connected most intimately. A swift glance into the long vista will show clearly enough that we are the residuary legatees of the hloody field where Miltiades won his immortality. Our work is not yet accomplished. Not yet have we made final settlement of what Professor E. A. Freeman calls “The Eternal Question — the Contact of the Orient with the Occident.” It is more than a guess at the truth, or the forcing of an analogy — the attempt to discover in the most significant thought — and race — collisions of the past millenniums, illustrations of the principle named. Yet herein lies a giant likeness, and our own day with all its tangled values and problems will gain new meaning if we rightly inter- pret the stream of tendency running by our very doors. First. — Note the successive and dramatic unfoldings of the contact of the Orient with the Occident. Greece enters. Persia faces her at Marathon. The coarse despotism of the East is about to stifle the energetic in- 3 dividualism of the West. But the heroism of the men of Athens turned back the tide and gave to the human mind fuller oppor- tunity for unhampered growth, and then Salamis helped to swell the glad chorus of the triumph O'f liberty over oppression. And now for twenty-four centuries there has been a running fight between these two forces. Some have decried the work and the legacy of Alexander, but all unworthily. He seemed at first to have dedicated himself to the purpose of merely righting the wrongs of the Occident against the pressure of the East. The liberalism of Grote led him to close his famous history with a dirge over the fading away of democracy in Athens under the hard hand of the Macedonian. On the other hand, the aristocracy of (Mitford and Thirlwall led them to emphasize the mixed good of Mace- donian tyranny. History is too big for any mere partisan interpretation. Alexander was an agent of God. His early ambition was followed by a larger spirit in all likelihood. He rose with his victories and later a broader view filled his eye. He saw much good in the East, and he sought to mold the two into one. The Greek was to leaven the inert mass of the East. Though he could not have hoped wholly to succeed in his short twelve years of toil, yet he left behind him traces of a new world in the seventy city- centers of culture with which he sought to bind the East to the thought-leader of the world. Grote has scarcely done him justice, regarding him too easily as the destroyer of the tendency to democracy in Europe. Benjamin Ide Wheeler lifts him aloft to a fitter place: “No single personality except- 4 ing the carpenter’s Son of Nazareth has done so much to make the world we live in what it is as Alexander of Macedon.” So the world moved Greeceward. Second. — Rome and Carthage. The city on the south shore of the Mediterranean was a branch of the Semitic race. Less fitted than Rome for the work of a stable empire and political expansion, it fell afoul of the more virile and democratic Roman power. Carthage did not possess the common law, the developing language, the marvelous ability of Rome to melt down such national antipathies as would necessarily front a people sent to conquer the world. It lacked, as Mommsen declares, “the instinct of po- litical life, the noble idea of self-governed freedom.” Its government was one of capi- talists. The majority of citizens held no property. In this they were unlike the Ro- mans, and could not fairly represent the trend of the ages. Merivale contends that Carthage was only slightly Oriental, but this view is set aside by the great German, Momm- sen, and others. So the Punic Wars saved Europe from becoming a dependency of Asia. Hannibal may win the favor of the school boy, hut the statesmanship of the Scipios was pointing the better way for the world- march. Third. — Teuton and Hun. If ever one is tempted to turn away from the centuries in which Rome was staggering to her ruin, either in disgust over the horrors of strife or inability to gather up into unity the scat- tered bits of apparently unconnected events, let him rightly conceive the fifth century as an open door to the modern world and he 5 will find himself drinking at a fountain of limitless power to satisfy the deepest thirst of the student of history. The commotions far out upon the plains of Scythia, begun hack in the days of Julius Caesar, were now focused upon the Italian peninsula. The Germans were pushed downwards by the Slavonians and the Scythians, the latter true exponents of the mistborn Orientals, and having little in common with the more immediate and first conquerors of the fron- tiers of Rome. Alaric the Teuton came upon Rome not as a destructionist, but as a builder. Attila the Hun fell upon Rome not as a builder, but as a scourge and a de- stroyer. The awful crisis both for Rome and the Church had come when the shaggy hordes of Attila met the united German peoples on the vast plains of Chalons in 451 A. D. But the tempest passed away and left only the cycles of tradition, part of which in Germany later formed the germ of the national epic, the Nibelungenlied. The Ger- man successor of Rome took up the work of the conqueror of the world. The West still held off the East. Civilization lagged, but did not entirely surrender the task set before it. Fourth. — Islam and Christianity. Nearly three centuries after the preceding crisis the East and the West met in deadly conflict on the field of Tours, in the year 732. There had arisen another prophet coming out of Arabia, and the orphan sheeptender, the man of commanding presence, with piercing eyes, and of fluent speech and pleasing ways, had entered the lists as one of the world leaders. In a few years the fanatic followers of Mo- hammed had swept across the Northern coasts 6 of Africa, had leaped the Straits of Hercules, and had camped upon the southern slopes of the Pyrenees. Just a century after the death of the prophet his followers faced the Chris- tian host of Charles Martel in France, at Tours, 732, and their defeat by the “Ham- merer” saved the civilization of Western Europe from the hard hand of Islam. Less known than the repulse of the Crescent by the Cross at Tours was the almost equally great event of the defeat of the Saracens in 718 before the gates of Constantinople. The invasion of Islam was turned hack through the valor of Leo the Isaurian, else the Chris- tian religion had been swept with European civilization from the face of the earth. This triumph marks one of the most signal events in world history. Again the East went down before the West. Fifth. — Crusader and Saracen. The salva- tion of Constantinople did not prevent the Arabian from controlling the East, with the exception of Constantinople, which stood as a mighty buffer to protect Christendom for over a thousand years. But with the re- vival of the iniquitous treatment of Chris- tian pilgrims to the holy sepulcher by the Mahometan owners of Palestine, and the knowledge of the divisions among the East- ern powers, it was deemed opportune by Christians to fall upon their rivals for the world control — Whence issued two centuries of crusades against the infidels, the West against the East. Though the West held the kingdom of Jerusalem for a hundred years, yet in the end the crusaders fell back upon their own lands to bring out of the disorder of feudalism the centralization of modern 7 nations in Western Europe, leaving the Holy Land to its infidel masters. The East appeared to have held its own. Sixth. — The Coming of the Ottoman Turks. These new masters of the Bast were first heard of about the time the Crusades came to a close, not far from the middle of the thirteenth century. They gradually swal- lowed up the provinces of the empire in Asia, and began to batter the walls of the Imperial City on the Golden Horn. Under the awful vigor of Bajazet, surnamed the Thunderbolt, all the Christian States of Southeastern Europe seemed about to disap- pear. Under the greatest of the Ottoman sultans, Mahomet the Conqueror, the long siege of Constantinople began, and on May the 29th, 1453, it was taken by storm. The thousand-year capital of Christendom now became the head of the Ottoman Empire, and Justinian’s wonderful Church of Saint So- phia became a Mahometan mosque. The conqueror went on to plan the conquest of Western Europe, but it was saved from this dread fate by his death in 1481. Between the East and the West the balance hung trembling. Islam had swung one jaw of its tremendous vise into the center of France in the eighth century, and now the left jaw was thrust up into the plains of Hungary. Still the shadow of the Cross rested upon Western Europe not to be pushed away by the Crescent. How well I recall the bright light in the eyes of Dr. Long, the scholar of many lan- guages at Robert College, as he told me of the effort of the Moslem conquerors of Con- stantinople to obliterate every evidence of 8 the Christian character of the great Church of Saint Sophia, and that they had failed to cover up the Greek inscription over the great front door of the church, possibly not knowing the meaning of the lettering. It was the text, “I am the Door; by Me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.” There it stands to-day, a glorious prophecy of the recovery of the greatest Christian edifice on earth to pure worship some day when the Turk shall no more occupy the city of the Golden Horn. Seventh. — Expansion Westward. Was it not remarkable that in the very year in which Mahomet the Conqueror died, 1481, the Catholic kings, as Ferdinand and Isa- bella were called, began a war with Granada, whose king had invaded Castilian territory, and the recovery of Granada in the year 1492 was thought almost to make up for the loss of Constantinople at the other frontier of Europe? Now Spain was easily the leading power in Europe. To her fell the glory which memory evermore renders of the dis- covery of the New World. The lines of trade to the East had been cut off. Colum- bus dreamed not of a new world, but of re- establishing connection with the East, and he died not realizing what he had found. Yet we do not dwell upon the growth of Spain for evidence that we are on the trail of Providence. Her decline begins with her triumph. Another race looms large on the horizon. In the same decade in which the Turk got footing on the Golden Horn, the Englishman drew off from the fields of France, and ended the Hundred Years’ War. God had other work for the Anglo-Saxon to 9 do. He was to go East by way of the Western World. Of the five Western Euro- pean powers to whom fell the discovery of America — Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England — all lost out but the last in nearly all that has given mastery to race and institutions. It is not at air needful to re- cite commonplace details. Yet only by reckoning them in their proper order is one able to read the writing of prophecy and to determine the trend of the path that stretches away into the unknown. In 1400 the Anglo-Saxon ruled less than one hun- dred and twenty-five thousand square miles of territory and four million people. To-day fifteen million and a bit over of square miles are under the control of the Anglo-Saxon, and nearly a half-billion of people turn their eyes either to the English Jack or to “Old Glory” for cure of the blindness of despot- ism, superstition, idolatry. The Latin races number about two hundred and fifty-five millions, with an extent of slightly less than fifteen million square miles. The Slav num- bers one hundred and forty millions of peo- ple, covering a little less than nine million square miles of territory. The German holds sway over two million and three hun- dred and fifty thousand square miles of ter- ritory, with a population of one hundred and thirty-five millions of people. After five hundred years the weakest of these four at the start has risen to the first place, and dominates the future, so far as mortal vision can scan the unknown. Eighth. — The New Occident-Orient. A world circle has been swept. Virility and somnolence have had strange meeting In 10 the last half-century. The younger West has picked up a Book from the older East and now offers it to the sleepy races of the Pa- cific. Also it tells it how to make battle- ships. It is not strange if the latter, more purely Western, outcome of progress, finds warmer welcome than the Book which the West has inherited from the East. Is it not worth remarking that the leaders of Western Europe hold chief place both in shipyards and printing shops? What the West has fur- nished the East is pithily set forth in an in- cident touching one-half of the vast endow- ment of Japan. She is called the “copy-cat” in some quarters. A French officer was re- fused the privilege of inspection of some Japanese field artillery. The suave Japanese officer observed, “You must appreciate the importance to us of keeping our military secrets.” “Your secrets, bosh!” replied the undiplo- matic Frenchman, disgust getting the better of his manners. “As if you hadn’t stolen everything you have from us.” Be that as it may, Europe goes to Asia with both hands open, in the one a printed Book, in the other an Iron ship. And the world’s future hangs in the balance. Mil- lard’s late “America and the Far Eastern Question” contends that the rise of Japan, her mastery of Russia in battle, her economic activity, her towering ambition, her un- doubted subtlety, mark her as the foremost figure in the most important international issue with which the world now has to deal. The destiny of the whole world has been cast into the scale. In 1906 he traveled through the East and everywhere he found evidences 11 of a growing “Pan-Orientalism.” Japan has been a most vigorous developer of this new Eastern spirit. The immediate storm- center, so far as America is concerned, is Manchuria, where we have the largest com- mercial field of opportunity open to us. The “open-door” policy, for which we have strug- gled with fair success, must be maintained, even though Japan, Russia, France, and even England appear to stand together to ob- struct our free path. That Germany does not seem to be anxious to line up with these in opposing our commercial advance is worth remarking. On the other hand, Eng- land is showing signs that she is not free to keep the full measure of her treaties with Japan, for in Australia there is protest, vigorous too, against whatever oversight of the great colony the mother may indulge in making pact with the ambitious Japanese. The question of the preservation or the disintegration of the Chinese Empire occu- pies a foremost place upon the table of diplomacy, both in Europe and America, and dull must the man be who thinks for a second that it matters not to America what becomes of the great yellow people and their domain. Some broad-minded Chinese officials claim that a way out of China’s fiscal difficulties may be found by engaging the help of American and English capital- ists, conceding as they do that these two nations have no ulterior designs upon the unity and the peace of the empire. The great moderate reformer. Yuan Shih-K’ai, surrounded himself with men trained in American schools. The restoration of the “Boxer” indemnity to China by the United 12 States demonstrates the friendly sentiment of this nation towards China. The “Hay” doctrine of 1899, securing China’s political integrity and the “open door,” has become a part of an international covenant. And though great crises in international conflict may imperil this doctrine, it may be granted that if the United States stands Arm and keeps eyes open, no other people will rashly venture to disavow the doctrine. We are in the Philippines and shall, under God, stay there until he tells us it is time to leave, and we will not go until American ideals and institutions are imbedded in the faith and practice of the islanders. The Panama Canal goes on toward completion. Its future will be dictated by the American nation. It will serve our mills for a good turn in the cheap transportation of millions of rails for the vast expansion which is sure to take place in China in the next twenty years. Good authority declares that China will lead the world in the next fifth of a century in the matter of building rail- ways. Are we to have no part in that ex- pansion? If our diplomatists are keen-eyed enough they will see that Russia and Japan do not dictate without protest the building of railroads in Manchuria, when we possess the good will of the Chinese Empire, and even though France and England joined hands recently to urge China to be cautious and make no agreement with America with- out first securing the approval of Russia and Japan, we must stand fast. The above puts the emphasis upon the economic phase of history. Great as this is, it is not all. The American and English 13 Bible Societies lead the world in their dis- tribution of Bibles. Clayton S. Cooper writes with unwonted fervor of the mere facts of the spread of the Bible in the East. Last year 1,900 college men enrolled in vol- untary Bible classes in Japan. Lately D. Willard Lyon was appointed National Bible secretary for China. The day classes of the Chinese Young Women’s Christian Associa- tion in Shanghai make a picture of moment to the believer in the supremacy of the Word of God. In Korea the only English book that is fully translated is the Bible. It is difficult to supply enough Bibles at twenty- two cents each to meet the demand. In 1906 one church ordered twenty thousand. Every copy was sold before a page was printed. The Cabinets of Europe are watching the new awakening in the East with eager con- cern. Western influences are apparent in every quarter. Not only in the economic and political fleld is the East bending its thought in what has been styled its “copy-cat” spirit towards the West, but also in the realm of the spirit, and the Bible is getting back to its own. It has been a long time making the march from Syria and the Mediterranean to China and Thibet by way of Europe, but it has gone step by step with the main forces of history. It has joined hands with the in- evitable in human evolution. The impera- tive of Providence is back of it. Western Europe and America invented the iron ship of war and gave it to the people of the sun- set. Is it at all likely that the Book with which the march has been made for nearly two thousand years will be left behind for the future? Not unless we turn lunatics. 14 What the new Orient will be depends largely upon the attitude of America and England. Last year eighty-five per cent of the money raised for foreign missions in the Protestant world was contributed by the Anglo-Saxons. Is their sense of obligation to shrivel? Does doing the right thing tend to make it more foolish to continue doing it? Does finding the best method after centuries of experiment develop skepticism of its workableness? Is China’s adoption of the English language for international inter- course a sign that China believes another tongue is to rise to supremacy in the new future? Is the surrender of the “Boxer” indemnity by the United States to China to ill affect her in the future and lead her to suspect us of an unbrotherly spirit? The war of 1894 saw China weak. She is fast recovering, even though for a time Japan exercises a controlling influence in her af- fairs, and there will come a time when she will emerge out of the sad welter of conser- vatism. What a day has come! The Prince Regent summoned the first National Assem- bly to meet at Peking October 3, 1910. That date will rank for China with the July 4th of American history. Nor is that all. When 1913 shall have witnessed China starting forth with her tested and approved repre- sentative form of government, she will then be able to point with noble pride to her suc- cessful emulation of the great American Re- public which began its life In 1789. China is moving fast. That Statesman-Bishop, J. W. Bashford, has declared that no people has done so much in 1910 as this mighty Oriental folk. “Judged by its influence up- 15 on the future of the human race, there is reason to believe that the progress which the four hundred million Chinese have made during the past year (1910), in representa- tive government, in the abolition of slavery, and in the opium reform, will in the judg- ment of future historians outweigh the prog- ress which any other nation has made dur- ing 1910.” The day dawns indeed for the Orient. For her no more despotic autocrat. For her the fair model of Anglo-Saxon constitutional gov- ernment. For her no more the flaming dragon terror. For her the fair Pace of the Christ upon her peaceful banners. For her a share in what has made us worthy of per- manent power, that of being reckoned as the Christ-Bearer, the Christopher, of the world. God grant it may soon come. If the moral support given her by England and America, and not without its physical basis too, shall continue, the world will awake some day to read a new motto for the statesman, “As goes China so goes the Orient.” Then the fine feeling with which the West will greet the East is sung in the lines of Kipling: “0 the East is East, and the West is West, And never the twain will meet Till earth and sky stand presently Before the Judgment seat; But there is neither East nor West, Nor border, nor breed, nor birth. When two strong men stand face to face. Though they come from the end of the earth.” Delaware, Ohio. 16