The Hon. Benjamin Harrison, late President of the United States, replied to my inquiry in the terse remark:--''If what Lord Salisbury says were true, the reflection would not be upon the missionaries, but upon the premiers.''

General James H. Wilson, of the United States Army, the second in command of the American forces in Peking, adds his testimony:--

''Our missionaries, after the earlier Jesuits, were almost the first in that wide field (China). They were generally men of great piety and learning, like Morrison, Brown, Martin and Williams, and did all in their power as genuine men of God to show the heathen that the stranger was not necessarily a public enemy, but might be an evangel of a higher and better civilization. These men and their co-labourers have established hospitals, schools and colleges in various cities and provinces of the Empire, which are everywhere recognized by intelligent Chinamen as centres of unmitigated blessing to the people. Millions of dollars have been spent in this beneficent work, and the result is slowly but surely spreading the conviction that foreign arts and sciences are superior to 'fung shuy' and native superstition.''

The Hon. John Goodnow, American Consul-General at Shanghai, emphatically declares:--''It is absurd to charge the missionaries with causing the Boxer War. They are simply hated by the Chinese as one part of a great foreign element that threatened to upset the national institutions.''

Viceroy Yuan Shih Kai when Governor of Shantung, in the spring of 1901, wrote to the Baptist and Presbyterian missionaries of the province as follows:

''You, reverend sirs, have been preaching in China for many years, and, without exception, exhort men concerning righteousness. Your church customs are strict and correct, and all your converts may well observe them. In establishing your customs you have been careful to see that Chinese law was observed. How, then, can it be said that there is disloyalty? To meet this sort of calumny, I have instructed that proclamations be put out. I purpose, hereafter, to have lasting peace.

Church interests may then prosper and your idea of preaching righteousness I can promote. The present upheaval is of a most extraordinary character. It forced you, reverend sirs, by land and water to go long journeys, and subjected you to alarm and danger, causing me many qualms of conscience.''

A charge which has been so completely demolished by such competent and unprejudiced witnesses can only be renewed at the expense of either intelligence or candour. Dr. Arthur H.

Smith truly says that ''amid the varied action of so many agents it is vain to deny that Christianity has sometimes been so presented as to be misrepresented, but on the whole there had for some time been a marked and a growing friendliness on the part of both people and officials. . . . The convulsion which shook China to its foundations was due to general causes, slow in their operations, but inevitable in their results. It was the impact of the Middle Ages with the developed Christian commercial civilization of the nineteenth century, albeit accompanied with many incidental elements which were neither Christian nor in the true sense civilized. If Christianity had never come to China at all, some such collision must have occurred.''[78]

[78] ''Rex Christus,'' pp. 204-206.

XXII

THE CHINESE CHRISTIANS

THE real effect of the operation of the missionary force is to be seen in the Chinese who have accepted Christianity. As the commercial force is causing an economic revolution and as the political force resulted in the Boxer uprising, so the missionary force is developing a great spiritual movement which is crystallizing into a Chinese Church.

Much has been said about the character of the Chinese Christians and doubts have been cast on the genuineness of their faith.

It is admitted that they sometimes try the patience of the missionary.

But is the home pastor never distressed by the conduct of his members? I am inclined to believe that the Christians in China would compare favourably with the same number selected at random in America. A Chinese laundryman posted on his door this significant notice to his foreign customers:--''Please help us to remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy by bringing your clothes to the laundry before ten o'clock on Saturdays,''

while in another place a Chinese servant left the morning after a card party at which much money had changed hands, stating to his mistress in explanation, ''Me Clistian; me no stay in heathen house!'' The Chinese Christian does not content himself with church attendance once a week when the weather is pleasant or an attractive theme is announced.

He does not find himself in vigorous health for an evening entertainment, and with a bad headache on prayer-meeting night.

There are of course exceptions, but as a rule, the Chinese Christians worship God with regularity in all kinds of weather.

A missionary told me that the attendance at his mid-week meeting was as large as at his Sunday morning service, that every member of his church asked a blessing at the table, had family prayers and tried to bring his unconverted friends to Christ. If there is a pastor in America who can say that of his people, he has modestly refrained from making it public.

But such comparisons are, after all, unfair to the Chinese Christian for he should be compared, not with Europeans and Americans who have had far greater advantages, but with the people of his own country. ''At home, you have the ripe fruits of a Christianity which was planted more than a thousand years ago. The Word of God has been among you all these Christian centuries. You have in every part of the country a highly trained ministry, a gifted and devoted eldership, and a whole army of Christian workers of all ranks. You work in the atmosphere of a Christian society, and under a settled Christian government. You have an immense and varied Christian literature, and notwithstanding all defects and drawbacks, you have on your side a weight of Christian tradition and a wealth of Christian example. Under such circumstances and in such an atmosphere, what are we not entitled to expect of those who bear the Christian name? What justice is there, or what reasonableness, in demanding as a test of genuineness the same degree of attainment on the part of Christian people, many of them uneducated, who are only just emerging from the deadness and insensibility of heathenism?''[79]

[79] Gibson, pp. 239, 240.

The real question is this:--Is the Christian Chinese a better man than the non-Christian Chinese--more moral, more truthful, more just, more reliable? The answer is so patent that no one who knows the facts can doubt it for a moment. The best men and women in China to-day are the Protestant Christians.

This is not saying that all converts are good or that all non- Christian Chinese are bad. But it is saying that comparing the average Christian with the average heathen, the superiority of the former in those things which make character and conduct is immeasurable. ''The conscience of those who have been born into a new life is not suddenly transformed, yet the change does take place and upon a larger scale. When once it has been accomplished, a new force has been introduced into the Chinese Empire, a salt to preserve, a leaven to pervade, a seed to bring forth after its kind in perpetually augmenting abundance and fertility.''[80]

[80] Smith, ''Rex Christus,'' p. 107.

The character of the Chinese Christian will appear in still more striking relief if we consider the circumstances in which he hears the gospel and the difficulties which he has to overcome.

On this subject the following remarkable passage from Dr. Gibson is worth quoting entire:--

''Out there the great issue is tried with all external helps removed.

The gospel goes to China with no subsidiary aids. It is spoken to the people by the stammering lips of aliens. Those who accept it do so with no prospect of temporal gain. They go counter to all their own preconceptions, and to all the prejudices of their people. Try as we may to become all things to all men, we can but little accommodate our teaching to their thought. . . . Often and often have I looked into the faces of a crowd of non-Christian Chinese and felt keenly how many barriers lay between their minds and mine. Reasoning that seems to me conclusive makes no appeal to them. Even the words we use to convey religious ideas do not bear to their minds one-hundredth part of the meaning we wish to put into them. I have often thought that if I were to expend all my energies to persuade one Chinaman to change the cut of his coat, or to try some new experiment in agriculture, I should certainly plead in vain. And yet I stand up to beg him to change the habits of a lifetime, to break away from the whole accumulated outcome of heredity, to make himself a target for the scorn of the world in which he lives, to break off from the consolidated social system which has shaped his being, and on the bare word of an unknown stranger to plunge into the hazardous experiment of a new and untried life, to be lived on a moral plane still almost inconceivable to him, whose sanctions and rewards are higher than his thoughts as heaven is higher than earth. While I despair of inducing him by my reasonings to make the smallest change in the least of his habits, I ask him, not with a light heart, but with a hopeful one, to submit his whole being to a change that is for him the making of his whole world anew. 'Credo quia impossis- ble,' I believe it can be done because I know I cannot do it, and the smallest success is proof of the working of the divine power. The missionary must either confess himself helpless, or he must to the last fibre of his being believe in the Holy Ghost. I choose to believe, nay I am shut up to believe, by what my eyes have seen.

''I do not mean that one sees the results of preaching directly on the spot. In China at least one seldom does. But by the power of God the results come. We have seen unclean lives made pure, the broken-hearted made glad, the false and crooked made upright and true, the harsh and cruel made kindly and gentle. I have seen old women, seventy, eighty, eighty-five years of age, throwing away the superstitions of a lifetime, the accumulated merit of years of toilsome and expensive worship, and when almost on the brink of the grave, venturing all upon a new-preached faith and a new-found Saviour. We have seen the abandoned gambler become a faithful and zealous preacher of the gospel. We have seen the poor giving out of their poverty help to others, poorer still. We see many Chinese Christians who were once narrow and avaricious, giving out of their hard-earned month's wages, or more, yearly, to help the church's work. We see dull and uneducated people drinking in new ideas, mysteriously growing in their knowledge of Christian truth, and learning to shape their lives by its teachings. We have seen proud, passionate men, whose word was formerly law in their village, submit to injury, loss and insult, because of their Christian profession, until even their enemies were put to shame by their gentleness, and were made to be at peace with them.

And the men and women and children who are passing through these experiences are gathering in others, and building up one by one a Christian community which is becoming a power on the side of all that is good in the non-Christian communities around them. . . . Everything is hostile to it. It is striking its roots in an uncongenial soil, and breathes a polluted air. It may justly claim for itself the beautiful emblem so happily seized, though so poorly justified, by Buddhism--the emblem of the lotus. It roots itself in rotten mud, thrusts up the spears of its leaves and blossoms through the foul and stagnant water, and lifts its spotless petals over all, holding them up pure, stainless and fragrant, in the face of a burning and pitiless sun. So it is with the Christian life in China Its existence there is a continuous miracle of life, of life more abundant.''[81]

[81] ''Mission Problems and Mission Methods in South China,'' pp. 29-31, 240.

Is it said that these Asiatics have become Christians for gain? Then how shall we account for the fact that out of their deep poverty they gave for church work last year $2.50 per capita, which is more in proportion to ability than Christians at home gave? The impoverished Tu-kon farmers rented a piece of land and worked it in common for the support of the Lord's work; the Peking school-girls went without their breakfasts to save money for their church, and eight graduates of Shantung College refused high salaries as teachers, and accepted low salaries as pastors of self-supporting churches.

''Rice Christians?'' Doubtless in some instances, just as at home some people join American churches for business or social ends. But those Chinese Christians are receiving less and less from abroad and yet their number grows.

And it costs something to be a Christian in China. All hope of official preferment must be abandoned, for the duties of every magistrate include temple ceremonies that no Christian could conduct. For the average Christian, loss of business, social ostracism, bitter hatred, are the common price.

Near Peking, a young man was thrice beaten and denied the use of the village well, mill and field insurance, because he became a Christian. A widow was dragged through the streets with a rope about her neck and beaten with iron rods which cut her body to the bone, while her fiendish persecutors yelled:-- ''You will follow the foreign devils, will you!'' And that Chinese saint replied that she was not following foreigners but Jesus Christ and that she would not deny Him!

And so on every hand there are evidences of fidelity in service, of tribulation joyfully borne, of systematic giving out of scanty resources. While sapient critics are telling us that the heathen cannot be converted, the heathen are not only being converted but are manifesting a consecration and self-denial which should shame many in Christian lands. At a Presbyterial meeting in north China, the native ministers held a two- hours' prayer-meeting before daylight. Such prayer-meetings are not common in America. Is it surprising that in that little North China Presbytery 292 baptisms were recorded that year?

Nor is this a solitary instance. Every Sunday the little congregations gather. Every day the native helpers tell the Bible-story to their listening countrymen.

The history of missions in China has shown that it requires more time to convert a Chinese to Christianity than some other heathen, but that he can be converted and that when he is converted, he holds to his new faith with a tenacity and fortitude which the most awful persecution seldom shakes. The behaviour of the Chinese Christians under the baptism of blood and fire to which they were subjected in the Boxer uprising eloquently testified to the genuineness of their faith. That some should have fallen away was to be expected. Not every Christian, even in the United States, can ''endure hardness.''

Let a hundred men anywhere be told that if they do not abandon their faith, their homes will be burned, their business ruined, their wives ravished, their children brained, and they themselves scourged and beheaded, and a proportion of them will flinch.

It was to be expected, too, that when, after the uprising, the Christians found their supporters triumphing over a prostrate foe, some of them should unduly exult and take advantage of the opportunity to punish their enemies or to collect money from them as the price of protection. The spirit of retaliation is strong in human nature in China as well as in America.

When the armies of the Allies, led by educated and experienced officers, and controlled by diplomats from old-established Christian countries, gave way under the provocation of the time to unmeasured greed and vindictive cruelty, it is not surprising that some of the Chinese Christians, only just emerged from heathenism, should betray a revengeful spirit towards men who had destroyed their property, slaughtered their wives and children, and hunted the survivors with the ferocity of wild beasts. In some places, the missionaries had a hard task in restraining this spirit. It was inevitable, also, that in the confusion which followed the victory of the foreigners, some ''wolves'' should put on ''sheep's clothing,'' and, under the pretense of being Christians, extort money from the terror- stricken villagers, or try to deceive the foreigner with false claims for indemnity.

But as I visited the scenes of disaster, saw the frightful ruin, heard the stories of Christians and missionaries, faced the little companies of survivors and learned more of the awful ordeal through which they had passed, I marvelled, not that some yielded, but that so many stood steadfast. Edicts were issued commanding them to recant on pain of dire punishment, but promising protection to those who obeyed. The following proclamation posted on the wall of the yamen at Ching-chou-fu is a sample of hundreds:--

''The Taku forts have been retaken by the Chinese. Gen.

Tung Fu Shiang has led the Boxers and the goddesses, and has destroyed twenty foreign men-of-war, killing 6,000 foreign soldiers. The seven devilish countries' consuls came to beg for peace. General Tung now has killed all the foreign soldiers.

The secondary devils (the native Christians) must die. General Tung has ordered the Boxers to go to the foreign countries and bring out their devil emperors from their holes. One foreigner must not be allowed to live. All who are not Chinese must be destroyed.''

It requires no large knowledge of Chinese character to calculate the effect of such official utterances on the minds of lawless men.

Word sped from a Chinese city that on a certain day all Christians who had not recanted could be pillaged. From every quarter, the lawless streamed in, eager for the shambles.

Ruffians pointed out the women they intended to take. And there was no foreigner to protect, no regiment or battleship for the Chinese Christian.

Those poor people, hardly out of their spiritual infancy, stood in that awful emergency absolutely alone. Could an American congregation have endured such a strain without flinching? Let those who can safely worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences be thankful that the genuineness of their faith has never been subjected to that supreme test.

Those were grievous days for the Christians of China.

Two graduates of Teng-chou College remained for weary weeks in a filthy dungeon when they might have purchased freedom at any moment by renouncing Christianity. Pastor Meng of Paoting-fu, a direct descendant of Mencius, was 120 miles from home when the outbreak occurred. He was safe where he was, but he hurried back to die with his flock. He was stabbed, his arm twisted out of joint and his back scorched with burning candles in the effort to make him recant. But he steadfastly refused to compromise either himself or his people and was finally beheaded.

The uneducated peasant was no whit behind his cultivated countrymen in devotion to duty. A poor cook was seized and beaten, his ears were cut off, his mouth and cheeks gashed with a sword and other unspeakable mutilations inflicted. Yet he stood as firmly as any martyr of the early Church.