IT would be unwise to underestimate the gravity of the situation, or to assume that the most numerous and conservative nation on the globe has been suddenly transformed from foreign haters to foreign lovers. The world may again have occasion to realize that the momentum of countless myriads is an awful force even against the resources of a higher civilization, as the Romans found to their consternation when the barbarian hordes overran the Empire. We do not know what disturbances may yet occur or what proportions they may assume. It may be that much blood will yet be shed. Inflamed passions will certainly be slow in subsiding. Men who are identified with the old era will not give up without a struggle. It took 300 years to bring England from pagan barbarism to Christian civilization, and China is vaster far and more conservative than England. The world moves faster now, and the change-producing forces of the present exceed those of former centuries as a modern steam hammer exceeds a wooden sledge. But China is ponderous, and a few decades are short for so gigantic a transformation.
Meantime, much depends on the future conduct of foreigners. It is hard enough for the proud-spirited Chinese to see the aliens coming in greater numbers than ever and entrenching themselves more and more impregnably, and a continuance of the policy of greed and injustice will deepen an already deep resentment. The almost invincible prejudice against the foreigner is a serious hindrance to the regeneration of China. ``This fact emphasizes the need for using every means possible for the breaking down of such a prejudice. Every careless or willful wound to Chinese susceptibilities, or unnecessary crossing of Chinese superstitions, retards our own work and increases the dead wall of opposition on the part of this people.''
The proper way to deal with the Chinese was illustrated by the Rev. J. Walter Lowrie of the Presbyterian Mission at Paoting-fu when, as a token of appreciation for his services to the city in connection with the retaliatory measures of the foreign troops shortly after the Boxer outbreak, the magistrate raised a special fund among wealthy Chinese, bought a fine tract of sixteen acres and presented it to the mission as a gift. The tract had been occupied for many years by several families of tenants who had built their own houses, but who were now to be evicted. Of course, Mr. Lowrie was not responsible for them. But he insisted that they should be dealt with fairly, and be paid a reasonable price for their homes and the improvements that they had made so that they could rent land and establish themselves elsewhere. In addition, he was at pains to find work for them until their new crops became available. Their affectionate greeting of Mr. Lowrie as we walked about the place clearly showed their gratification. There is not the slightest trouble with the Chinese when they are treated with ordinary decency as brother men.
At any rate, in the name of that civilization and Christianity which we profess, as well of common humanity, let foreign nations abandon the methods of brutality and rapine. If we expect to convert the Chinese, we must exemplify the principles we teach. It is not true that the Chinese cannot understand justice and magnanimity. Even if it were true, it does not follow that we should be unjust and pitiless. Let us instruct them in the higher things. How are they ever to learn, if we do not teach them? But as a matter of fact, the Chinese are as amenable to reason as any people in the world. Their temperament and inertia and long isolation from the remainder of mankind have made them slow to grasp a new idea. But they will get it if they are given reasonable time, and when they do once get it, they will hold it. Whether, therefore, further trouble occurs, depends in part upon the conduct of foreign nations. Justice and humanity in all dealings with the Chinese, while not perhaps wholly preventing outbreaks of hostility, will at least give less occasion for them.
But however trying the period of transition may be, the issue is not for a moment doubtful. Progress invariably wins the victory over blind conservatism. The higher idea is sure to conquer the lower. With all their admixture of selfishness and violence, the fact remains that the forces operating on China to-day include the vital regenerative element for human society. It is futile to expect that China could ever regenerate herself without outside aid. Spontaneous regeneration is an exploded theory in society as well as in biology. Life always comes from without.
The spirit of China's new system of education shows that there is imminent danger of the misuse of modern methods, even when they have been adopted. All her institutions are conducted on principles which virtually debar Christians either as students or professors. Infidelity, however, has free entrance as long as it conforms to the external forms imposed by the State. ``Anti-conservative but anti-Christian,'' the educational movement has been characterized by Dr. W. M. Hayes of Teng-chou. Dr. W. A. P. Martin, so long President of the Imperial Chinese University, declares that ``if Christians at home only knew what a determined effort is being made to exclude Christian teachers and Christian text-books from Chinese Government schools, from the Imperial University down, they would exert themselves to give a Christian education to the youth of China.'' A single mission institution, like the Shantung Protestant University, with its union of the best educational methods and the highest ideals of Christian character, will do more for the real enlightenment of China than a dozen provincial colleges where gambling, irreligion and opium smoking are freely tolerated and a failure to worship the tablet of Confucius is deemed the only cardinal sin.
In view of all these things, the regeneration of China becomes a question of transcendent importance, a question demanding the broadest statesmanship and the supremest effort; a question involving the future destinies of the race. ``On account of its mass, its homogeneity, its high intellectual and moral qualities, its past history, its present and prospective relations to the whole world, the conversion of the Chinese people to Christianity is the most important aggressive enterprise now laid upon the Church of Christ.'' It would be a calamity to the whole world if the dominant powers of Asia should continue to be heathen. But if they are not to be, immediate and herculean efforts must be made to regenerate them. Sir Robert Hart declares that the only hope of averting ``the yellow peril'' lies either in partition among the great Powers, which he regards as so difficult as to be impracticable, or in a miraculous spread of Christianity which will transform the Empire. Beyond question, Sir Robert Hart is right. It is too late now to avoid the issue. The impact of new forces is rousing this gigantic nation, and Western nations must either conquer or convert. Conquering is out of the question for reasons already given. The only alternative is conversion. In these circumstances ``the yellow peril becomes the golden opportunity of Christendom.''
And by conversion is not meant ``civilization.'' Here is the fundamental error of the pseudonymous writer of ``Letters From a Chinese Official.'' He evidently knows little or nothing of the missionary force or of the motives which control it. He writes as a man who has lived in a commercial and political atmosphere, and who feels outraged, and with some justice, by the policy which European nations have adopted towards China. From this view-point, it was easy for the quick- witted author to satirize our defects and to laud the virtues, some of them unquestionably real, of his native land. But it does not follow that his indictment holds against the Christian people of the West, who reprobate as strongly as the author the duplicity and brutality of foreign nations in their dealings with China. The West has something more to offer China than a civilization. As a matter of fact, the best people of the West are not trying to give China a civilization at all, but a gospel. With whatever is good in Chinese civilization, they have no wish to interfere. It is true that some changes in society invariably follow the acceptance of Christianity, but these changes relate only to those things that are always and everywhere inherently wrong, irrespective of the civilization to which they appear to belong. The gospel transformed ``the Five Points'' in New York not because they were uncivilized but because they were evil. It will do in China only what it does in America--fight vice, cleanse foulness, dispel superstition. Christianity is the only power which does this. It has transformed every people among whom it has had free course. It has purified society. It has promoted intelligence. It has elevated woman. It has fitted for wise and beneficent use of power. Of those who deny this, Lowell says:
``So long as these very men are dependent for every privilege they enjoy upon that religion which they discard, they may well hesitate a little before seeking to rob the Christian of his faith and humanity of its hope in that Saviour who alone has given to man that hope of eternal life which makes life tolerable and society possible, and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom.''
No degradation is beyond the reach of its regenerating power. Witness the New Hebrides, Metlakatla, the Fiji, Georgia and Friendly Islands. Even England, Germany and America themselves are in evidence. Christianity lifted them out of a barbarism and superstition as dense as any prevailing among the heathen nations of this age. It can effect like changes in China if it is given the opportunity.
But it is said that the Chinese do not want to be converted. A distinguished General of the United States army declared, after his return from Peking in 1900:--``I must say that I did not meet a single intelligent Chinaman who expressed a desire to embrace the Christian religion. The masses are against Christianity.'' It is pleasant to know that it is so common for unconverted Americans to go to that army officer for spiritual guidance that the failure of the Chinese to do so disappointed him. Most men would hardly have expected a people who were smarting under defeat to open their hearts to a commander of the conquering army. But hundreds of other foreigners in China, myself included, can testify that they have heard intelligent Chinese express a desire to embrace the Christian religion, and the fact that there are in China to-day over a hundred thousand Chinese, to say nothing of myriads of enrolled catechumens, who have publicly confessed their faith in Christ and who have tenaciously adhered to it under sore persecution is tangible evidence that some Chinese at least are disposed to accept Christianity.
Do they want Him? ``It would please you,'' a missionary writes, ``to see these poor people feeling after God, and their eagerness to learn more and more.'' It is not uncommon for converts to travel ten, fifteen and even twenty miles to attend service. The Sunday I was in Ichou-fu, I met a fine-looking young man, named Yao Chao Feng, who had walked sixteen miles to receive Christian baptism, and several other Chinese were present who had journeyed on foot from seventeen to thirty-three miles. In Paoting-fu, I heard of a mother and daughter who had painfully hobbled on bound feet thirteen miles that they might learn more about the new faith. In another city, 800 opium-smokers kneeled in a church and asked God to help them break the chains of that frightful habit. Surely He who puts His fatherly arms around the prodigal and kissed him was in that humble church and answered the prayer of those poor, sin-cursed men. It would be easy to fill a book with such instances.
But suppose the Chinese do not want Christ. What of it? Did they want the distinguished General? On the contrary, he had to fight his way into Peking at the mouth of the cannon and the point of the bayonet, over the dead bodies of Chinese and through the ruins of Chinese towns. Do ``the masses'' desire Christ anywhere? Mr. Moody used to say that the people of the United States did not want Christ and would probably reject Him if He came to them as He came to the Jews of old.
The question is not at all whether the Chinese or anybody else desire Christ, but whether they need Him, and a man's answer to that question largely depends upon his own relations to Christ. If we need Him, the Chinese do. If He has done anything for us, if He has brought any dignity and power and peace into our lives, the probabilities are that He can do as much for the Chinese.
``Be assured that the Christ who cannot save a Chinaman in longitude 117'0 East is a Christ who cannot save you in longitude 3'0 west. The question about missions would not be so lightly put, nor the answer so lightly listened to, if men realized that what is at stake is not a mere scheme of us missionaries, but the validity of their own hope of eternal life. Yet I am bound to say that the questions put to me, on returning from the mission field, by professedly Christian people often shake my faith, not in missions, but in their Christian profession. What kind of grasp of the gospel have men got, who doubt whether it is to-day, under any skies, the power of God unto salvation?''
It passes comprehension that any one who has even a superficial knowledge of the real China can doubt for a moment its vital need of the gospel. The wretchedness of its life appalls an American who goes back into the unmodified conditions of the interior or even into the old Chinese city of proud Shanghai. As I journeyed through those vast throngs, climbed many hilltops and looked out upon the innumerable villages, which thickly dotted the plain as far as the eye could reach, as I saw the unrelieved pain and the crushing poverty and the abject fear of evil spirits, I felt that in China is seen in literal truth ``The Man with the Hoe.''
``Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground, The emptiness of ages in his face, And on his back the burden of the world.
``What gulfs between him and the seraphim, Slave of the wheel of labour, what to him Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades? What the long reaches of the peaks of song, The rift of dawn, the reddening of the rose? Through this dread shape the suffering ages look; Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop.''
This is the need to which the churches of Europe and America are addressing themselves through the boards and societies of foreign missions. These boards are the channels through which the highest type of Christian civilization is communicated to pagan peoples, the agencies which gather up all that is best and truest in our modern life and concentrate it upon the conditions of China. From this view-point, foreign missions is not only a question of religion, but a problem of statesmanship, and one of overshadowing magnitude. As such, it merits the sympathy and cooperation of every intelligent and broad-minded man, irrespective of his religious affiliations. Its spiritual aims are supreme and sufficient for every true disciple of Christ, but apart from them its social and educational value and its relation to the welfare of the race justly claim the interest and support of all. In this work the Church is saving both individuals and nations, and for time as well as for eternity. It holds no pessimistic views of the future. It denies that the development of the race has ended. It frankly concedes the existence of vice and superstition. But it believes that the gospel of Jesus Christ is able to subdue that vice, and to dispel that superstition. So it founds schools and colleges for the education of the young; establishes hospitals and dispensaries for the care of the sick and suffering; operates printing-presses for the dissemination of the Bible and a Christian literature; maintains churches for the worship of the true God, and in and through all it preaches to lost men the transforming and uplifting gospel of Him who alone can ``speak peace to the heathen.''
But some are saying that the Boxer outbreak has destroyed their confidence in the practicability of the effort to evangelize the Chinese. They are asking: ``Why should we send any more missionaries to China?''
I reply: ``Why send any more merchants, any more consuls, any more oil, flour, cotton? Shall we continue our commercial and political relations with China and discontinue our religious relations; allow the lower influences to flow on unchecked, but withhold the spiritual forces which would purify trade and politics, which have made us what we are, and which alone can regenerate the millions of China?''
Is disaster a reason for withdrawal? When the American colonists found themselves involved in the horrors of the Revolution, did they say that it would have been better to remain the subjects of Great Britain? When, a generation ago, our land was drenched with the blood of the Civil War, did men think that they ought to have tolerated secession and slavery? When the Maine was blown up in Havana Harbour and Lawton was killed in Luzon, did we demand withdrawal from Cuba and the Philippines? When Liscum fell under the walls of Tien-tsin, did we insist that the attempt to relieve the Legations should be abandoned? Or did not the American people, in every one of these instances, find in the very agonies of struggle and bloodshed a decisive reason for advance? Did they not sternly resolve that there should be men, that there should be money, and that the war should be pressed to victory whatever the sacrifice that might be involved?
And shall the Church of God weakly, timidly yield because the very troubles have occurred which Christ Himself predicted? He frankly said that there should ``be wars and rumors of wars''; that His disciples should ``be hated of all men''; that He sent them ``forth as sheep in the midst of wolves,'' and that the brother should ``deliver up the brother to death and the father the child.'' But in that very discourse He also said: ``He that taketh not his cross and followeth after me is not worthy of me.'' ``Go, preach,'' He commanded. ``Woe is me if I preach not,'' cried Paul. Hostile rulers and priests and mobs and the bitter Cross did not swerve Him a hairbreadth from His purpose; nor did the rending of the early disciples in the arenas of Nero, the burning of a Huss and a Savonarola, the pyres of Smithfield, the dungeons of the Tolbooth and the thumb-screws of the Inquisition quench the zeal of His followers.
And in the like manner, the ashes of mission buildings and the blood of devoted missionaries and the tumult of furious men have led multitudes at home to form a high and holy resolve to send more missionaries, to give more money and to press the whole majestic enterprise with new faith and power until all China has been electrified by the vital spiritual force of a nobler faith. God summons Christendom to a forward movement in the land whose soil has been forever consecrated by the martyrdom of the beloved dead. Instead of retreating, ``we should,'' in the immortal words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, ``be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.''
It may be said that this is a purely sentimental consideration. But so may love for country, for liberty, for wife and children, be called a sentiment. God forbid that the time should ever come when men will not be influenced by sentiment. The intuitions of the heart are as apt to be correct as the dictates of the head. I candidly admit that as I stood amid the ruins of the mission buildings in China, as I faced the surviving Christians and remembered what they had suffered, the property they had lost and the dear ones they had seen murdered,--as I stood with bared head on the spot where devoted missionaries had perished, I was conscious of a deeper consecration to the task of uplifting China. And I am not willing to admit that such a dedication of the living to the continuance of the work of the dead is a mere sentiment.
We are not wise above what is written when we declare that the eternal purpose of God comprehends China as well as Europe and America. He did not create those hundreds of millions of human beings simply to fertilize the soil in which their bodies will decay. He has not preserved China as a nation for nearly half a hundred centuries for nothing. Out of the apparent wreck, the new dispensation will come, is already coming. Frightened men thought that the fall of Rome meant the end of the world, but we can see that it only cleared the way for a better world. Pessimists feared that the violence and blood of the Crusades would ruin Europe, but instead they broke up the stagnation of the Middle Ages and made possible the rise of modern Europe. The faint-hearted said that the India mutiny of 1857 and the Syria massacres of 1860 ended all hope of regenerating those countries, but in both they ushered in the most successful era of missions.
So the barriers which have separated China from the rest of the world must, like the medieval wall of Tien-tsin, be cast down and over them a highway for all men be made. No one sup- posed that the process would be so sudden and violent. But in the Boxer uprising the hammer of God did in months what would otherwise have taken weary generations. Some were discouraged because the air was filled with the deafening tumult and the blinding dust and the flying debris. Many lost heart and wanted to sound a retreat because some of God's chosen ones were crushed in the awful rending. But the wiser and more far-seeing heard a new call to utilize the larger opportunity which resulted. Up to this time we have been playing with foreign missions. It is now time for Christendom to understand that its great work in the twentieth century is to plan this movement on a scale gigantic in comparison with anything it has yet done, and to grapple intelligently, generously and resolutely, with the stupendous task of Christianizing China.
But we are sometimes told that the churches should not be allowed to go on; that one of the conditions of good feeling will be the exclusion of missionaries from China. On this point, I venture three suggestions:--
First,--No administration that can ever be elected in the United States will thus interfere with the liberty of the churches. It will never say, in effect, that arms' manufacturing companies can send agents to Peking and distilleries send drummers to Shanghai, but that the Church of God cannot send devoted, intelligent men and women to found schools and hospitals and printing-presses and to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. It will never say that American gamblers in Tien-tsin and American prostitutes in Hongkong shall be protected by all the might of the American army and navy, but that the pure, high-minded missionary, who represents the noblest motives and ideals of our American life, shall be expatriated, a man without a country.
This is, however, a problem for the nation, rather than for the boards. The American missionary went to Asia before his Government did, and until recently he saw very little of the American flag. European nations have protected their citizens, whether they were missionaries or traders. In the United States Senate Mr. Frye once reminded the nation that about twenty years ago England sent an army of 15,000 men down to the African coast, across 700 miles of burning sand, to batter down iron gates and stone walls, reach down into an Abyssinian dungeon and lift out of it one British subject who had been unlawfully imprisoned. It cost England $25,000,000 to do it, but it made a highway over this planet for every common son of Britain, and the words, ``I am an English citizen,'' more potent than the sceptre of a king. And because of that reputation American missionaries have more than once been saved by the intervention of British ministers and consuls who have not forgotten that ``blood is thicker than water.'' Shall we vociferously curse England one day and the next supinely depend upon her representatives to help us out when our citizens are endangered?
This is not a question of ``jingoism,'' whatever that may be. It is not a question of making unreasonable complaints to home governments. It is not a question of religion or of missions. It is a question of treaties, of citizenship, of national honour and of self-respect. Let the nation settle it from that viewpoint. The missionary asks no special privileges. He can stand it to go on as before, if the nation can stand it to have him.
Second,--If China should ever make such a demand in repudiation of the treaties which she herself has expressly acknowledged to be valid, and if all the Powers should support her in that demand, does anybody doubt what the missionary would say? We know at any rate what he has said in similar circumstances. When Peter and John were scourged and forbidden to preach any more in the name of Jesus, friendless and penniless though they were, they ringingly answered: ``Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye. For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.'' When Martin Luther was arraigned before the most powerful tribunal in Europe, he declared: ``Here I stand. God help me. I can do no other.'' When the Russian Minister in Constantinople haughtily said to Dr. Schauffler, ``My master, the Czar of all the Russias, will not let you put foot on that territory,''--the intrepid missionary replied: ``My Master, the Lord Jesus Christ, will never ask the Czar of all the Russias where He shall put His foot.'' Scores of missionaries have not hesitated to say to hostile authorities: ``I did not receive my commission from any earthly potentate but from the King of Kings, and I shall, I must go on.''
Some will say that this is madness. So of old men said of Christ, ``He hath a demon''; so they said of Paul, ``Thou art beside thyself.'' If magnificent moral courage and unyielding devotion to duty are ``madness,'' then the more the world has of it the better.
The effort to minimize the significance of the missionary force in China will be made only by those who, destitute of any vital religious faith themselves, of course see no reason for communicating it to others, or by those who are strangely blind and deaf to the real issues of the age. In the words of Benjamin Kidd, ``it is not improbable that, to a future observer, one of the most curious features of our time will appear to be the prevailing unconsciousness of the real nature of the issues in the midst of which we are living.''
``No more did the statesmen and the philosophers of Rome understand the character and issues of that greatest movement of all history, of which their literature takes so little notice. That the greatest religious change in the history of mankind should have taken place under the eyes of a brilliant galaxy of philosophers and historians who were profoundly conscious of decomposition around them; that all these writers should have utterly failed to predict the issue of the movement they were then observing; and that during the space of three centuries they should have treated as simply contemptible an agency which all men must now admit to have been, for good or evil, the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of men, are facts well worthy of meditation in every period of religious transition.''
Does any sane man imagine that the Church could cease to be missionary and remain a Church? It has been well said that the Christian nations might as well face the utter futility of any hypothesis based upon the supposition that they can remain away from the Orient. The occurrences of recent years have made changes in their relation to the world which they can no more recall than they can alter the course of a planet. It is idle for doctrinaires to tell us from the quiet comfort of home libraries, that we should ``keep hands off.'' We can no more keep hands off than our country could keep hands off slavery in the South, no more than New York could keep hands off a borough infected with smallpox. The world has passed the point where one-third of its population can be allowed to breed miasma which the other two-thirds must breathe. Both for China's sake and for our own, we must continue this work. If this is true in the political and commercial realms, much more is it true in the religious. Chalmer's notable sermon on the ``Expulsive Power of a New Affection'' enunciates a permanent principle. When a man's soul is once thrilled with the conviction that he has found God, he must declare that sublime truth,
``To doubt would be disloyalty, To falter would be sin.''
I confess to a feeling of impatience when I am told that all missionary plans for China must be contingent ``upon the settlement of political negotiations,'' ``the overthrow of the Empress Dowager and her reactionary advisers,'' ``the reestablishment of the Emperor on his rightful throne,'' ``the continuance in power of Viceroy Yuan Shih Kai,'' ``the mainte- nance of a strong foreign military and naval force in China,'' ``the thwarting of Russia's plans for supremacy,'' and several other events.
All these things have been said and more. Is the Church then despairingly to resign her commission from Jesus Christ and humbly ask a new one from Caesar? Not so did the apostolic missionaries, and not so, I am persuaded, will their modern successors do. They cannot, indeed, be indifferent to the course of political events or to their bearing upon the missionary problem. But, on the other hand, they cannot make their obedience to Christ and their duty to their fellow men dependent upon political considerations. For Christian men to wait until China is pacified by the Powers, or ``until she is enlightened by the dissemination of truer conceptions of the Western world,'' would be to abdicate their responsibility as the chief factor in bringing about a better state of affairs. Is the Church prepared to abandon the field to the diplomat, the soldier, the trader? How soon is China likely to be pacified by them, judging from their past acts? The gospel is the primary need of China to-day, not the tertiary. The period of unrest is not the time for the messenger of Christ to hold his peace, but to declare with new zeal and fidelity his ministry of reconciliation. To leave the field to the politician, the soldier and the trader would be to dishonour Christ, to fail to utilize an unprecedented opportunity, to abandon the Chinese Christians in their hour of special need and to prejudice missionary influence at home and abroad for a generation.
But the numbers at work are painfully inadequate. To say that there are 2,950 Protestant foreign missionaries in China is apt to give a distorted idea of the real situation unless one remembers the immensity of the population. A station is considered well-manned when it has four families and a couple of single women. But what are they among those swarming myriads? The proportion of Protestant missionaries to the population, which is commonly quoted, needs revision. There is one to about every 144,000 souls. But that, too, requires modification, for it counts the sick, the aged, recruits who are learning the language, wives whose time is absorbed by household cares, and those who are absent on furloughs, the last class alone being often about ten per cent. of the total enrollment. The actual working force, therefore, is far smaller than the statistics suggest.
Of China as a whole, it is said that ``some of the missionaries and some of the converts are to be found in every one of the provinces, both of China and Manchuria. But in the 1,900 odd counties into which the provinces are divided, each with one important town and a large part of them with more than one, there are but some 400 stations. That is to say, at least four-fifths of the counties of China are almost entirely unprovided with the means of hearing the gospel.'' Of all the walled cities in the Empire, less than 300 are occupied by missionaries. There are literally tens of thousands of communities that have not yet been touched by the gospel. Plainly, the missionary force must be largely augmented if the work is to be adequately done. The home churches have gone too far to stop without going farther. ``Those who undertake to carry on mission work among great peoples undertake great responsibilities. We have no right to penetrate these nations with a revolutionary gospel of enormous power, unless we are prepared to make every sacrifice and every effort for the proper care and the wise training of the organization of the Christian community itself which, while it must become increasingly a source of revolutionary thought and movement, is also the only body that can by the help and grace of God give these far-reaching movements a healthy direction and lead them to safe and happy issues.''
Grant that the work of evangelization must be chiefly done by Chinese preachers; there is still much for the missionary to do. Allowing for those who, on account of illness, furlough or other duties, are temporarily non-effective, 10,000 missionaries for China would not give a working average of one for every 50,000 of the population. In these circumstances, the union conference of missionaries at Kuling, August 7, 1903, was surely within reasonable bounds when, in urging the Protestant churches to celebrate in 1907 the one hundredth anniversary of the sending forth of Robert Morrison, it declared:--
``. . . In view of the vastness of the field that lies open before us, and of the immense opportunities for good which China offers the Christian Church--opportunities so many of which have been quite recently opened to us and which were won by the blood of the martyrs of 1900-- we appeal to the boards and committees of our respective societies, and individually to all our brethren and sisters in the home churches, to say if we are unreasonable in asking that the last object of the Three Years' Enterprise be to double the number of missionaries now working in China.''
The time has come to ``attempt great things for God, expect great things from God.'' When in 1806, those five students in Williamstown, Massachusetts, held that immortal conference in the lee of a haystack, talked of the mighty task of world evangelization and wondered whether it could be accomplished, it was given to Samuel J. Mills to cry out: ``We can if we will!'' And the little company took up the cry and literally shouted it to the heavens: ``We can if we will!'' ``A growing church among a strong people burdened by a decadent Empire--the spirit of life working against the forces of death and decay in the one great Pagan Empire which the wrecks of millenniums have left on the earth--surely there is a call to service that might fire the spirit of the dullest of us.'' The obstacles are indeed formidable, but he who can look beneath the eddying flotsam and jetsam of the surface to the mighty undercurrents which are sweeping majestically onward can exclaim with Gladstone:--
``Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onward in their might and majesty, and which the tumults of these strifes do not for a moment impede or disturb--those forces are marshalled in our support. And the banner which we now carry in the fight, though perhaps at some moment of the struggle it may droop over our sinking hearts, yet will float again in the eye of heaven and will be borne, perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and to a not distant victory.''
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