The Problem of Foreign Missions
Address delivered at the opening of the
session in the Free Church College, Glasgow, in November 1890.
IT has for a long time seemed to me that
missionary facts, and the missionary problem generally, are susceptible of more
special--may I say more scientific?--treatment than they usually receive; and
the large size of the field which it has fallen to me to see is favourable to
that methodical survey of the whole which is denied even to the missionary, for
he represents but a single field.
There are two ways in which men who offer their
lives to their fellow-men may regard the world. They mean the same thing in the
end, but you will not misunderstand me if I express the apparent distinction in
the boldest terms. The first view is that the world is lost and must be saved;
the second, that the world is sunken and must be raised. According to the
first, the peoples of the world are looked upon as souls--souls to be redeemed;
the second thinks of them rather as men--men to be perfected; or as
nations--nations to be made righteous. The first deals with a sinner's
status in the sight of God, the second with his character in the
sight of men The first preaches mainly justification; the second mainly
regeneration. The first is the standpoint of the popular evangelism; the second
is the view of evolution.
The danger of the first is to save the souls of
men and there leave them; the danger of the second is to ignore the soul
altogether. As I shall speak now from the last standpoint, I point out its
danger at once, and meet it by adding to its watchword, evolution, the
qualifying term, Christian. This alone takes account of the whole nature of
man, of sin and guilt, of the future and of the past, and recognises the
Christian facts and forces as alone adequate to deal with them. The advantage
of speaking of "the Christian evolution of the world," instead of, or, at
least, as a change from, "the evangelization of the world," will appear as we
go on. By making temporary use of the one standpoint, I do not exclude the
other; and if I ignore it from this point onward, it is not because it is not
legitimate, but simply because it is not the subject.
Nothing ought to be kept more persistently before
the mind of those who are open to serve the world as missionaries than the
great complexity of the missionary problem; and nothing more strikes one who
goes round the world than the amazing variety of work required and the almost
radical differences among the various mission fields. In the popular conception
the peoples of the world are roughly divided into black and white, or Christian
and heathen, and the man who designates himself for the mission field makes a
general choice, taking the first opening that comes, and considering but little
in his decision that there are many shades of black, and innumerable kinds of
heathen. But it is just as absurd for a man to choose in general terms "the
foreign field" and go abroad to rescue heathen, as for a planter to go anywhere
abroad in the hope of sowing general seed and producing general coffee. The
planter soon finds out that there are many soils in the world, some suited to
one crop and some to another; that seed must be put in for each particular crop
in one way and not in another; that he requires particular implements in each
case and not any implements, and that the time between sowing and reaping, and
even between sowing and sprouting, is an always appreciable and very varying
interval. The mission field has like distinctions. Some crops it is mere waste
of time to try to plant in one place; the specialist's business is to find out
what will grow there. Some crops will not and cannot come up in one
year, or in ten years, or even in fifty years; it is the specialist's business
to study scientifically the possibilities of growth, the limitations of growth,
and the impossibilities of growth. It is irrational also for the missionary to
carry the same message, or rather the same form of message, to every land, or
to think that the thought which told to-day will tell tomorrow; he must rotate
his crops as God through the centuries rotates the social soil on which they
are to grow. To every land he must take, not the general list of agricultural
implements furnished by his college, but one or two of special make which
possibly his college has never heard of. Above all, when he reaches his field,
his duty is to find out what God has grown there already, for there is no field
in the world where the Great Husbandman has not sown something. Instead of
uprooting his Maker's work and clearing the field of all the plants that found
no place in his small European herbarium, he will rather water the growths
already there and continue the work at the point where the Spirit of God is
already moving. A hasty critic, when these sentences were spoken, construed
them into a plea for building up Christianity upon heathenism. The words are
"what God has sown there," and "where the Spirit of God is already moving." The
missionary problem, in short, so far from being a mere saving of promiscuous
souls with a few well-worn appliances, is a most complex question of Social
Evolution.
Let me illustrate the necessity of further
specialization in regard to missions by reference to the three or four very
different fields which I have just visited. As examples of what might be called
a scientific classification of missions, one could scarcely pick any more
typical than Australia, the South Sea Islands, China, and Japan. I include
Australia among mission fields, and I might with it include both British
Columbia and Manitoba, because none of these countries can provide as yet for
its own evangelization.
I. Australia. The missionary problem, or
the mission churches problem, in these colonies is to deal with a civilized
people undergoing abnormally rapid development. Australia is a case of
prodigiously active growth in a few directions under most favourable natural
conditions for nation-making. It is what a biologist would call an organic mass
of the highest possible mobility, of almost perilous sensitiveness to
prevailing impressions, with feeble safeguards to conserve its solid gains, and
few boundary lines either to shape or limit other growths. The orderly progress
here is complicated mainly by one thing,--a continuous accretion of outside
elements,--due to immigration--which creates difficulties in assimilation. The
chief problem of Christianity is to keep pace with the continuous growth; the
immediate peril is that it may be wholly ignored in the pressure of competing
growths.
II. The South Sea Islands, of which the
New Hebrides are a type, lie exactly at the opposite end of the scale. Growth,
so far from being active, has not even begun. Here are no nations, scarcely
even tribes. The first step in evolution, aggregation, has not yet taken place.
These people are still at zero; they are the Amoebae of the human world. There
is no complication here of unassimilated elements introduced by immigration,
but a serious opposite difficulty--depletion due to emigration to other
countries, and to other causes which vitally affect the whole future problem.
As to religion here, the field is altogether open, for there is none at all.
III. China. Midway between the South Sea
Islands and the Australian colonies, this nation, as every one knows, is an
instance of arrested development. On the fair way to become a higher
vertebrate, it has stopped short at the crustacean. There are two
complications: the amazing strength of the ekoskeleton--the external shell of
custom and tradition, so hardened by the deposits of centuries as to make the
evolutionist's demand for mobility, i.e. for capacity to change, almost
non-existent. Secondly, which directly concerns Christianity, there is a very
powerful religion already in possession. These two complications make the
missionary problem in China one of the most delicate in the world.
IV. If the South Sea Islands are the opposite of
Australia, China, in turn, finds its almost perfect contrast in Japan.
One with it in stagnation and isolation from external influences during three
thousand years, almost within the last hour Japan has broken what Mr. Bagehot
calls its "cake of custom," and so sudden and mature has already been its
development that it is, at this moment, demanding from the Powers of Europe
political recognition as one of the civilized nations of the world. This is an
entirely different case from any of the preceding. It is the insect emerging
from the chrysalis. From the Christian standpoint, the case is unique in
history. Its own religion was abandoned a few years ago, and the country is at
present looking for another.
Even this rough classification will serve to show
how far from simple the missionary question really is, how the problem varies
from place to place, how different the equipment for each particular field, how
wise the mind which should know where to strike in, how responsible the hand
which would finger these subtle threads of human destiny, or move among the
roots of national life, which God alone has tended in the past. To the
Christian evolutionist these differences are educative. They mark different
stages in the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth, none of them in vain, all
of them to be allowed for, some perhaps to be reset in the superstructure
Christianity would build upon them.
Suppose now the Churches had compiled a
classification on some such lines of all the mission fields of the world, it
would serve two practical purposes. In the first place, it would be the duty of
the would-be missionary to go over that list, and select from it the exact kind
of work to which he was most suited. In this way the missionary staff would be
differentiated with more exactness than at present. Each man, also, having made
his choice, would further equip himself along particular lines, and become a
specialist at his work. In the second place, and what is just now of even more
importance, it would make it possible for some men to be missionaries, and
these among the best men entering the Universities, who see no room for
themselves at present in the foreign field. Some men with such a review before
them might see at once that there was no place for them in missionary work at
all; but others, and, I believe, a larger number than have ever been attracted
by this career, would find there something open to them--would find in a
service which they had looked upon, perhaps, as somewhat limited and narrow
something which, when looked upon in all its length and breadth, was large
enough and rich enough in practical possibilities to make them offer to it the
whole-hearted work of their lives. To-day, certainly, some of the best men do
go to the foreign field; but the reason why more do not go is not indifference
to its claims, but uncertainty as to whether they are exactly the type of men
wanted, i.e., in plain language, uncertainty as to whether the cut of
their theology quite qualifies them to be the successors of Carey or Williams.
These men feel orthodox enough, of course, to be clergymen at home, but they
have a secret sense that their views might be scarcely the thing on Eromanga
The missionary theology--it is useless disguising it--is supposed to be a very
special article, and a kind of theological modesty forbids some of our
strongest men from considering it conceivable that they should ever aspire to
be missionaries. Now this feeling is very real, but I am convinced that it is
very ignorant--ignorant of the changed standpoint from which scores of our
missionaries are even now doing their work, ignorant of the world's real needs,
ignorant of the hospitality which they would receive from many at least of the
officials of most of the Mission Boards. And yet these Boards are not wholly
guiltless of having made it appear, or permitting it to continue understood,
that only those of a certain type need look for welcome at their doors. I am
not referring to any particular Church; but I do not think the mission
committees of the world have ever worded an advertisement for men in language
modern enough to include the class of whom I speak. I am not arguing for
free-lances, or budding sceptics, or rationalists being turned loose on our
mission fields. But for young men--and our colleges were never richer in them
than at this moment--who combine with all modern culture the consecrated spirit
and the Christ-like life; for men who are too honest to go under false
pretences to a work which, though they be not yet specially enthusiastic for
it, they are entirely willing to face, there ought to go forth a new and more
charitable call. It ought at least to be understood that what qualifies to-day
for the leading Churches at home ought not to disqualify for the work of Christ
abroad, but that there is for Christian men of the highest originality and
power a career in the foreign field at least as great and rational as that at
home. Indeed, so far from such men feeling as if they were not wanted in the
foreign field, or at the best that their presence there could but be tolerated
by the Mission Boards, I am sure the committee at least of some Churches not
only want these men to-day, but scarcely want anything else.
First, always, in opening a new mission field
comes the splendid work of the pioneer, the old missionary pioneer of the
Sunday-school picture books, who stands with his Bible under the stereotyped
palm tree, exhorting the crowd of impossible blacks. These we have had in most
fields now, and their work must still and always continue. But next we have
these same men in settled charges, founding congregations, planting schools,
and carrying on the whole evangelical work of the Christian Church. But next,
among these, and gathered from these, and in addition to these, we require a
further class not wholly absorbed with specific charges, or ecclesiastical
progress, or the inculcation of Western creeds, but whose outlook goes forth to
the nation as a whole; men who in many ways not directly on the programme of
the missionary society will help on its education, its morality, and its
healthy progress in all that makes for righteousness. This man, besides being
the missionary, is the Christian politician, the apostle of a new social order,
the moulder and consolidator of the State. He places the accent, if such an
extreme expression of a distinction may be allowed, not on the progress of a
Church, but on the coming of the Kingdom of God. He is not the herald, but the
prophet of the Cross.
Of course every missionary who nowadays sets out
for a foreign field acquires beforehand some general idea of the lie of things
in the country to which he goes; but what is needed is more than a general
idea. The Christianizing of a nation such as China or Japan is an intricate,
ethical, philosophical and social as well as Christian problem; the serious
taking of any new country indeed is not to be done by casual sharp-shooters
bringing down their man or two here and there, but by a carefully thought out
attack upon central points, or by patient siege, planned with all a military
tactician's knowledge. We have at present, and, as already said, we shall
always need, and they will always do their measure of good, devoted men of the
sharp-shooter order who aim at single souls; but in addition to these the
Kingdom of God needs men who work with a wider vision--men prepared by fulness
of historical, ethnological, and sociological knowledge to become the statesmen
of the Kingdom of God.
Let me spend what time remains in briefly
expanding the classification already given--partly to illustrate better what I
mean, but especially to furnish a few materials to help those whose eyes, when
they think of their future life, sometimes turn towards distant lands.
I begin with the New Hebrides--mainly because
least is known about them. The New Hebrides mission represents a class of
missions differing so essentially from those of the third and fourth classes
--China and Japan--that any one who was taught to regard it as a typical
mission work would be completely misguided; and for some men at least a mission
work of this order would be almost the last thing they would throw themselves
into. For what are the real facts? The New Hebrides are a group of small
islands, a few about the size of Arran, a very few others two or three times as
large, the whole of no geographical importance. They are peopled by beings of
the lowest human type to the number of probably not more than 50,000; so that
they are of no political importance. This does not refer to the islands, but to
the people. The islands themselves are of so great political importance at the
present moment that the allegiance of Australia to England would tremble in the
balance if there were any suspicion that the Home Government would hand them
over to France. The population may be over or under that here stated. I have
taken my figures from authorities on the spot, but any approximation to the
numbers of inhabitants on these partially explored islands must be a guess.
Whether we regard their quality or quantity, they can never play any
appreciable part in the world's story; and the question which would immediately
rise in the mind of the man who looked at the world from the standpoint of
evolution would be the direct one: Is it really worth while sending twenty
first-rate men to till this vineyard which can never contribute anything of
importance to mankind? If it be replied, But is it proved that they will not?
the answer is a sad one. A closer study of these islands shows that instead of
increasing their population, these are dying fast. On the first which I
visited, Aneityum, when the missionaries reached it, there were some thousands
of inhabitants. To-day there is a bare four hundred of depressed and sickly
souls. The children are swept away by the white man's epidemics almost as soon
as they are born, and the missionaries tell you that the total doom of this
island may be a matter of some score years. The very church which was built for
the islanders in better days has had to be cut in two, and even the portioned
half is now too large; and a small chapel is to be built to hold the remnant of
this once noble flock. It is a dismal story, but it is more than likely that it
will be repeated in time to a greater or less extent, not only throughout this
group, but throughout the whole of the unchristianized South Sea Islands. At
New Caledonia I found the depletion of population even more appalling; and
though here and there an island may escape, the ultimate prospect is almost
total obliteration. This being so, what man who entered the mission field from
the standpoint from which I speak, what man who wished his work, however small,
to contribute to the permanent evolution of the world, would choose the New
Hebrides for his mission field? No man would. Yet is the inference then to be
drawn that this mission is a mistake? There is a book by an accomplished
clergyman called Wrong Missions to Wrong Races in Wrong Places. Is its
thesis, when it answers this question in the affirmative, correct? I should be
the last to say so, though its warning is a true one. For, as we have seen,
there are missions and missions; and this mission belongs to a type which ought
to be more clearly defined and acknowledged.
In the evolutionary branch of missions it has
simply no place at all--no place at all. It is a mistake from first to last.
But it does not belong to this class, and is not to be judged by its
standards--perhaps by higher ones. It belongs to the Order of the Good
Samaritan. It is a mission of pure benevolence. Its parallel is the mission of
Father Damien on the Leper Island. Who shall say that there are not, and will
not always be, men among us who see that kind of mission, men who have no
intellectual apprehension of evolution, but who possess the pitiful heart? Or
who will say that the day will ever come when the leaders of the wider movement
will grudge such men to the lost places of the earth?
I cannot leave this subject without paying my
passing tribute--may I say my homage? for tribute they need not--to the
missionaries of the New Hebrides themselves. From a recent biography which all
of you have read, you know something of the difficulties of their work. You
remember the description of the Island of Tanna, the remoteness of its
position, the strangeness of its language, the fierceness of its people; you
remember how daily the savages sought the missionary's life, and how after
years of facing death in a hundred forms he was driven from their shores with
scarcely a single convert for his hire. Last June, sailing along Tanna, I tried
to land near Mr. Paton's deserted field. With me was one of the missionaries
who has now gained a footing on another part of that still cannibal island. As
we neared the shore, a hundred painted savages poured from out the woods, and
prepared to fire upon us with their guns and poisoned arrows. But the
missionary stood up in the bow of the boat and spoke two words to them in their
native tongue. Instantly every gun was laid upon the beach, and they rushed
into the surf to welcome us ashore. No other unarmed man on this earth could
have landed there. It meant that the foundation stone of civilization upon
Tanna was already laid. Every island was once like Tanna; some are like it
still. But on one after another the cannibal spirit has been already conquered;
schools are planted everywhere; and neat churches and manses gleam through the
palm trees, and signify to the few ships which wander in those seas that here
at least life and property are safe. At Eromanga I went to see the spot on the
beach where Williams fell. Hard by were the graves of his murdered successors,
Mr. and Mrs. Gordon. Their almost immediate successor, Mr. Robertson, is there
to-day, his large church and beautiful manse within a stone-throw of the place
where these first martyrs died; his leading elder the son of the cannibal who
murdered Gordon. This monster left three sons; they are all elders of the
Church, and life is as safe throughout that island to-day as in England. For
the first year of their life in Eromanga Mr. and Mrs. Robertson lived in a
bullet-proof stockade. They left it only under cover of night for a few yards,
and on few occasions, once to bury their firstborn babe. For a year they never
saw a European. Their work was to let the people look at them. Their message
was to be kind. By-and-by acquaintance was picked up with one or two natives;
the circle of influence spread, and after years of extraordinary patience and
self-denial, their lives again and again hanging by a thread, they won this
island for civilization and Christianity.
On another island, where the missionary two years
ago used to see the smoke of the cannibal feasts from his door-step, the
natives brought me their spears and bows and poisoned arrows. "We do not need
them now," they said; "the missionary has taught us not to kill."
I have no words to express my admiration for
these men, and, may I say, their wives, their even more heroic wives; they are
perfect missionaries; their toil has paid a hundred times; and I count it one
of the privileges of my life to have been one of the few eye-witnesses of their
work.
As to the calls of this field for more men, I
must add this. It is a proof of the sound sense of the New Hebrides
missionaries that they are pretty unanimous in agreeing that, considering the
needs of the rest of the world, they have already a quite fair portion of
workers. The staff, of course, could be doubled or trebled to-morrow with great
advantage, but the missionaries do not ask it. With their present resources and
the number of native teachers who are in training they hope in time to cover
these islands with mission stations by themselves. I confess these are the
least greedy missionaries I ever heard of.
I am sorry that, owing to the shortness of my
visit to China, I should feel it a pure presumption to say almost anything
about this, the greatest mission field in the world. What I can offer is but a
surface impression, and I warn you beforehand it is little worth. From the old
standpoint the work in China seems to be splendid; men and women from every
Christian Church in the world are busy all over the land, and small
congregations of native Christians are springing up everywhere along their
track. The industry and devotion of the workers--Roman Catholic, Episcopalian,
Congregational, Presbyterian, Wesleyan, and a host of others--is beyond all
praise, and there is not one of the missionaries who will not tell you he is
encouraged, that he sees some fruit, and that the future is full of hope. There
seems to be great care, moreover, in the admission to the Churches of native
Christians, and the belief in education and in medical missions is widely
rooted. But from the ideal of a Christian evolution there remains very much to
criticise--happily less in the direction of commission than of omission. This
band of missionaries--I speak not of this society or of that, for the work of
each separate society is compact enough in itself, but of the army as a
whole--is no steady phalanx set on a fixed campaign, but a disordered host of
guerillas recruited from all denominations, wearing all uniforms, and waging a
random fight. Some are equipped with obsolete weapons, some with modern
armament; but they possess no common programme or consistent method. Besides
being confusing to the Chinese, this means great waste of power, great loss of
cumulative effect. This, of course, is inevitable at first, and it is not the
sin of the missionaries, but of Christendom; and, after the late Shanghai
conference, there is more than a hope that even this in time may be remedied.
But what one would really like to see, in addition to greater concentration,
would be a more serious reconsideration of the manner of approach and the form
of message most suited to the Chinese mind, and nature, and tradition, and some
further contribution to the question how far its form of Christianity is to be
Western, or how far a Chinese basis is possible or permissible. These questions
might be left to adjust themselves but for one most serious fact: the converts
in China, in the majority of districts, are almost exclusively drawn at present
from the lower classes. There are exceptions, but the educated classes as a
whole, the merchants and the mandarins, remain, I understand, almost wholly
untouched. There is something wrong if this be the case. And leaving the
present machinery to do the good work it is doing among the poor, I would join
with the best of the missionaries in arguing for a few Rabbis to be sent to
China, or to be picked from our fine scholars already there, who would quietly
reconnoitre the whole situation, and shape the teaching of the country along
well-considered lines--men, especially, who would lay themselves out through
education, lectures, preaching, and literature to reach the intellect of the
Empire. That some men are aiming at this, and doing it splendidly, we are
already well aware. It is the direct policy of many missionaries and even of
whole societies. But it is these missionaries themselves who are crying out for
more of it. Men will not take the trouble to enquire what some of these
societies are really aiming at and really doing, and, in ignorance of either,
they regard the whole missionary work as a waste of time and money. The things
also which one hears of missionaries, in talking with the business men of the
Eastern ports--the contempt, the charges of inefficiency, impracticableness,
and general uselessness--are enough to make any traveller not well on his guard
renounce the mission cause for ever. These impressions are reimported into this
country by ninety out of every hundred men who return home from the great
commercial houses of the East, and they build up a public opinion against
foreign missions most wanton and most false. As a rule these critics have never
had ten minutes' serious talk with a missionary in their lives. If they had,
they would find two things. First, that there were some missionaries a thousand
times worse in folly and incompetence than they had ever imagined; and,
secondly, that there were others, and these by far the greater majority, than
whom no wiser, saner, more practical men could be found in any of the business
houses of the world. It is men of this latter class, and not merely the passing
traveller, who are calling out to-day for more scientific work and more
rational methods in the mission field. They are perfectly aware that the
evangelization of China is not a mere carrying of the Gospel to illiterate and
heathen savages; and that perfect knowledge both of the modes of thought of the
people and of the true genius of Christianity is needed to direct a campaign
that will be permanently effective there. The missionary who is an
educationist, who has some scientific and philosophic training, who knows
something of sociology and political economy, and who will apply these in
Christian forms to China, is the man most needed there at the present hour. For
it is to be remembered that this is a case of arrested motion, and that the
most natural development, perhaps the only possible one, certainly the only
permanent one, will be one which is a continuation of that already begun rather
than one entirely abnormal and foreign.
It was new to me, though I ought to have known it
before, that the Chinese, instead of looking up to Europeans, regard them as a
most inferior and even barbaric people--clever, certainly, in a few directions,
but with no sort of authority to instruct a Celestial. In most mission
fields the missionary has a platform simply in the fact that he is a white man,
that he came in a steam ship, and wears a hat; but the Chinaman has no such
hallucination. He listens to a European missionary much as a London crowd would
listen to a Red Indian--half curious, half amused, but wholly contemptuous as
to his pretension to teach him anything. It is the deliberate opinion of many
men who know China intimately, who are sympathetic with missionaries, who are
even missionaries themselves, that half of the preaching, and especially the
itinerating preaching, now being carried on throughout the Empire is absolutely
useless. Some go so far as to say that it even does harm, that its ignorance
and general quality make it almost an impertinence. In New York I met an
influential Christian layman, who had just returned from a visit to China,
where his son was a missionary; and he assured me that he meant to devote this
entire winter to opening the eyes of the American Churches to the futility and
falseness of method of much that was being done being done in perfect good
faith--by worthy men and worthy women to convert the people of China. I cannot
verify this criticism; I merely record it. But at a time when the loud cry for
hundreds of more laymen to pour into China is sounding over this land the
warning ought at least to be heard. I go further. This call is frequently
uttered in such terms as to take almost an unfair advantage of a certain class
of Christians--uttered with a harrowing importunity and sensationalism of
appeal which when it falls upon a tender conscience or an excited mind makes it
seem blasphemy to decline. The kind of missionary secured by this process, to
say the least, is neither the wisest nor the best; and not only China needs to
be protected from these men, but they need to be protected from themselves and
from those who, in genuine but unbalanced zeal, appeal to them--protected by
sober statements from sober men, who love the word of God, and the souls of men
not less, but who understand both better.
I pass now to a country where the situation is
more delicate still. Japan is the most interesting country in the world at this
moment. The past never witnessed a birth of a civilized nation so remarkable,
so orderly, so sudden. Within the lifetime of all of us the Japanese were a
wholly unilluminated race. They kept their doors shut against outside influence
of every kind. No foreigner could even enter the land. Today all is changed.
They sent envoys to France, who brought back law; others to Germany, who gave
them a military organization. From England they borrowed a navy; from America a
system of national education. From the civilized world in general they imported
a most perfect telegraph and postal system, railways and tramways, the electric
light, Universities, technical colleges, and within the last few months, Houses
of Parliament and a vote. The Japanese have set themselves up, in short, with
all the material and machinery of an advanced and rising civilized State--all
the material except one. They have no religion. As was inevitable, heathenism
has been abolished, and, as already said, the people are in the unique position
at present of prospecting for a religion.
Now this last fact having become somewhat known,
Japan to-day presents the spectacle of having already within its borders
representatives from every Church in Christendom prospecting for converts. Even
the politicians being fairly agreed--and this in itself is most striking--that
some sort of religion is necessary, these representatives are eagerly listened
to, and get a perfectly honest chance.
The noblest building in the capital of Japan is
the Cathedral of the Greek Church. Roman Catholics are there, Unitarians are
there, Episcopalians of different degrees of height and Presbyterians of
different degrees of breadth, and Methodists of different degrees of heat, and
Baptists and Independents, and Theosophists and Spiritualists, and every sect
and church and denomination under heaven. The issue will be one of the most
interesting events in ecclesiastical history. For there is no favouritism and
no prejudice. When the result is known, it will be the purest possible case of
the survival of the fittest.
One cannot at all say at present who has it. It
will be some sort of Christianity; probably not now the Roman Catholic or the
Greek; and what makes the situation so extremely interesting and the hour so
overwhelmingly important is that every Christian man, and every Christian book,
and every Christian stroke of work that are given to Japan have an immediate
and almost palpable influence upon this problem. Such is the mood and such is
the malleability of this nation at the present hour, that if a Christian of
great size arose to-morrow, either among the Japanese themselves or among the
European missionaries, he could almost give the country its religion. If there
be here one prophet, or half a prophet, or even the making of half a prophet,
let me assure him that there is no field in the world to-day where, so far as
man can judge, his best years could be lived to so great a purpose.
With the mention of two more facts, I am done
with Japan. You are aware that the work of the missionaries has been so
successful that there are already thousands upon thousands of Christian
converts in the country. Very many of these know English as well as we do, and
many are perfectly read in every form of modern European literature, and as
able and as cultured as the picked men in our Universities. The man among these
men whom I found was most regarded as a leader of thought among the Japanese
Christians made to me this striking statement: "We have got," he said, "our
Christianity almost exclusively from the missionaries, especially from the
American missionaries, and we can never thank them enough. But after a little
we began to look at it for ourselves, and we made a discovery. We found that
Christianity was a greater and a richer thing than the missionaries told us.
Perhaps they themselves were second-handed. At any rate, we must
henceforth look at it for ourselves. We want Christianity, not perhaps
necessarily a Western Christianity." His next sentence was expressed with some
hesitation and much delicacy, but it meant this--"In the past they have helped
us much; but . . . they may now . . . go."
In justice to the missionaries, let me say that
one or two of the few whom I met were quite aware that this feeling existed
towards some of them, and they also knew its cause; others knew that the
Japanese were beginning to think them de trop, but they attributed it to
conceit, and to the general anti-English reaction lately set in in all
departments But all were agreed that the Japanese church could not yet be left
to stand alone. What exactly my critic would have replied, or rather how
exactly he would have qualified by further statement of his meaning, may
possibly be inferred from the other circumstances which I wish to name. It
happened in Tokio that I had the privilege of addressing some thirty or forty
Japanese Christian pastors. At the close I asked them if they had any message
they would like me to take home with me to the Churches here or in America.
They appointed a spokesman, who stood up and told me, in their name, that there
were two things they would like me to say. The one was, "Tell them to send us
one six thousand dollar missionary, rather than ten two thousand dollar
missionaries." But the second request went deeper. I again give the exact
words--"Tell them," he said, "that we want them to send us no more doctrines.
Japan wants Christ."
I trust the narrative of these two facts will not
be taken as a reproach to the missionaries. If they represent a true feeling,
it is rather to their lasting honour that in a few years they should have
taught the native Christians to see so far. Of the actual mission work in Japan
I can say nothing, for I was only a few days there. But if I were to judge from
the Japanese converts whom I met, I would question whether any mission work in
the world had ever produced fruit of so fine a quality. How deep it is, how
permanent it is, remain for the test of time to declare; but the immediate
outlook, though disheartening possibly to individual missionaries, seems to me
one of the richest hope and promise.
I had meant in closing to turn to Australia and
make a bid for able men for that Greater Britain, but there is only time for a
word. Composed largely of men whom the rush for wealth has drawn from an older
civilization, the Church's problem in that colossal continent--you are aware it
is as big as Europe--is to establish the new civilization in truth and
righteousness. Who, where every man is making money, is to make just laws, to
raise social standards, to purify political ideals? Two kinds of ministers are
required to be directly or indirectly the leaders of this work.
(1) Men of the highest culture and ability as
ministers for the large towns; men who are preachers and students. There is no
more influential sphere in the world than that open to a cultured preacher in
one of the capital cities of Australia. His influence will tell upon the whole
colony almost immediately, and as a public man he will have opportunities of
giving a tone and direction even to political life such as no one at home
possesses. At this moment there are some three or four vacant churches of the
very first rank which must be supplied from home; and if these are shut to
students or probationers, any man of strength in that new land can raise a
minor charge to an equal place within two or three years' time.
(2) The second kind of man that is wanted, and he
is wanted not by the dozen, but by the score, is the bush minister. This man
must be a man; he must be ready, and adaptable; he may be as
unprofessional as he pleases, but he must be a Christian gentleman. His work
will be to keep up an occasional service at some half-dozen wooden
chapels--oases in the wilderness of forest and scrub--or to hold services in
barns or, on great occasions, in some village church. You will see why I have
allocated the man who is the student to the city. This man cannot study, or
cannot study much. He is the evangelist, the other the teacher.
* * * * *
If one saw a single navvy trying to remove a
mountain, the desolation of the situation would be appalling. Most of us have
seen a man, or two, or a hundred or two--ministers, missionaries, Christian
laymen--at work upon the higher evolution of the world; but it is when one sees
them by the thousand in every land, and in every tongue, and the mountain
honey-combed and slowly crumbling on each of its frowning sides, that the
majesty of the missionary work fills and inspires the mind.
* * * * *
Gentlemen, finally, what a field the world is for
any man who means, as Goethe says, to be a hammer and not an anvil! We have
looked down only three or four of the vistas of useful work which in every
region of the earth are opening up; but how attractive, how alluring each of
them is to the man with a generous purpose in his soul! There is one thing for
which I love the very sound of the word Evolution--its immense hope, its
indescribable faith. Darwin's great discovery, or the discovery which he
brought into prominence, is the same as Galileo's--that the world moves. The
Italian prophet said it moved from West to East, the English philosopher said
it moved from low to high. The message of science to this age is that all
Nature is on the side of the men or of the nation who is trying to rise. An
ascending energy is in the universe, and the whole moves on with the mighty
idea and anticipation of the Ascent of Man.
The progress of the past seems almost to
guarantee the future. Here there may be retardation, there obstruction, but
somehow we have learned to believe that the mass moves on. Yesterday saw
divergence from the faith, to-day mourned persecution; but somehow to-morrow we
feel that the sun will shine again on a Kingdom of God which has also somehow
grown. After all, this instrument of science, this discoverer of a
secret motion in the world, this great calmer of faithless men, this rebuker of
quaking saints, is a religious teacher--we work with it, we look with its eyes,
we hear its voice, and it says with Browning--
"God's in His
Heaven,
All's right with the world."
This document (last modifiedJanuary 27, 1999) from Believerscafe.com
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