A History of Christian Missions in China

to other factors and they would probably have come just as quickly and have been quite as thorough had no missionary, either Protestant or Roman Catholic, ever entered the country. The primary cause was the commercial and political expansion of the West. The Chinese found themselves helpless before the navies and armies of the Occident, whose chief object in coming was to force them to admit the merchandise of Europe and America and who even before 1898 were beginning to seize their territory. It is significant that among the first attempts of the government to employ the new methods was the construction of arsenals, and that the first government school to teach Western learning was one for the preparation of young men for service as interpreters in the Tsungli Yamen-itself a creature of diplomatic intercourse with the West-and in legations abroad." The first introduction of Western subjects into the civil service examinations came in 1885, following the war with France." New thoughts were constantly entering through merchants, through the foreign organized and directed Imperial Maritime Customs Service, through the legations in Peking, and the Chinese representatives in foreign capitals. When the great transformation finally came, its immediate causes were the decisive defeat of China by a Japan newly empowered by Occidental appliances, threatened partition by the powers, and the overwhelming and humiliating disaster which in 1900 followed the effort to oust the foreigner and all his ways. The Chinese decided that if they were ever to cope successfully with the foreigner they must adopt many of his

methods and machines.

What the missionary did do was to help give direction to the revolution. He prepared leaders and communities who were ready to assist in the reshaping of China when the inevitable arrived. Because Christian groups and individuals existed and had become partly adjusted to Western ways before the general change began, the chaos and bewilderment were not as great as they would otherwise have been and the readjustment could be made more quickly. Moreover, by bringing to China moral, religious, and intellectual factors of Western culture with which the Chinese otherwise could not have come into such intimate 57 The T'ung Wên Kuan.-Morse, International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Vol. 3, p. 413.

Pott, The Emergency in China, p. 148.

contact, the missionary helped determine the character of the new China. He was by no means faultless, and many non-missionary foreigners were of inestimable service to China in preparing her for the transition. Witness, for example, Sir Robert Hart of the Customs Service and many of his subordinates. By and large, however, it is safe to say that chiefly because of the missionary, China in the days of its transformation came into intimate touch with, and so was influenced by, not only the militarism, commercialism, and materialism of the West-the features most prominent in commercial and diplomatic intercourse—but by the spiritual and moral forces of the Occident. As we have so often suggested, when in the succeeding decades the constructive elements in their older culture declined or collapsed, fortunate it was for the Chinese that foreigners were present who exemplified the ethical and religious values of the Christian faith. In spite of all their weaknesses and shortcomings, every Christian community, every mission press, every mission school, and every hospital was a center of influences of which China was to stand sorely in need.

In this general effect on the life of the country, the Protestant groups, although smaller, were more potent than were the Roman Catholic communities. That was probably in part because Protestant missionaries were from the countries who had the largest proportion of the foreign trade of China and whose language and ideas the Chinese were accordingly most inclined to adopt, but it was also partly because Protestants laid more emphasis on schools, medicine, and the preparation and distribution of literature, and had among their number men who sought to mold the life and thought of the nation as a whole. Certainly a large proportion of the leaders of the new China, especially its physicians, educators, and publishers, received their training at the hands of Protestant missionaries. This will become more apparent in later chapters: here reference need be made only to such examples as the greatest publishing house in China, the Commercial Press, an institution whose founders learned their trade in the Presbyterian Mission Press; to the numbers of graduates of mission schools who taught in government colleges; and to the sons of Chinese Protestant clergy of this early period, like C. T. Wang and W. W. Yen, who were to become important in Chinese politics.

THE SIZE AND CHARACTER OF THE PROTESTANT
CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY

To the average Protestant missionary the significant results of his activities were not riots and the actions of governments, nor even changes in Chinese institutions and culture, but the numbers who heard and accepted the Christian message, and the fruits of that message in lives.

Judged by statistics, in 1897 the Protestant Christian communities were still a negligible fraction of the population. In 1893 Protestant communicants were estimated to number 55,093,° only about one in every seventy-five hundred of the inhabitants of the Empire, and most of these were in the provinces on the south coast, for here Protestant activities had been longest in progress. This figure represented, however, a very rapid growth. In 1853 Protestant churches are said to have had three hundred and fifty communicants. By the summer of 1869 the number had increased to 5,753.** In 1876, 13,035 communicants were counted," of whom more than two-thirds seem to have been in Fukien, Kwangtung, and Chêkiang." In 1886, 28,506 communicants were reported," in 1887, 32,260," in 1888, 34,555, and in 1889, 37,287. In each of these years non-communicant members of the Protestant groups, Christians' children not yet admitted to full church membership, and those regularly under instruction, were probably at least as numerous as the commu

nicants.

Much more important than the numbers of Protestants is the question of their character. It was upon quality of life that Protestant missionaries placed the most emphasis in testing applicants for church membership and they believed that in the last analysis the evidence for the success or failure of their work rested upon it. The majority of their converts were farmers, 59 China Mission Hand-book, Part 2, p. 325.

In 1893, 8,248 of the communicants were in Kwangtung.-Chinese Recorder, Vol. 26, pp. 82-83.

Chinese Recorder, Vol. 23, p. 512.

Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 63.

3 Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China,

1877, p. 486.

China's Millions, 1879, p. 9.

5 Missionary Review of the World, Vol. 1, p. 143.

Chinese Recorder, Vol. 20, p. 47.

67 Ibid.

Records of the Missionary Conference, Shanghai, 1890, p. 732.

shop-keepers, physicians, artisans, street-vendors, and laborers," and so belonged to the substantial, although not the influential, rank and file of the nation. It required, moreover, a certain initiative to break with Chinese society and, as a result, in native vigor Christians were probably above the average of the groups from which they came: by a process which the anthropologist would call "selection" they tended to be a superior company. Very few of the scholar class came into the Church, although now and then one was reached, and by 1897 special efforts were being made to approach them, notably by Timothy Richard and the society of which he was the head, and by Gilbert Reid." The Church welcomed to its credit—the very poor, but those who availed themselves of the invitation seem to have composed only a small minority of the membership.

In the earlier days of a Christian community men were in the majority and adults predominated," but as the years passed women often formed more than half the church membership and children began to be reached through the homes and the schools."

The motives which impelled those seeking membership in the Church were varied. Now a man wished to be freed from the opium habit and found release through his new faith;" often he hoped for the aid of the missionary in a lawsuit; occasionally some one who had been vainly seeking inward peace through the religious agencies known to him discovered it in the Christian Gospel; sometimes the attraction was the moral emphasis of Christianity and the changed lives of those already Christians,' and sometimes what the applicant had seen and heard while in a hospital." Occasionally the catechumen was drawn by intelGraves, Forty Years in China, p. 289; Soothill, A Typical Mission in China, p. 100.

70 Soothill, op. cit., pp. 100-120.

71 In 1897 Reid was planning an institute for the higher classes.-L. M. S. Chronicle, Vol. 6 (new series), p. 276.

72 Nevius, China and the Chinese, p. 373; Duncan, The City of Springs, pp. 89-91; Chinese Recorder, Vol. 24, p. 120.

73 Nevius, op. cit., p. 373.

Cable, The Fulfilment of a Dream, pp. 127-138; Ross, Mission Methods in Manchuria, pp. 25-28.

75 Ross, op. cit., pp. 18 et seq.; Davies, Among Hills and Valleys in Western China, p. 240. There was little of the deep sense of sin as a compelling motive, such a sense as was to be found in some places in the West, especially in Calvinistic circles. -Nevius, op. cit., p. 379.

Craighead, Hunter Corbett, pp. 137, 138.

"Pakenham-Walsh, Some Typical Christians, pp. 55-66.

lectual belief in the superiority of Christianity," sometimes by the promise of eternal life," and often by a conviction of the futility of idolatry as an aid in obtaining the goods of this life and by confidence that these could be secured through the Christians' God."

Missionary literature of the period abounds in the life-stories of converts and probably better than anything else these give insight into the character of the Protestant community and of the changes wrought by the Faith. A few of the outstanding ones will serve as illustrations.

Pastor Hsi was a native of Shansi, a scholar who had taken the first of the three literary degrees. While in Shansi to aid in famine relief, David Hill sought to awaken interest in the Faith by prizes for the best essays on Christianity. Hsi, although not then a Christian, wrote the winning paper, and so came in touch with the Gospel. He soon became Hill's teacher in Chinese, his conversion followed (1879), and as a result of his newly found faith he was cured of the opium habit, was reconciled to his brothers, and brought back his stepmother whom he had driven away. His wife, afflicted with the strange malady described as demon possession, was healed through his faith. Hsi was earnest in seeking to win others and he was led, too, to open refugeseventually more than a score of them-where by prayer and the use of medicine which he compounded he sought, often successfully, to free others from the clutch of the drug that had once enslaved him. Through his efforts many entered the Church and he came to have much influence with the Protestant groups in his vicinity. He lived a life of unremitting toil and prayer, and he and his wife denied themselves all but the barest necessities of life that the work to which they were dedicated might have the financial means to go on. He was largely independent of the missionary, whom, indeed, he tended somewhat to dis

Ross, op. cit., p. 29.

7 Muirhead, China and the Gospel, p. 184; Stott, Twenty-Six Years of Mission Work in China, p. 142.

Davis, Choh Lin, the Chinese Boy Who Became a Preacher, passim; Voskamp, Zerstörende und aufbauende Mächte in China, pp. 47-55; Brown, China in Legend and Story, pp. 150-162. Two most interesting studies of converts among the Chinese in Formosa and which make much of this point are Moody, The Heathen Heart, and Moody, The Saints of Formosa. See also Moody, The Mind of the Early Converts, in which Chinese Christians are compared with Christians in the early days of the Church in the Roman Empire. The latter are shown greatly to resemble the former in many of their motives and concepts.

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