Yet the whole population of three hundred thousand seemed to have come
out to meet us. Imagine a street two and a half miles long, but only ten
to fifteen feet wide, thronged with water-carriers and beasts of burden
compelled to give way to our great procession! Every nook and corner of
the way, the fronts of the one-storied shops and the entrances to the
cross-streets, were all a perfect sea of faces--rows of children little
and big overtopped by rows of half-naked men, with scores of women
peering wistfully from windows in the rear--faces by thousands and tens
of thousands, till it seemed as if the whole population of the planet
had emptied itself into Chao-yang. I looked upon hundreds of splendid
forms of men, naked above the waist, and carrying heads worthy of notice
from any sculptor, none of them hateful, all of them impressed and
wondering, and they seemed to me the embodiment of China crying out for
God. When we were only half-way through the city, the endless masses of
humanity had so impressed me that I could not restrain the tears. The
sight was simply overwhelming. And all this the parish of one man! It
is to save this great city, now almost wholly given to idolatry, that
Mr. Groesbeck asks for money to build in its very center an
assembly-room and an institutional church, and that Doctor Lesher asks
for a hospital building to facilitate his medical work.
I made an address to those eighty boys that evening, as they stood at
attention before me. Half of them were still heathen, but their fathers
had sent them to this Christian school, believing that they needed a
better religion than that of Confucius or of Buddha. I urged them to
become soldiers of Christ, and to follow him as their Commander. I did
not conceal from them the fact that such following might involve
opposition and earthly loss. But I promised them that, if they suffered
with Christ, they would also reign with him.
We returned from Chao-yang very sober and thoughtful, for our visit had
been a revelation of appalling needs. Swatow seemed a paradise after
such a visit. The smiling faces of so many Christians, and the signs of
a truly Christian civilization, inspired me with new hope for the
future. But our time had come for leaving China, at least temporarily,
and India was at once to be visited. Our departure from Swatow was
almost as spectacular as our entry into Chao-yang. There was no military
guard, and there were no firecrackers, but there was a fine brass band
of academy boys, to lead our procession of sedan-chairs, as we passed
through the long lines of scholars who had gathered with their teachers
to bid us farewell. The schools were all represented. First came the
little kindergartners, then pupils of the grammar school, the girls'
school, the women's school, the Bible-women's training-school, the boys'
academy, and finally, the theological seminary. They numbered more than
three hundred in all. Some of the teachers accompanied us to the
steamer. We parted from them with regret, but we were thankful that they
could remain to prepare the way for a new religion, education, and
civilization in China.
My week-end in China leaves me with a new sense of the vastness of the
heathen world, and of its absolute dependence upon Christ, as its only
possible Saviour. The question whether the heathen will ever be saved if
we do not give them the gospel, is not so serious a one for us as the
other question whether we ourselves will ever be saved if we do not give
them the gospel.
III
MANILA, SINGAPORE, AND PENANG
Each of these cities might seem to be the New Jerusalem, if you were to
see only its European part and the dress of its inhabitants. Their
European residents are all arrayed in white. Not all of them are saints,
however. The white is purely external and compulsory. Heat is a great
leveler, and we are nearing the equator. When we approached Manila we
were in the tail of a typhoon, but the danger was past. Indeed, since we
left San Francisco, we have encountered no storm, have had only smooth
seas, and have witnessed continually what Æschylus called "the
innumerable laughter of the ocean waves."
It was pleasant to perceive that American enterprise and administration
have transformed Manila, the capital of the Philippine Islands, from a
medieval into a modern city. Its newly constructed streets and
pavements, water-works and drainage, electricity and the trolley, have
turned this old and dilapidated Spanish town into a place of order and
beauty. Its parks and gardens, its municipal buildings and hospitals,
are an object-lesson to all beholders. The walls of the fort still
remain, but the moat has been filled up. The Roman Catholic Cathedral
shows the large designs of a former priesthood to capture the people by
architecture and ceremonial. But Protestant churches, missions, and
schools, are coming to have the first place in popular esteem. The
former palace of the Spanish governor is now the meeting-place of the
democratic legislature, and the Jones Bill, recently passed by our
Congress, but now locally known as "the Bill Jones," has given hopes of
a complete and speedy Filipino independence.
Our observation of the place, and our intercourse with residents of
Manila, lead us to doubt the wisdom of our immediate relinquishment of
authority over these islands. Eager as are the Filipino leaders for
self-government, they have not yet learned the art of self-restraint.
The recent trouble in the great hospital illustrates this. Its American
superintendent has resigned his office, for the reason that his Filipino
staff and subordinates conspired to make discipline and sanitary
regulations impossible. They desired to manage the institution
themselves, when they were incompetent to enforce cleanliness and order.
What happens in hospital work happens also in all branches of civil
administration. It will take a whole generation to raise up officials
who can be trusted to do their work for the public good, rather than to
provide comfortable and remunerative positions for themselves.
We visited the spot, five miles away, where our American troops, under
Admiral Dewey, landed to besiege the town. We motored to Fort McKinley
also, where our soldiers still command the situation. But our main
interest was in the mission schools and in the interdenominational
theological seminary. In these educational institutions all the
instruction is in the English language. They are Americanizing as well
as evangelizing the population. The establishment of universal and
compulsory school attendance will in a few years turn a Spanish-speaking
into an English-speaking people, and will unify the education and the
civilization of the islands. Nothing indeed is more remarkable in the
Orient than the gradual superseding of the native dialects by the
printed and spoken English. In the great country of India, it is to be
remembered, English is the required language in school and court, as
well as in every government office. Even the Romanizing of written
Chinese and Japanese will make vastly easier the political unity and the
religious evangelization of China and Japan.
When we reached Singapore, we found ourselves in one of the world's
greatest ports of entry. It is also one of the keys to the Orient, as
Sir Thomas Raffles perceived more than a century ago. Its splendid
government buildings and its strong fortifications show that the British
propose to hold it to the end. The recent incipient revolt, which was
fortunately nipped in the bud when it seemed to the conspirators on the
verge of success, and which was punished by the summary execution of
thirty or forty rebels without the news of it getting into the papers,
showed that Germany had much to hope for and Britain much to fear from
the unrest of these heterogeneous populations. I had a vivid reminder of
all this at the Methodist Episcopal Mission, where I found over sixteen
hundred scholars in attendance, and where I addressed five hundred of
them at their morning prayers. One of the chief difficulties of
Christian work in Singapore is the aggregation and mixture of races.
Seven different nationalities are represented in the schools. The
Tamil, the Malay, and the Chinese are the most numerous, and of these
the Chinese take the lead. Fifty thousand Chinese immigrants enter the
port of Singapore every year, mainly because there is employment for
them in the rubber plantations of the Straits Settlements. The
congestion of population in China drives them southward to Singapore,
and from Singapore they swarm northward to Burma, southward to Java, and
westward to India.
This mixing up of the many different nationalities makes it impossible
for the missions in Singapore to teach their pupils in any other
language than the English. This requisition of English seems to some of
the people a slur upon their own tongue, and a sign of British
ascendency. They are jealous of the English, even while they perceive
their own dependence upon them. Only British justice and watchfulness
can keep in check the disposition to revolt on the part of some classes
with which the government has to deal, especially when these classes are
stirred up by German spies and German money. Thus far all seditious
attempts have been put down, and the traveler learns to bless the wisdom
of British administration, and to rest secure and confident under the
folds of the Union Jack.
We left Singapore for Penang with some regret, for the reason that large
steamers must be exchanged for small steamers. The one we took was
exceedingly good and modern. Another on which we embarked somewhat later
seemed to have come down from the days of Noah and the ark. But British
steamers, however old and small, are clean and safe. You "get there"
all the same. On our way to Rangoon our first stop was at Port
Swetterham, from which we motored twenty-seven miles to Kuala Lumpur,
the capital of the Federated Malay States--federated under the British
Crown. Here is a city of Malays and Chinese, with British government
buildings, Mohammedan mosques, Buddhist temples, an English cathedral,
and a Methodist church. Our road thither led us through seemingly
endless forests of rubber trees and of coconut palms. The profusion of
tropical vegetation was both novel and impressive. These Federated Malay
States furnish the world with more than half its supply of rubber, and
many English and American investors are growing rich from the soaring of
prices induced by the war.
Penang, however, furnished us with our greatest sensation. It was a
Chinese funeral. In this city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, a
millionaire Chinese banker had died. He was a Buddhist as well as a
Confucianist, but also a loyal and patriotic supporter of charitable
institutions, and of the British rule. He had given to the British
government a number of aeroplanes to facilitate its military operations,
and a large sum of money for its war-loan. When he died, the customary
worship of ancestors, which is a part of Chinese religion, as well as
gratitude for his past gifts, prompted his family to plan a sumptuous
funeral. It is said to have cost them thirty thousand dollars. We
arrived in Penang just in time to see the show. All the way from
Singapore, indeed, we were accompanied on our steamer by a fine brass
band, which was only one of three brass bands hired to furnish music
for the funeral service.
My powers of description fail, when I attempt to tell the wonders of a
funeral procession fully a half mile long. It was headed by a symbolic
float of waxwork figures, in which a colossal horse, prancing on its
hind legs, seemed just about to soar into the air. The horse was held in
by four angelic forms following and holding in their hands scepters of
royalty. This apparition reminded me of the horses and chariot in which
Elijah ascended to heaven, and it seemed to indicate that the deceased
had departed with all the honors heaven and earth could bestow. A band
of music accompanying the float, and playing solemn but not mournful
strains, gave color to this interpretation. A retinue of sedan-chairs,
decorated with all the colors of the rainbow, came next in order. These
sedan-chairs were empty of occupants, and contained long strips of red
paper on which were written the names and merits of the millionaire's
ancestors, to be read by Buddhist priests at the grave. The chairs were
each the gift of some relative or friend of the departed. They
symbolized the welcome given him by those who had gone before him to the
better land. A second band of music was followed by a body-guard of
British soldiers in khaki, deputed by the British governor to show his
estimate of the character and loyalty of the deceased.
Then came the hearse, if hearse it could be called. It was really an
enormous catafalque, decorated with gold tinsel and costly embroideries.
Peacocks and birds of paradise were depicted on its silken hangings. A
dozen men, in elaborate robes of blue, carried this gaudy structure upon
their shoulders, while other gorgeously attired attendants bore great
ribbon-banners of satin, say twenty feet long by four feet wide and of
the most brilliant colors, inscribed with Chinese characters and making
known the virtues of the departed. But the most curious part of the
procession, was yet to come. Preceded by the third band of music were
the offerings of food and drinks which were to furnish sustenance to the
spirit in the world into which he had now entered. There were six
roasted sucking-pigs, laid in order, on portable tables, with baskets of
rice, oranges, bananas, all kinds of fruit and confectionery, and cups
of tea and wines. These were carried to the cemetery, to be presented to
the departed spirit at the grave, then jealously guarded for an
interval, finally in part given to the officiating priests, and in part
consumed at a feast held by the surviving members of the family. The
costlier the offerings, the better would the feast be enjoyed. There was
no lack of priests in this ceremonial. They were young and clean-shaven,
and looked as if they had enlisted for this very service. I thought I
could discern a sly twinkle in their eyes, as they inspected the
preparations for the feast, before the march began.
The mourners must not be forgotten. Among the Chinese, white, and not
black, is the appointed sign of mourning. The four wives of the deceased
and the members of his family were accordingly dressed in the coarsest
of white sackcloth, with ashes sprinkled over their faces, and they
walked behind the hearse, howling. It was a piteous spectacle, reminding
one of the professional and hired wailers in Palestine, where "the
mourners go about the streets," uttering dismal lamentations which can
be bought for money. Far be it from me to suggest that such was the
lamentation which we heard that day, for there is reason to believe that
in this case the deceased was respected and beloved.
This ceremonial had required long and elaborate preparation. The death
indeed occurred last July; the body had been embalmed; it had lain in
state and open to public inspection for four whole months; the funeral
did not take place until November. A vast amount of detail had been
attended to and provided for. Great packages of silken umbrellas had
been stored to shield the heads of guests and servants. All the bearers
of sedan-chairs, scores in number, were clad in silken uniforms; there
were banners, and inscriptions, and lanterns, galore. Everything was
done to impress the Chinese multitude with the greatness of the
occasion. But it was all a glorification of man and of his virtues.
There was no confession of sin, nor assurance of pardon; no
proclamation of a divine Redeemer; no promise of life and immortality
in Christ. Heathen religions are man's vain effort to win heaven by
merits of one's own. Only Christianity is God's revelation of salvation
"without money and without price," through the sacrifice and death of
his only Son. This is the gospel which Confucianist and Buddhist, Hindu
and Mohammedan, need to-day, and which, thank God, our missionaries are
giving them.
IV
THREE WEEKS IN BURMA
Burma is the land of pagodas. These places of worship are the most
striking feature of every landscape. Their bell-shaped domes,
startlingly white, or so covered with gold-leaf as to shine resplendent
in the sunlight, crown many a hilltop and constitute the chief beauty of
the towns. The pagodas are usually solid structures of brick, with
facings of plaster, and they are buildings at which, rather than in
which, worship is offered. There are exceptions, however. The more
ancient of these edifices, like the Ananda at Pagan, have inner chambers
enshrining gigantic statues of Buddha, with corridors around the
chambers, quite comparable to the aisles of English or French
cathedrals. But the greatest of all the Burmese pagodas, the Shwe Dagon
of Rangoon, is a solid mass of brick, with no interior cell, yet
enormous in size, erected on a broad platform one hundred and sixty-six
feet from the ground, towering to an additional height of two hundred
and seventy feet, and crowned with a jewelled "umbrella" at the total
elevation of four hundred and thirty-six feet above the teeming streets
of the city below. The main platform from which the pagoda proper rises
is an immense court nine hundred feet long by six hundred and
eighty-five feet wide, and crowded with minor pagodas and shrines. This
great esplanade is approached from the four points of the compass by
long covered arcades, lined with shops in which offerings of every
description can be bought. On the marble floor of the main court and
before the minor shrines these offerings are presented by scores of
worshipers prostrating themselves before statues of Buddha of every
size. And yet the great conical or bell-shaped dome of the pagoda is
its chief attraction, for this is covered with gold-leaf from its base
to its summit, and its shining splendor salutes the traveler from miles
and miles away.
The religion of Burma is Buddhism. Buddhism is a religion of "merit," so
called, and the surest way to acquire "merit" is by building a pagoda.
Repairing an old pagoda will not answer the purpose; hence many an old
pagoda goes to ruin, side by side with a new one coated with whitewash
or gold-leaf. Curiously enough, the epoch of pagoda-building was almost
coincident with that of cathedral-building in England and France, that
is, from A. D. 1000 to 1200. When one sees at Pagan an area along the
Irrawaddy River eight miles long and only two miles wide, with nearly
five thousand pagodas, multitudes of them small and in ruins, but many
still standing great and splendid in their proportions, it seems
impossible to doubt that a certain genuine religious impulse, however
blind and mistaken, led to their erection. There they stand, mere relics
of a magnificent past, but now erect in the midst of desolation, with
only scattered huts about them, where once there must have been a dense
population, rich and lordly. The fate of these towering monuments of
idolatry and superstition, now for the most part given over to the moles
and the bats, shows what God can do for pagodas, and encourages us to
believe that missionary effort will be mighty through God to the pulling
down of similar more modern strongholds, together with all the high
things that exalt themselves above the knowledge of his truth.
This leads me to speak of the great missionary work that is now
honeycombing and undermining the foundations of heathenism in this
pagoda-land. We came to Burma to see what God has wrought. The labors
and sufferings of Adoniram Judson appealed to us even in our
childhood. We wished to see how the mustard-seed which Judson sowed in
faith has grown up to bear fruit. So we went to Aungbinle, where for
twenty long months Judson was imprisoned and tortured. There we seemed
to hear God's word to Moses: "Take off thy shoes from off thy feet,
for the place where thou standest is holy ground." We were reminded
also of the burning bush, which was ever burning but not consumed.
Great forward movements in history are born in suffering. Through
death to life, and the cross before the crown--that was the way of
Christ, and it will be the way of his followers. We gathered, a small
group of missionaries and visitors, in the little chapel that has been
built upon the site of that old prison, and we prayed, with a lot of
dusky villagers and children before us, that God would yet more
gloriously prosper the work of missions.
We had every advantage in our investigations in Burma. Thirteen of my
former pupils are now missionaries in that land. For many years they
have been inviting me to visit them. Nine missionaries met us at the
dock, as we landed from Singapore and Penang. They have made our visit
delightful by their affectionate and boundless hospitality. Morning,
noon, and night have been full of sightseeing, of visiting mission
churches and schools, of "chotas," or little breakfasts, of "tiffins" or
substantial lunches, or afternoon-teas and dinners at the close of the
day. The social and kindly spirit of it all has turned what otherwise
would have been wearisome into a succession of pleasant experiences. But
there has been work, and there has been hard thinking also. Making three
addresses a day, longer or shorter, for three weeks in succession, is no
sinecure. I am sometimes called an "octogeranium," but I have not been
permitted to waste my sweetness on the desert air. It is a wonder to me
that I have survived so much stress and rushing, but I am compelled to
say that good appetite and good sleep have made me feel in better health
and spirits than for many months before.
What I have seen has gladdened my eyes and warmed my heart. Closer
contact with mission work and mission workers has broadened my ideas,
given me more sympathy, more zeal, and more hope. The vastness of these
heathen populations, their appalling needs, together with their infinite
possibilities, have dawned upon me as never before. Burma has sixty
millions of people. It is a most fruitful land, never visited by the
famines which ravage India proper, the land west of the Bay of Bengal.
It enshrines a religion which, with all its ignorance and superstition,
is more free from gross immorality than that which prevails on the other
side of the bay. Its people are the most heterogeneous of any upon
earth. Though the proud Burman native is still the dominant power, he
has now to compete with the rising intelligence of the Karens, the
sturdiness of the Chinese, and the subtlety of the Hindus. These last
two peoples have in late years in large numbers migrated hither.
Mohammedan mosques are rising side by side with the older Buddhist
pagodas. The Parsees are numerous and influential, and theosophists
are not rare. Rangoon is probably the capital city of Buddhism, for
here at any rate is its most splendid temple. And Rangoon is a sort of
melting-pot of all races. Burmans and Chinese are intermarrying, and
are producing a most vigorous offspring. Sikhs and Malays, by their
peculiar dress, make picturesque the streets. I know of no greater
mixture of races, unless it is in the city of New York, where we have
more Jews than there are in Jerusalem, and more Italians than there
are in Rome. Here in Rangoon, however, all these peoples preserve
their distinctive characteristics of dress and language, so that
racial differences are more apparent.