ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONS IN CHINA
It is only just to put in the forefront of the influences that are
Christianising and changing China the French, Italian, and other
missions of the Roman Catholic Communion. Our first contact with the
wonderful work which these missions are accomplishing was in French
China, at that very interesting but most pestilential locality, Saigon.
We were received with the greatest kindness by the Sous-Gouverneur at
the French Government House, a palatial residence worthy rather of an
emperor than a governor, compared to which Government House at
Hong-Kong seemed but a cottage. Yet even there life was hardly
bearable even under an electric fan. The heat was stifling. It had
been impossible to drive out except in the middle of the night, and so
we were entertained by being taken by night to see our first glimpse of
Chinese civilisation, for the Chinese once dominated this country, and
have left their civilisation behind them.
Driving back, our French host regaled us with stories of the people,
and incidentally mentioned the great power which Christianity has in
these colonies. We were much impressed by his {184} testimony to the
efficiency of mission work, for the French official is far from
favourable to the Roman Catholic Church. He told us not only was a
large part of the country round Saigon Christian, but Christianity was
such a vital thing that the Church had no difficulty in getting
sufficient money to build splendid churches. Next day I called on the
Bishop. He was a splendid type of Roman Catholic missionary, with his
white beard and his courtly manners. We found several such in our
wanderings, for Catholic missions are spread all over China, and have
been founded many years. He spoke of the great success of the work,
and thought that the hostility of the French Government was in some
ways preferable to their patronage, for the personal lives of many of
the officials are far from admirable. Their morality would better
befit our Restoration Period than the twentieth century. A Governor's
mistress was a person recognised and courted by official society, and
it was perhaps to the advantage of the mission that in the native mind
Christianity was dissociated from such evil doings.
I asked him how he supported the climate, which we had found barely
endurable for two days. He replied that the climate was quite cool to
the missionary who lived a chaste and temperate life, but that the
Government found it terrible for their officials. This may be quite
true, but still I think chaste and temperate Englishmen would find the
climate of Saigon intolerable. We do not make {185} sufficient
allowance in speaking of a healthy or unhealthy climate for the origin
of the missionary. If he comes from Marseilles in the South of France,
it is not perhaps wonderful that he should find the countries which are
not hotter than his native land in the summer quite tolerable.
The history of Catholic missions is apparently to be divided into three
periods. The first period terminates in 1742 and commences with the
first mission of the Jesuits under Father Ricci in 1584. During this
period the Roman Catholic missions, directed by a series of men of
extreme ability, endeavoured and nearly succeeded in converting China
from the "top downwards," for, owing to their wonderful scientific
attainments, the missionaries received important posts under the
Chinese Government. The fall of the Ming dynasty and the conquest of
China by the Manchus only served to improve their position; they
directed not only the Government astronomical observatory, but they
even superintended the arsenal and became the cartographers of the
empire. They had many adherents chiefly among the learned.
Christianity, like Confucianism, had commended itself to the intellect
of the country. In pursuit of this policy they endeavoured to
harmonise Christianity with the thought of the literati of China; such
a process was no doubt extremely dangerous, but they thought that it
was possible to tolerate ancestor worship and the adoration of
Confucius; whether they were right or {186} whether they were wrong,
while they did it Christianity had many educated adherents.
Another kind of missionary next appeared in China, the Dominicans, who
made up in fanaticism for what they lacked in wisdom. These men
offended every prejudice of the Chinese; they taught the harshest and
narrowest form of the Roman Catholic doctrine. The foot was to be made
to fit the shoe, and not the shoe to fit the foot. There were riots
and troubles, and the Dominicans blamed the highly placed Jesuits and
freely accused them of having denied the faith and of having accepted
high office as the reward for unfaithfulness. Appeals were made to
Rome. Rome, many thousands of miles away, wavered, unable probably to
understand either the controversy or its importance. The heroism of
missionaries travelling over miles of sea and being shipwrecked in
their endeavours to reach Rome reads like a romance. But in 1742 the
matter was finally settled by Benedict XIV. in a Bull "Ex quo
singulari," and the Jesuits were defeated--a defeat which was completed
by their suppression in China in 1773.
With their defeat the Roman missions entered on the second period of
their history. They were no longer directed by very able men, and they
became rather the Church of the poor than of the rich. They
experienced constant persecution, and, to gain weight and position,
they finally accepted the French, who were then in the zenith of their
power, as their {187} patrons. Such a course necessarily involved that
they must do all they could to further the French interests, and the
Roman Catholic missions became more and more an adjunct of French
diplomacy, defended by France and on their side advancing the interests
of the French. It is impossible to say exactly when this policy began.
Louis XIV. had sent large gifts to the Emperor of China, but he does
not seem to have had any intentions beyond giving countenance and
weight to the Roman Catholic missions. Some one pointed out to
Napoleon I. the great value of China, and the man of great ideas,
always dreaming of that Empire in the East which he was never to found,
clearly thought there was something to be made of this. He helped the
missionary societies with funds--it is curious to think of Napoleon I.
as the supporter of foreign missions. This act came, like most other
French secrets of the time, to the ears of Pitt; and he managed that
the information should reach the Emperor of China, and sent through a
safe channel advice that the Emperor of China should look upon the
Roman missions as dangerous and France as a "wicked power." Whether
this advice would have been taken to heart or not is doubtful. Roman
missions were unpopular in China; still they had powerful friends; but
the discovery of one of their missionaries with maps of China intended
for the use of foreign countries convinced her of the truth of the
English suggestion, and Roman missions were put {188} down at the
beginning of the nineteenth century with a relentless hand. In 1840
there broke out the first foreign war between China and the West, and
after this Catholic missions became more and more an appanage of French
policy. Whether the French had distantly intended the conquest of
China, or whether they merely looked upon China as an outlet for her
trade, they used the Catholic missions as a means whereby French
interests should be pushed. Certainly the author of _Les Missions
Catholiques Françaises_ does not hesitate to suggest that France was
rewarded for the protection of missions by an increased trade.
In 1842, as the result of a war, a treaty was signed to which we have
before referred, and in 1860 it was followed by another. Both gave
missionaries extensive rights. Can you wonder that the peace-loving
Chinaman, looking back on history, finds it difficult to understand why
the preachers of the gospel of love should have been so often followed
by the armies and fleets of the military races of the West? The coping
stone to this policy of propagating Christianity by the power and
influence of a foreign nation was placed by an edict which just
preceded the Boxer movement. That edict astonished even the Roman
Catholics, for the author of _Les Missions Catholiques Françaises au
XIX. Siècle_ speaks of the extraordinary surprise it was to the Roman
Catholic body. This edict ordained that bishops and priests should
have official rank in China; that the bishops {189} should be equal in
rank to viceroys and governors, and the vicars-general and the
arch-priests should be equal to treasurers and judges, while the other
priests should be equal to prefects of the first and second class; and
that if any question of importance arose in connection with the
missions, the bishop or missionaries should call in the intervention of
the Minister or Consul to whom the Pope had confided the protection of
the Catholics. The edict closes with three injunctions. First, that
the people in general were to live at peace with the Catholics;
secondly, that the bishops should instruct the Catholics to live at
peace with the rest of the world; and lastly, that the judges should
judge fairly between Catholics and non-Catholics.
This edict can perhaps be regarded rather as a victory of French
diplomacy than of the Roman Church. French diplomacy had converted the
whole of the Roman Catholic work into an agency for the national
aggrandisement of France; the Roman Catholic Church had sold herself to
the French Government; her old traditional policy of employing the
powers of this world to propagate Christianity had involved her in this
position; and she had presented Christianity to her converts as
something which, however great its spiritual gain, had also very real
temporal advantages. The Church was a great society which would defend
you in this world just as it would give you promises of security in the
world to come. So she had instituted a regular system by which her
adherents were defended in any lawsuit or attack. {190} This
interference in lawsuits was, however, not peculiar to the Roman
Catholics. It is an old Chinese custom--a custom in which both Romans
and other denominations have acquiesced; still it was exaggerated by
the Roman Catholic Church till it brought down upon her the anger of
the Chinese official world.
It is hard for a Westerner, with his ideas of an independent court of
justice, to comprehend the system. A lawsuit is not regarded in China
as a thing to be settled simply on its merits. They are only a factor
in the decision. The general desire is that, if all things are equal,
justice shall be done; but together with justice the judge has to
consider the social position of the litigants and their power of
vengeance or of reward. The best analogy to a Chinese lawsuit is an
English election. If you read the speeches and addresses you will
conceive that the whole desire of a candidate engaged in an English
election is that justice should be done, but in practice you soon
discover that the influence of individuals has to be considered as
well. A candidate who always disregards justice is universally
condemned; but a candidate who wilfully offends powerful people, who is
not prepared to give and take, to sacrifice a conviction here, to push
forward a little beyond the line of justice there, is equally unable to
gain the suffrages of the voters; and in China the judge stands in the
same position as the candidate does in England. If he is convinced
that a certain {191} cause is backed by very powerful people who can
secure him a better appointment and a higher salary, or who if angered
might even succeed in getting him dismissed from his post, he decides
the case in that litigant's favour. If, on the other hand, the parties
are about equally matched in influence and power, like the English
candidate he then considers the justice of the case; and therefore the
first thing a litigant does is to try and secure all the influential
support within his reach. Chinese officials told me that they have to
have their cards printed with "for visiting purposes only" written on
them, otherwise they are stolen and used without their knowledge in the
furtherance of some lawsuit, and English Protestant missionaries
confirmed the story.
Though this interference in lawsuits is a universal custom, its extreme
use is peculiar to the Roman Catholics. To attack a Roman Catholic was
to bring the whole strength of his mission, with the diplomacy of
France behind it, against you. It was in furtherance of this policy
that the Roman Catholics were anxious to hold official rank. An
official will not speak to any one below his rank; the missionary finds
access to the Viceroys very difficult; but if the Roman Hierarchy had
this high official rank, the Bishop had only to pay a visit in his
green official chair, when, by the strict etiquette of China, he must
be received with all politeness, and his visit must be returned. To
procure these privileges the Roman Catholics were prepared to sell to
France the large {192} and undoubted influence they had among many
thousands in China. There is a certain poetic justice in the Roman
Catholic Church suffering from the actions of the French Government at
home.
Still justice compels us to remember that they have not been alone in
this policy. Missionaries of other faiths and other lands have both
relied on the defence of foreign powers and have interfered with the
lawsuits of their converts. A Protestant missionary from the Southern
States of America frankly defended the system. He boldly asserted that
non-interference in a lawsuit would be simply misunderstood by the
Chinese. When he was young he had absolutely refused to interfere in a
case where a widow was being oppressed, and a non-Christian Chinese
gentleman had interviewed him, and after some circumlocution, had
remonstrated with him on his hardness of heart, that he, a teacher of
the religion of love, should neglect the widow in her necessity.
Still, the Roman Church, as in Ireland, as in France, as in Italy, is
an institution which is essentially political; and the traditional
policy of the Roman Church has been followed in China with the
invariable result, first, that when the power of the State is used to
promote her tenets she grows strong, and next when that power is
withdrawn or becomes hostile she feels the loss of the earthly support
on which she has relied and apparently grows weaker. This is, however,
only transitory; the Roman Church, for instance, is growing stronger,
not weaker, now {193} that she has lost the support of French
diplomacy, and the missions have entered upon their third epoch when
they are preaching Christianity without any special support of a
foreign government and are succeeding. For there are few bodies of
people in this world who are more heroic and devoted than the Roman
missionaries; they have died by fever, have been massacred, they live
on a miserable pittance; I was told that one enlightened missionary,
once a Professor in Paris University, lived on £12 a year; and their
heroism and self-denial reaps a large reward.
Their most beautiful and most successful works are the orphanages which
they maintain. They accept any of those children whom the Chinese
mothers cast out to die, either because of their poverty or because
they are girls. These children are brought up with infinite care and
kindness, and are taught embroidery, lace-making, and other trades. No
more beautiful sight can be seen than one of these orphanages, with the
happy children hard at work and rejoicing as only Chinese rejoice in
pleasant labour. When these children grow up they are married to
Christians, and from them springs a native Christian population, which
has never known any of the horrors of heathenism. As a rule they live
in small societies. I believe there is an island on the Yangtsze which
is entirely peopled by Christians. The work may be great, but the cost
is great too. Many a life has been laid down so that these children
might be Christians.
{194}
I recall one scene at Ichang. There rises near the town a great
orphanage, and when we visited it, we found the French sisters looking
weary and whiter than their white robes. An epidemic of smallpox had
broken out in the orphanage, and out of 140 orphans, 28 had died of
small-pox, besides which the sisters had suffered themselves from
malaria. One could but admire the devotion of these women living far
off from their own country, tending children whom no one else would
tend, and gaining as their reward hatred and misunderstanding from the
Chinese. A Bishop belonging to this mission had been murdered, and a
lay brother told me that it was because they were accused of stealing
children to make Western medicine out of their eyes. This strange
slander arises apparently from the desire, which is not understood by
the Chinese, to save and preserve the lives of other people's children.
Chinese ethics have no place for such altruism. Your duty never
extends beyond your own relations, either by blood or from official
position. There is another reason, however, for this notion. The
Roman Catholics have a system of native agents who are prepared to
baptize any child, whether of heathen or Christian parents, who is
dying. This system is very well organised. Some of these agents
perambulate districts and some remain at fixed points. Perhaps not
unnaturally the Chinese cannot understand this methodical search for
dying children, and as a reason must be found, and as the reason that
seems most probable to the Chinese {195} mind is some form of personal
gain, they have invented this slander.
Whether we approve or disapprove the general action of the Roman
Catholics--and our feelings are probably very mixed on this subject--we
must recognise that they are a very great factor in the change that is
coming over China. For centuries they have stood before the Chinese as
associating with Christianity the science and the knowledge the Chinese
have always admired. The wonderful work done by the Jesuits of the
eighteenth century has established a tradition of excellent scientific
work which is well maintained by the learned brothers of the Ziccawei
Observatory. Many hundreds of lives have been saved at sea by the
splendid meteorological service they have organised, and the sailor who
cares nothing for Roman or for Protestant walks down on the Bund to see
what the Ziccawei brothers can tell him about the probability of a
typhoon. The benefit of their service, though great, is not limited to
the number of lives of mariners that their science preserves; their
science is an object-lesson to the Chinese--an object-lesson especially
useful at a time when materialism is taunting Christianity with
obscurantism.
Missionaries in the field do not entirely recognise the connection that
exists between their own work and the work of other denominations. The
man on the mission field sees his bit of work, and realises that it is
a failure or that it is a success, but he does not {196} realise how
intimately associated that success or failure is with world movements
over which he has but the very slightest control. These world
movements are dependent on many factors that must be beyond his direct
knowledge, and one of the factors that influence the success of
Protestant missions is the wide influence of Catholic work. Conversely
every new Protestant mission that opens the door of a school or a
college probably tends to augment the number of Roman Catholics in
China. The question put to the Chinaman is not, "Will you be Roman or
Protestant?" That was the question that was put to the European in the
sixteenth century. The question is, "Will you become a materialist or
a Christian?" And the answer he makes must be largely affected by his
experience of the intellectual efficiency and high moral tone of those
he calls Christians. I despair of persuading my Protestant friends
that the reputation of the Ziccawei brothers is a valuable asset in
evangelical work, and I equally despair of persuading the Roman
Catholic that the splendid educational establishments of American
Protestantism is one of the reasons why their numbers are increasing by
leaps and bounds; but the Chinaman would probably think the remark
self-obvious.
How small the differences appear that we think so profound was first
brought home to me as we passed through the Red Sea on the French mail
in company with a body of Coptic schoolmasters who were going to
civilise Menelik's subjects in Abyssinia. {197} As it was Sunday
morning these young men came up to me to ask an explanation of the
ceremony of ship inspection which is performed with some pomp by the
French captain on that day. With a wholly exaggerated idea as to the
religiosity of the French they had concluded that this was a Christian
ceremony, and when I had explained to them that on a French ship it was
illegal to have a service, they were distressed, for they explained
that though they had been educated in many different quarters, they
were all in agreement on religious matters. One had been educated in
the Protestant College in Beyrout, and another had been educated in the
Jesuit College at Cairo, which, he added in explanation, is practically
the same thing. This statement would be regarded as accurate by the
average Chinaman.
At any rate, no one can doubt the importance of Roman Catholic work in
China. They now claim to have over a million of adherents, served by
nearly two thousand priests, and when one reads that they declare that
they have made in Peking alone thirty-three thousand converts in one
year, one realises what a power they are in the Christianisation of
China. In the West such figures would mean the downfall of
Protestantism, but in China such figures mean the growth of a common
Christianity which all denominations can influence and in which all
denominations can have a share. Remember, though a million Christians
sounds a vast number, it is small compared with the four hundred
millions who now form the population of China.
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