THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA
At the great Shanghai Conference we always spoke of the "Church in
China," implying thereby that there was to be one Christian body in the
Chinese empire. This ideal is lofty and not impossible. There is a
reasonable expectation that the great intellectual movement in China
will render the Chinese very ready to accept new ideas, and the rate of
conversion in China gives one reasonable hope that the new ideas may be
Christian and not those of Western materialism. If China becomes
Christian there will no doubt be a great tendency to accept the unity
of Christianity as an essential doctrine. As a race they clearly tend
towards union as much as the Anglo-Saxon race tends towards disunion.
The British empire has been held together by its fear of its enemies;
the Chinese empire has been held together through their natural love of
union, which is the dominant characteristic of the race. Remove the
enemies of the British empire and she will naturally divide, but force
the Chinese empire apart and she will naturally return to one body.
Chinese Christianity will, if it is truly Chinese, tend to one body.
This truth, which I think would have been {243} allowed by the whole
Shanghai Conference, opens up a train of thought which is full of
foreboding and yet of hope.
One obvious criticism of what was said of the Church in China was kept
largely out of sight at the Shanghai Conference, namely, that as the
Roman Communion far outnumbers the whole of the non-Roman Communions
put together, the Church in China, therefore, if it is to consist of
all Christians, will be something very different to what the majority
of those present at that Conference would like. Some men maintain that
the Chinese love of unity will not go so far as to compel the union
between Protestant and Catholic, and that in China the schism which has
rent Christianity in twain in Europe will be continued. I would ask
those who think thus if they think this is desirable even if it is
possible. Once foreign influence and support has been removed, would
not such a division soon produce a state of great friction, resulting
probably in the destruction of the smaller body. But it is most
improbable; a race which has habitually put together Taoism, Buddhism,
and Confucianism will have no difficulty at all in uniting Romanism and
Protestantism. I do not mean to say that Rome will conquer; it does
not seem likely. The power of the Romans is great when they are
preaching our common Christianity, but their peculiar doctrine of the
pre-eminence of Rome is most unattractive to the Chinaman. After all,
Rome is a very small place to a man who lives in China. Think how
little {244} we know of ancient Chinese history, and realise how little
China knows of the history of our civilisation. Home at the present
day is to the Chinaman merely the capital of Germany's weakest ally.
The reasoning of the universality of the Roman Church, always faulty,
seems almost ridiculous in China. The Chinaman on one side is
conversant with America, on the other side she is in touch with India,
while on the north she has a frontier which stretches for thousands and
thousands of miles between her and the great Orthodox Church of Russia.
One's eyes naturally turn to this immense line of frontier between
Confucianism and Christianity, and one wonders how any Chinaman can
possibly think of Rome as the one Catholic Church. If the Roman
Church, with its foreign domination and its tacit acceptance of the
fact that only members of the Italian nation can receive Divine
authority to guide the Church on earth, is unattractive to the mind of
the man who lives in the Far East, on the other hand its ornate and
dignified services must be most attractive to a race whose national
philosophy puts pre-eminent weight on dignity and decorum in dress and
demeanour. If the Roman Church could give up her Latin services, could
frankly become a national Church which owed no obedience to any Pontiff
outside China, one would regret the possibility but one would have to
allow the probability of her complete domination over the Chinese
empire. Again one's eyes turn to the northern frontier, and one asks
oneself {245} whether that great Orthodox Church, the dignity of whose
services is without parallel, and which frankly accepts the national
Church as a reasonable Christian position, will not one day be a large
factor in the future missionary work in China. After what we had seen
and heard at the Centenary Conference, and after we had realised the
great extent of the Roman work, we felt that till one understood why
the Russian Church conducted no missionary work one could not
understand the whole missionary problem; for when the Russian Church
does undertake such work, her geographical position must render her
important.
The whole of this question is of the greatest interest to the student
of missions, but especially to an Anglican. The great value of the
Anglican position has always seemed that, to use an election phrase, we
offer a platform on which all those who call themselves Christian might
possibly unite. The great rent which divides Protestant from Catholic
seems not only to make it impossible for Latin Christians to unite with
the Teuton Protestant Churches, but also renders it hard for the latter
to unite with the great Churches of Eastern Europe. Of course all this
has only an academic interest in England, but in China with its rapidly
growing Christianity and an intellectual revolution surging forward to
unknown possibilities, all this is of vital interest. What will
Chinese Christianity be? Is it to be an ornate Christianity to which
the converts {246} of Rome and possibly the converts of the Orthodox
Church will adhere, an ornate Church sullied no doubt with the faults
of her parents, a Church possibly attractive to the Buddhist, for he
will not need to traverse any great distance in thought to enter her
portals; or is it to be a great Protestant Church, cold and bare,
vigorous and energetic, a Church in which the uniform of the Teuton
mind will sit badly on the Chinese convert, a Church which may in many
things represent truly the will of our mutual Master, but a Church
which leaves the Oriental cold and miserable, while it practically
tears from our Bible those endless chapters on the decoration of Temple
and Tabernacle, those constant commands to an exact and ordered ritual.
I write with what the Germans call "objectivity"; the Teuton within me
dislikes ritual; but the Chinaman is no Teuton, and the Chinaman loves
ritual as much as any man on earth. No one who has been received by a
Chinese Viceroy in his Yamen can have the very slightest doubt on this
subject. If the Protestant bodies hope to force on the Chinese a
non-ornate form of Christianity, they will be doing exactly what the
Italian Church did to the Northern races, and which produced the great
upheaval of the Reformation. The Reformation was essentially the
rebellion of the Teuton mind against a forced acceptance of the Italian
view of Christianity. To force on the Chinese converts a Christianity
shorn of all ritual and display will produce in years to come some
similar upheaval. {247} There is yet a third possibility. The
Anglican position affords the means of avoiding such an upheaval, and
of permitting a union of all Christians on the basis of an ornate
service and evangelical Christianity. For while it permits a service
equal in dignity to that of Rome or of Russia, it insists equally with
the bodies who pride themselves on the name of Protestant on the
supreme value of the Bible.
The very hope I have that Christianity will conquer China makes me
fearful for the future. The age of persecution is past, the blood of
the martyrs has been shed, and the seed of a Church freely sown. But
after the age of persecution comes the age of heresy, and to preserve
Christianity in China from future dangers, not only is union necessary,
but a well-ordered Church bound by creeds, respecting tradition, which
shall embrace all those Christians by whomsoever they have been
converted who love the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great danger
I fear for the future Church in China is one of Eastern and not Western
origin. I do not fear the domination of Rome. I doubt that the
Protestant Communions will succeed in ultimately persuading the Chinese
to worship God in a bare building and without vestments.
China and Japan will, if they are conquered by Christianity, be neither
Protestant nor Catholic any more than we are Nestorian or Eutychian.
Their divisions, their dangers, their struggles, will arise from a
wholly different set of circumstances. I fear {248} the dangers will
come from an effort to incorporate Buddhism and Christianity in one
religion. This is all the more probable as it has doubtless happened
before. Nestorianism and Buddhism are the probable parents of the
present Chinese Lamaism. It is, however, not given for us to see into
the future, but we can look back into the past, and we can see that our
predecessors in the faith nearly invariably made the mistake of
supposing that the old dangers were going to recur, and of therefore
depending on the old measures of defence.
The future Church in the Far East must fight her own battles. She must
solve her own problems. All we can do is to hand over to her the truth
in all its fulness, and teach her to look for divine guidance, to
forget such words as Protestant, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and
Anglican; to learn merely the word "Christian" and the word "Love." If
Far Eastern Christianity will have its battles to fight, it will have
also its message to give to the West, "that they without us should not
be made perfect." It may be that the message of the East to the West
will be that as God is One, so must His followers be; that strong and
mighty as is the West, there is in her an element of the very greatest
weakness; that the discord that reigns between Christian and Christian,
between race and race, between class and class, is not the will of the
Creator, but is the result of the national sins of the white races.
The Far East, with its greater power of unity, {249} may illumine the
West with a higher conception of this great virtue, and the world may
be a far holier and happier place when the yellow race has preached to
the world the great doctrine of peace on earth and goodwill to men.
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THE NEW AND THE OLD LEARNING