Echoes from the Laymen’s Missionary Congress
Lord Cecil of England spoke of his various observations in the Far East: “The Chinese accepted the Gospel in sincerity. Persecution came, and culminated in the Boxer uprising, in which thousands of native Christians lost their lives. The blood of the martyrs proved again the seed of the church. That persecution has resulted not in the retarding, but the rapid spread, of the Gospel. In Pekin the street chapels are crowded, people eager for the Gospel. How potent are the effects. Note the opium reform. When I first went to China, you could find the Chinese smoking opium on every boat, and the fields were red with the poppy. Later I traveled from Mukden to Pekin, from Pekin to Hankow, and then to Shanghai, back to Hankow, and on to Chan-Sha, the scene of the recent riots, and then into West China; and I did not see a single trace of the poppy. With such a reform we see that powers that are good are also moving China.” Dr. Pott, president of St. John’s College, Shanghai, China, made the following pertinent remarks: “The yellow peril is not that China will awake and go forth to conquer the world. It is not that the empire will become the great competitor with the Western commerce. It is that this new empire shall be a godless China. The danger is that this new civilization shall be wholly materialistic. The formation of a new civilization in the Far East through the fusion of the Oriental and Occidental elements, constitutes a great crisis. It concerns not only China, but the future of the whole world. The missionaries have not only to fight the false religion and devil-worship of heathen lands, but also have to fight the agnosticism and materialism of the West. The inroad of scientific education undermines the old religious systems and the old ethical ideals, and tends to leave China without God. “China is receptive to new truth. She is forsaking old ideals. China for centuries was like a closed room, using the figure of Sir Robert Hart. The dead air was unstirred by breezes from without. Some seventy years ago the work of prying open the doors and the windows began, but she only yielded from force from without. Now of her own accord, she is swinging wide open the doors and the windows, and welcoming the breezes of Western influence and civilization. The changed attitude is due to no small extent to the work of Christian missionaries. China is awake and making rapid progress.”