China and Christianity.
By T.
DURING recent weeks, Sir Hiram S. Maxim has been communicating through the press some of his views concerning the prospects of Christianity in China. He refers to the fact that the new Chinese republic requested all the numerous religionists in China to pray for the republican government. Then Mr. Maxim says: “On several occasions I have been requested by high Chinese officials to explain the religions of Europe and America for the use of the Chinese. When Li Hung Chang was in England I prepared, at his request, a scrap-book containing cuttings and quotations from many of the most eminent religious writers and philosophers. When Chang Chih-Tung, viceroy of Hupeh and Hunan, who was, after the death of Li Hung Chang, known as China’s greatest viceroy, wrote ‘China’s Only Hope,’ I was requested by Chinese Minister Loh Fung Lu to review the viceroy’s book. I did so at length, and I find that in many ways the Chinese have taken my advice about our missionaries. The best way to deal with our missionaries, I said, was to let them alone, and by no means attack them or destroy their property. There were many points of resemblance between Christianity and Buddhism.” Continuing, Mr. Maxim says: “Confucius taught a high moral philosophy, and as it was quite free from supernaturalism, it can not, strictly speaking, be considered as a religion. “‘The teaching of Confucianism on human duty,’ says Dr. Legge, ‘is wonderful and admirable. On three or four things which Confucius delighted to teach—letters, ethics, devotion of soul, and truthfulness—his utterances are in harmony with both the law and the gospel. A world ordered by them would be a beautiful world.’” “Buddhism, which dates from 450 B.C., has more adherents than any other religious system in the world, and very closely resembles Christianity, having a similar origin. There are about twenty million Mohammedans in Western China, probably six or seven million Roman Catholics, and perhaps two million Greek Catholics and Protestants, the Protestants being divided into innumerable sects. Over three hundred and fifty millions of the Chinese are Buddhists, if anything.” One of the leading characteristics among many people in these times is to seek to have it appear that Christianity is on a plane with the teachings of Confucius, and that Buddhism and other Oriental religions have many things in common with the teaching of the Christ of the living God. To the individual who does not know Christianity by an actual experience, this teaching may seem very true; but the individual who knows the Lord Jesus Christ and His power to save, is thoroly alive to the fact that there is no comparison between any of those religions and the gospel that brings salvation and power into the life of the individual. The trouble is that there are many millions of people who are professing Christianity who know nothing at all about its power to save them from sin. They hold it merely as a religion through which they hope to secure life beyond the tomb. They have not entered into the treasure-house of the gospel. They have not become personally acquainted with the Son of the living God. They know nothing of the soul-stirring joys of salvation. If they did, they never could talk as they do in regard to those old Oriental religions’ being in any sense on a par with Christianity. If Buddhism has such wonderful principles in it why haven’t the millions of adherents of that religion been elevated thereby? Why are they in the conditions in which they are found? Christianity has had an opportunity to express itself through the Protestant faith that broke the chains of the Dark Ages. And see where the Protestant nations of to-day are as compared with any part of the Oriental world. And these Protestant nations are nothing to what they might have been had more of the people really accepted Christianity as it is actually taught in the divine Book. Even in the Protestant world, there is only here and there an individual, comparatively, who actually accepts the plan of salvation, and receives in his life the uplifting power of the gospel. But when such men do arise, as Luther, or the Wesleys, for instance, see what a power they exert in the world, and how wide-spread and how uplifting is their work. The heathen world has no reforms to offer that have produced such results as are seen in the nations that have been touched by the influence and power of Protestantism. But aside from all of these facts, the individual who actually knows the power of salvation through Christ, has an experience of his own that enables him to know for himself the fallacy of all of the claims that are made concerning these systems of religion that come from the Orient. T.