DIFFICULTIES OF MISSION WORK IN CHINA.
THE religious beliefs, the customs and prejudices of the Chinese, are entrenched behind centuries upon centuries of superstition. It must be remembered that China is the most ancient empire in the world. . . . Her ethics, her laws and administration of government, have come down almost unchanged through all those thousands of years. As far back as history goes, the Chinese were governed by almost the same form of paternal or patriarchal government that has stood unshaken amid the rise and fall of Western empires, and is still as influential in its strength and vigor. It is this antiquity which the Chinese fall back upon with so much pride that stands in the way of their accepting anything so modern as Christianity. But in the consideration of the difficulties the missionary has to encounter, there is not only the antiquity, but also the enormous size of the nation and the extent of country. Out of a total of 5,000,000 square miles the eighteen provinces, or China proper, contain 1,500,000 square miles. In the middle of China is one of the greatest and most densely populated plains in the world, through which flow the Yellow River and the Yang-tse. This one plain supports a population of 175,000,000, or nearly three times as many people as inhabit the United States. The emperor of China rules over one-tenth of the surface of the habitable globe, and nearly half of the population of our planet. Both the land and the people are not only immense and overwhelming, but strange, unique, and without analogy. The methods used for preaching the Gospel in our own lands or among uncivilized races have to be modified greatly, if not entirely changed, when applied to the civilization of China. The mass to be moved is enormous, and the power applied must be great in proportion. Added to this difficulty of the size of the nation there is the complexity of the language. The old saying that "the devil invented the Chinese characters to keep Christianity out of China," appears to have some show of reason when we find that in place of a Chinese alphabet there are tens of thousands of formidable hieroglyphics of pictorial characters, and that each constitutes a separate monosyllabic word. Furthermore, this written language is to be seen and not heard, to be read and not spoken. Then there is the official or court language, used in the Northern and central provinces, with hundreds of different dialects spoken south of the Yang-tse. The missionary there has therefore to learn the local dialect, the court language, and the written or classical11language, before he can preach, read the translations of the Scriptures, and carry on oral and written intercourse with all the different classes of natives he meets. This alone is the work almost of a lifetime. But when the missionary has overcome these difficulties, which few succeed in doing beyond a certain limited extent, his task is only just begun. He has to learn all that the ordinary Chinese know from their classical and other books and teachers, in order to meet them on their own ground. Then he must begin to attack the sentiments the Chinaman holds most dear, and which are hallowed by the earliest associations and parental love. These ancestral teachings and examples, with his methods of religious worship, are deeply imbedded in his inmost heart. Yet the missionary has to ask him to give up many or most of them, and accept untried foreign dogmas and methods in their place. Is it any wonder that the conservative principle in Chinese human nature rebels, and that the Chinaman naturally is opposed to all missionary propagandism? It is almost impossible to realize the immense sacrifice a Chinese, even of the lower class, has to make when, in the face of the opposition and the contempt of his family, his kinsmen, his whole clan, and his friends, he determines to become a sincere Christian, and to follow the teachings of uncouth-looking strangers from far-off lands who are popularly known as "foreign devils!"—Prof. John Fryer, in Ainslee's Magazine.