A FEW days ago I was asked this question, "Can you love the Chinese enough to go and work for them?" My answer was, "I can not help loving them;" nor do I think any one else could who has had daily association with them for the sole purpose of doing them good. No one responds more quickly to kindness than the Chinese man; and none make more faithful and constant friends when you have once entered into their confidence. In spite of the popular contempt for the Chinese, and the generally-entertained opinion that they are far inferior to the ordinary mortal, there are just as amiable, honest, and intelligent creatures among them as among any other race. More than this, there are characters among them that are gentle, lovable, and affectionate, who not only elicit your admiration, but command your love and incite an interest to lift them out of the moral and physical degradation, in spite of which many of them exhibit these noble traits.
A Spiritually-Minded and Ever-Reliable Chinaman.
A man is not to be measured so much by the absolute rule of right as by what he is under the circumstances and environments of his life. I have often felt rebuked by the patience and unselfishness of the Chinese schoolboy. Could the contempt that is generally held toward the Chinese man be once laid aside, and could he be taken for just what he is and what he will prove to be under proper treatment, much of the race prejudice cherished against him by Europeans, and especially by Anglo-Saxons, would disappear.
It is not to be supposed that what has been said of the estimable traits of the Chinese applies to them universally, or as a rule, or even in very large proportion; but because a man wears a cue, eats rice with chopsticks, and lives in uncanny places, it is not justifiable to conclude that he is wholly depraved, or that he is not worthy of our prayers, our labor, and our love.
It is true that the Chinese man is in a state of terrible bondage—to superstition, to idolatry, to custom, to avarice.
His superstition will not permit the physician to mutilate the body in any way; consequently surgery can not be practised ordinarily, the Chinese man preferring death to losing or deforming even the smallest part of his body. The reason for this is found in his belief that physical imperfection in this life is not removed in that which is to come. The same superstition forbids dissection after death; hence the Chinese ignorance of his anatomy, and perhaps his lack of interest in the study of physiology in English schools.
One of our schoolboys, while at play, fell from the limb of a tree to the ground, sustaining no injury except a little fright. On being sent home, his father came immediately to the school-ground and offered a burnt sacrifice on the spot where the boy struck the ground, in order to appease the evil spirit which he believed caused the boy's fall.
Another schoolboy sickened and died; and for days afterward no other boy could be persuaded to sit in the seat previously occupied by the boy who had died, believing the seat to be infested with evil spirits.
In the ordinary progress of school one boy will often refuse to sit on a seat made warm from contact with the body of another, for fear the other's spirit will be imbibed.
Nearly every Chinese man wears a ring of ivory or other material on his wrist or arm, as his talisman, it being the more effectual if it comes from some unknown or mysterious place.
His idolatry is polytheistic. He sees a god in every tree and cloud and mountain. If the tree is struck by lightning, it was inhabited by a bad god; if it affords protection in a storm, its god is good. If the earth-quakes, the god of the mountain is angry, and must be appeased by sacrifice and oblation.
Chinese customs are proverbially ancient and rigid, and conform in many remarkable features to Bible customs and usages, yet with such essential differences that they can usually be regarded as just as great perversions as the worship of a distinct god in every object of nature is a perversion of the worship of the God that created the heavens and the earth; or as evil is a perversion of good.
Their avarice is as deep-seated and penetrating as the root of evil would naturally be in those who are so fully without God that they have no power to oppose its evil and tyrannical sway.
On the whole, there is so much to admire, and yet so much to be corrected, that the conclusion is inevitable that there is no more attractive and yet needy subject for missionary effort than is the Chinese man.
