Christian Missions in China

I

WHAT opinion shall we hold of Christian missions in China? Have they had any important influence upon the country? If so, has that influence been harmful or helpful? These are questions which many thoughtful people are asking, both in and out of China, and both inside and outside of Christian circles. They have repeatedly been raised, but lately they have been unusually insistent , chiefly because of the antichristian movement in China of the past seven years, and the forced exodus of missionaries — mainly those of the Protestant body — two years ago. The nature and the importance of the discussion that has been aroused are evidenced by three articles in the Atlantic — ‘A Missionary Audit,’ by Mr. Mark M. Jones, in December 1927; ‘Christianity in China,’ by Mr. Moore Bennett, in August 1928; and ‘Humanizing the Missionary,’ by Miss Louise Strong Hammond, in November 1928.

The missionary enterprise in China is certainly extensive enough to warrant attention. In the main it is conducted by two great branches of the Church, the Roman Catholic and the Protestant. The mission of the Russian Orthodox Church, although nearly two hundred and fifty years old, does not compare in size or influence with the others, and in any attempt at a brief appraisal of the general movement can be ignored.

Roman Catholic missions have been in China continuously since the latter half of the sixteenth century. A few Franciscans had come to Cathay in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, just subsequent to the sojourn of Marco Polo, but had left behind them no enduring communities. Roman Catholic missionaries to-day in China total about thirty-one hundred, — in round numbers, seventeen hundred and fifty priests, two hundred and fifty lay brothers, and eleven hundred sisters, — and are to be found in all the twenty-two provinces. The majority are from Latin Europe, — France, Italy, and Spain, in about the order named, — but with substantial groups of Germans and Belgians, and, latterly, of Americans. The interest of the Roman Catholics of the United States in missions in China, almost nonexistent twanty years ago, is, indeed, rapidly growing, and is expressing itself in the establishment of several new missions and in substantial financial contributions. Roman Catholic missions in China are maintained by more than two-score orders, societies, congregations, and sisterhoods. They have chiefly emphasized building and nourishing a Church, and so successful have they been that to-day the Chinese Republic contains between two and a quarter and two and a half million members of their communion, a little over three times the number of twentyfive years ago. Roman Catholics have a fairly extensive educational system, but, with the exception of a few secondary schools and two small universities, the institutions of higher grade have been primarily for the training of catechists and priests. A large number of orphanages and a few hospitals and dispensaries are maintained. The funds to support the missions come partly from gifts from Europe and America, partly from contributions from Chinese, but very largely from extensive investments, mainly in real estate, in China — a form of endowment in accord with Chinese usage.

Protestant missions in China began in 1807, and so are much younger than those of Roman Catholics. Protestant missionaries, just before the exodus of 1926 and 1927, numbered about eight thousand, of whom about three thousand ware men, about twenty-four hundred were wives, and about twentysix hundred were unmarried women. Like the Roman Catholics, they were to be found in all the twenty-two provinces. Probably fifteen hundred of the eight thousand were at home on sick leave or their customary furloughs, making a constantly effective force in China of about sixty-five hundred. At the present writing those actually in China number about four thousand, a total that is being steadily augmented by refugees returning to their posts. In contrast with the Roman Catholics, the great majority of Protestant missionaries are Englishspeaking, about half coming from the United States, a slightly smaller proportion from Great Britain and Ireland, and still smaller numbers from Canada and Australia. There are, however, substantial groups from Germany and Scandinavia.

The missionaries are divided among about one hundred and sixty different societies, but, as we shall see in a moment, this disunion is much more apparent than real. Protestants, like Roman Catholics, have sought to build up a Church — or churches. Their efforts, too, have been so successful that the baptized Protestant community to-day numbers something over half a million, and is about four times what it was twenty-five years ago. The Protestant communities, in other words, beginning more than two centuries later than the Roman Catholic, are much smaller, but, proportionately, have grown more rapidly. Protestants, too, have engaged in more diversified activities than have the Roman Catholics, and have sought to influence the nation outside as well as inside the Christian fellowship. They have placed much more emphasis upon education, and especially upon higher education. Thirteen or fourteen of their institutions are of what Americans would call college grade, and at least five are doing university work. Protestants have medical schools and numerous hospitals. They have prepared an extensive literature on both secular and religious subjects. In a great variety of other ways they are seeking to touch constructively the nation’s life. Unlike the Roman Catholics, Protestants have built up few endowments in China, and the funds to support their work come from the churches which send the missionaries and from contributions and school and hospital fees from the Chinese.

II

An appraisal of this extensive missionary enterprise, to have any hope of accuracy, must be made against the background of present-day movements in China. These movements, as everyone knows, centre around the one word ‘revolution.’ All phases of China’s life — political, social, economic, intellectual, and religious — are being radically altered. The cause is the penetration of China by the Occident. Of this missions are a part. The impact of the Occident, however, is primarily economic and political. Revolution, therefore, would probably have occurred in China had never a missionary left his native land. It has been chiefly for markets and raw materials that the Westerner has come to China. The wars and treaties by which Occidentals first imposed themselves on the Middle Kingdom had as their chief objects commerce and political prestige. The Chinese began to recast their culture after the humiliations they suffered at the hands of Japan and Western Powers between 1894 and 1905. While, however, missions have not been the main cause of the change, they are modifying the results — and wholesomely.

The economic and political phases of the Western invasion of China have been primarily destructive. That does not mean that at times they have not been helpful. The Maritime Customs Service, and its child, the Post Office, — both, in their inception, the work of foreigners and outgrowths of commercial relations, — have been of inestimable service. Western commerce itself has not been without great benefits to the Chinese, and many merchants have had the welfare of China sincerely at heart. For the most part, however, the good which has accrued to China from commercial and political contacts has been incidental and undesigned; most merchants and diplomats have been in China for other purposes than the well-being of the Chinese. Having set in motion the forces that destroyed the old, they have done relatively little to assist China to achieve a new and better culture.

The missionary, on the other hand, has set himself primarily to the task of making the impact of the West helpful rather than harmful, of putting the Chinese in touch with whatever in the Occident has intellectual, physical, spiritual, and moral worth, and has devoted his energies unselfishly to bringing the Chinese into contact with the best elements in Western civilization. At times, of course, the missionary has been destructive. Some of the old religious life he has opposed, and, since religion was intertwined with the State, the family, the village, the city, and the guild, these institutions have been weakened by his presence. While it would have come without him, the missionary assisted in bringing the revolution. Long before it arrived, however, he had set in motion processes which would help build upon and from the ruins of the old a new and, he has hoped, a better China. The ways in which he has sought to do this, and the present results, will be enumerated shortly.

III

Before these are described, however, it should be said that the missionary enterprise has not been without grave faults. Missionaries have reproduced in China many of the weaknesses of Occidental Christianity, and at times have done harm when they meant good. Most of the missionaries’ failings, however, have been greatly exaggerated by critics, and other failings attributed to missions are purely imaginary.

Take, for example, the criticisms made in the first two of the three articles in the Atlantic. Both writers — in common with many others — make much of the seeming lack of unity of Protestant missions, and Mr. Moore Bennett contrasts it unfavorably with the unity among Roman Catholics. The real facts are that extensive coöperation among Protestants is found in China — much more than in this country. To stress the one hundred and sixty different Protestant societies operating in China is very misleading. Over half the missionary force is under twelve of the larger societies. Several of the hundred and sixty, like Yale-in-China and the much more extensive Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Associations, are performing specialized tasks in conjunction and not in competition with denominational bodies. Numbers of others represent national or other subdivisions of the same denomination and unite in coöperating with a single Chinese body of the same communion. Considerably more than half the missionaries and Chinese Protestants are in fellowship with three great Chinese Christian groups which have arisen during the past twenty years. One of these groups, called the Church of Christ in China, is made up of elements as diverse as Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists, United Brethren, and former Methodists (now in the United Church of Canada) — an ecclesiastical union more comprehensive than any heretofore effected in Protestant Christendom. Moreover, the majority of the denominational societies, by mutual understanding, have avoided duplicating each other’s efforts. Then, too, among Protestants a great deal of coöperation exists on a national scale — more, strange to say, than among the various Roman Catholic bodies. On the National Christian Council, formed in 1922 and succeeding another body formed in 1913, the majority of the Protestant groups, Chinese and foreign, are represented. For more than thirty-five years Protestant missionary physicians the nation over have cooperated through a single organization. The Christian Educational Association coördinates most of the Protestant educational efforts, and considerable progress has been made toward a unified Protestant system of schools, particularly of those of college and university grade.

In contrast with these many Protestant coöperative enterprises, not until after the World War did Roman Catholics achieve a continuing national organization of any kind. While they have had more unity of doctrine, they have not enjoyed as much unity of fellowship. The Propaganda has parceled out the country among the various orders, societies, and congregations, and each of these has gone on its way knowing all too little of what the others were doing. Protestant missionaries have never in any country had as prolonged or acrimonious a controversy as that over the ‘rites’ which troubled the Roman Catholics in China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The fellowship among missionaries, while extensive, is not all that could be desired. Between Roman Catholics and Protestants a great gulf exists, with occasional local clashes between the Chinese adherents of the two groups. Many of the smaller Protestant societies, and an occasional larger one, hold back from close coöperation with other bodies. The Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy for a time threatened a split in Protestant ranks. A single Chinese Christian Church is as yet a very remote possibility.

As to the quality and training of the missionary body, Mr. Moore Bennett is grossly inaccurate. He declares of Protestants that, ‘leaving aside such lights as Legge and Martin, Morrison and a very few others, the men sent out by the Protestant Church can make no pretense to the higher education even of their own countries, let alone advanced study in Asiatic history and culture.’ The facts, fortunately, are otherwise. A minority of Protestant missionaries, most of them sent out by smaller boards, are poorly educated. Some, to be sure, are very crude, and are disdainful of China’s heritage. The boards appointing the majority of the missionaries, however, insist upon thorough preparation, and high standards of character, ability, and health. Most of the appointees from the United States and Canada have not only their bachelor’s degrees, but advanced degrees as well — in theology or medicine, or in arts and science. A large proportion spend their furloughs in further graduate study. On their arrival in China, Protestant missionaries are usually sent to a language school for from one to two years, and there acquire not only the rudiments of the language, but an introduction to Chinese history and culture. It is significant that of those teaching Chinese history and culture in colleges and universities in this country about half have been members of the Protestant missionary body. The Harvard-Yenching project, the bestfinanced undertaking yet launched in the United States for the scholarly study of things Chinese, has as its China centre a Protestant university. The professors of Chinese at Oxford and the University of London obtained the expert knowledge that qualified them for these posts during long and busy years as Protestant missionaries. Many of us wish the average missionary were better prepared in the language and in knowledge of the civilization of China, but, even so, in these respects he is far ahead of the members of the foreign business communities.

To the charge of luxurious living — which Mr. Moore Bennett and other critics have brought against the Protestant missionary — Miss Hammond’s article¹ seems an ample reply.

As to the exodus of Protestant missionaries two years ago while the majority of Roman Catholic missionaries remained at their posts, — a contrast of which critics have made much, — again the facts are that British and Americans, merchants as well as missionaries, were singled out for attack by Communist agitators, and the Germans, French, Italians, and Spaniards were largely ignored. Since most of the Protestant missionaries belong to the former and most Roman Catholic missionaries to the latter group, Protestants were more affected. In centre after centre, however, Chinese Christians rose nobly to the emergency and carried on the tasks dropped by the foreigner. Some observers, indeed, believe that the Protestant movement is emerging from the testing more firmly established in Chinese hearts than before.

IV

This naturally leads to a query of Mr. Jones as to whether ’reasonable progress is being made in nationalizing local projects by turning them over to the management of the Chinese,’ and to the criticism of Mr. Moore Bennett that Protestants are denationalizing the Chinese. From the inception of their enterprises both Roman Catholics and Protestants have striven to train Chinese to whom they could transfer the leadership of the Church. For Roman Catholics, with their conscientious insistence that Chinese Christians must remain in full communion with Rome and reasonably free from danger of schism, the process has been delayed until an adequate and trustworthy body of native-born clergy could be created. Of late years, however, and especially during the World War, when missionary staffs were depleted and could with difficulty be filled, both the number of Chinese priests and their proportion to the foreign clergy have rapidly increased. The reigning Pontiff has been especially insistent that a native clergy be developed, and three years ago gave vivid demonstration of his sincerity by raising six Chinese to the episcopate, the first of their race to be promoted by Rome to that dignity after a single experiment in the seventeenth century.

Protestants, being less bound by a rigid ecclesiastical system, and being traditionally more tolerant of nationalism, have made even more rapid progress toward the goal of a Chinesemanned Church. They now count two Chinese bishops — a larger proportion than in the case of the Roman Catholics, for only a minority of the Protestants in China are under the Episcopal polity. For years Chinese have predominated on the governing bodies of the Young Men’s Christian Associations, and the National General Secretary is a Chinese. The chairman, the senior secretary, and a majority of the members of the National Christian Council are Chinese. In Christian community after Christian community and denomination after denomination, the control, these past few years, has been transferred to Chinese. One of the latest developments is the appointment of Chinese presidents and governing bodies for about half the Protestant colleges and universities. Under the new day some of the missionaries are going at the invitation and are being placed under the direction of Chinese ecclesiastical authorities or of governing bodies in which Chinese are in the majority.

With independence of foreign control is coming, although less rapidly, financial self-support. Many of the Protestant schools have long been entirely supported by fees and contributions from Chinese or have received from abroad only the salaries of foreign teachers and funds for new equipment. A number of hospitals are largely maintained by fees and local gifts. In 1926, as against $1,650,000 of American funds spent in China by the Northern Presbyterians on all branches of their work, $587,135 came from Chinese in fees and gifts to the hospitals and schools under that board. Churches have been slower to develop self-maintenance, particularly since the Chinese usually support their temples and monasteries by endowments and so are unaccustomed to the system of regular subscriptions which is in use by Protestants. However, in spite of the financial distress caused by the political chaos of recent years, numbers of congregations are entirely independent of funds from abroad and are giving to the extension of the faith in their own land.

Some denationalizing of Chinese Christians is inevitable. By its very nature, Christianity runs counter to many older Chinese customs and beliefs. The guild, the family, the village, and the State all have religious observances entwined in their structure which Christians feel they must oppose. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants have condemned the customary honors to ancestors and thus have threatened one of the strongest supports of that basic Chinese social institution, the family. However, substitutes have sometimes been arranged, particularly by Protestants. It is important to remember, moreover, that other forces than missions are threatening the family and that both groups of missionaries are seeking to nourish a new type of family life which they believe to be superior to the old.

Unnecessary denationalizing does undoubtedly exist. Western forms of worship and organization are un intelligently reproduced. Many pupils in mission schools have, in their enthusiastic zeal for new ways, taken on foreign dress and manners and have failed to acquire much knowledge of Chinese culture. A substantial proportion of the students in Protestant schools are there because they want the English language and a knowledge of Western subjects, and tend to slide through the Chinese side of the curriculum as easily as possible. Appeals have been made for French support for some of the Roman Catholic schools on the grounds that they teach Chinese the French language, and so further French influence. On the other hand, the initial department in the new Catholic university in Peking was one of Chinese language and culture, and Protestant educators have attempted, even though with many failures, to cultivate in their students a respect for and knowledge of the older native civilization.

The antichristian movement of the past few years has opposed Christian missions, in the main, on three grounds: that they are seeking to propagate a faith which scientifically is untenable and which is being abandoned in the Occident; that they are agents of Western capitalism; and that they are part of Western imperialism. Of the first of these criticisms nothing should be said here; an examination of the claims advanced for the intellectual validity of Christianity cannot adequately be made in an article of this length. As to the charge that missionaries are tools of Western capitalism, no further answer should be needed than the lack of sympathy, amounting often to a gulf, which exists between the foreign business and missionary communities.

In support of the third criticism, however, a number of uncomfortable facts can be adduced. The interpreters through whom several of the early treaties between China and the Powers were negotiated were Roman Catholic or Protestant missionaries. The official murder of a Catholic missionary was made an excuse by France for war on China in 1856, and the death of two other missionaries of the Roman communion gave the Germans a pretext for the seizure of Kiaochow in 1897. For many years the French protectorate of Roman Catholic missions was a means of strengthening French influence in China, and recently Mussolini has subsidized Italian missions. The toleration clauses in the treaties, usually introduced at the instance of missionaries and unanimously welcomed by them, by guaranteeing to the Chinese liberty to profess and practise Christianity, in effect have tended to remove Chinese Christians from the jurisdiction of their own officials and to weaken the State. Under cover of these clauses Chinese have sought the assistance of missionaries in litigation, and not infrequently missionaries, particularly Roman Catholic missionaries, have brought pressure to bear through their consuls on Chinese courts, to the just indignation of the Chinese.

Against these facts, however, must be placed others. Protestant missionary bodies and Rome have strictly forbidden interference in lawsuits. The majority of Protestant missionaries and of the more important Protestant mission boards have recently shown by formal action that they would welcome the abolition of the toleration clauses. A large number of Protestant missionaries desire the rescinding of extraterritoriality, and many have put themselves on record as opposing any use of force by their respective governments to protect them or avenge injuries to them. As long ago as the Boxer Uprising, the China Inland Mission, the heaviest sufferer among the Protestants from that disaster, adopted the policy of declining to ask for or to accept indemnities for property destroyed or lives lost, and other Protestant groups have since taken that position.

V

From the criticisms of missions, it is pleasant to turn to the positive achievements of the enterprise.

Missionaries are, of course, bringing into existence Christian communities. Baptized Protestants, as we have seen, number about half a million, and Roman Catholics between two and a quarter and two and a half millions. All told, therefore, there are to-day in China about three million professing Christians. It is well to recall, moreover, that during the past eighty years both Roman Catholics and Protestants have been increasing proportionately far more rapidly than has the population as a whole.

Much more important than the number of Christians is the question of their quality. Is becoming a Christian merely a change of labels, or is conversion real, and does it mark the beginning of spiritual and moral improvement? Do Christians, by virtue of being Christians, add anything constructive to Chinese life? To anyone who knows the situation it is obvious that Chinese ‘study the doctrine’ from a variety of motives. Some have been attracted by expected support in litigation, and some by hope of financial assistance — for several of the Roman Catholic missions pay the expenses of Chinese while they are in the catechumenate being prepared for baptism, or give aid in time of famine on condition that the recipient enroll for religious instruction, and Protestants employ so large a proportion of the membership in the service of the Church that a Chinese may come to them hoping to fill his rice bowl. Others expect Christianity to give them more effectively than could their former faiths freedom from misfortune for themselves and their domestic animals. Many, on the other hand, are attracted by the lives of worthy Christians whom they have known. Not infrequently some highminded soul affiliates himself with the Church because in China’s present plight he despairs of any regeneration for the country unless a new dynamic can work a moral and spiritual revolution, and believes that this is to be found in Christianity. Still others, left hopeless by the agnostic tendencies of traditional Chinese philosophy, and conscious of a desperate need for the supporting fellowship of a loving and wise God who is at work in the universe, find in Christianity the experience for which they have been looking.

Coming into the Church as they do from a variety of motives, Christians are of varying quality. The testimony both of experienced missionaries and of neutral well-informed foreign observers, however, is predominantly to the effect that, taken as a whole, Christians are superior to their non-Christian neighbors. Protestant missionaries and travelers are usually agreed that ‘old Catholics’ — the descendants of converts and reared from infancy in the faith — are cleaner, more orderly, more thrifty, and of more admirable moral character than are the non-Christians around them. Instance after instance, too, is to be found of Protestants who by their new faith have been freed from the opium habit, or have turned away from thieving and gambling, or have been reconciled to their families, or have been saved from despair over their country’s ills, and have lived inspiring, unselfish lives.

To discover the reasons for the improvement wrought in Christians, it would be necessary ultimately to examine the nature of the Gospel. Part of the secret, however, is to be found in the character of the missionaries through whom the Chinese have seen the faith. Some missionaries are bigoted and narrow, others are eccentric to a degree, and now and then is one who is ignorant. The vast majority, however, while by no means freed by their profession from human frailty, are high-minded, devoted to the Chinese, pure in speech and life, quietly courageous, and show by their lives their profound confidence in a God who loves men and longs to save them. Both Catholic and Protestant missionaries, however much they may differ in other respects, display these qualities; for nobility of life it is hard to choose between the two groups.

Chinese Christians, moreover, are much better educated than the average Chinese about them. In the school systems organized by the missionaries a very large proportion of the children of Christians are being given regular instruction. Fourteen per cent of the Roman Catholics are in school, as against two per cent of the population of the country. Protestants especially have made much of the school; several of their missions endeavor to teach every Christian to read, if for no other purpose than to be able to study the Bible. Sixty per cent of the men and forty per cent of the women who are members of Protestant churches are sufficiently literate to be able to read the New Testament. This is many times the percentage of literacy of the non-Christian population. Particularly have Protestants stressed secondary and higher schools.

Missionaries, especially Protestants, were pioneers in introducing the educational methods and materials of the West. The result has been that in the Christian and notably in the Protestant community China has a body of men and women who are better prepared than the great body of their fellow countrymen for the transition brought by the coming of the West. One of the most hopeful educational enterprises in China to-day, the Popular Education Movement, has as its organizer James Yen, a Christian, and was begun under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association. It was at the hands of Protestant teachers in Hawaii and Hongkong that Sun Yat-sen obtained most of such education as he acquired through schools. Sun Yat-sen may have been too radical and visionary, but he furnished leadership for the idealism which, otherwise unorganized on a national scale, was weary of the sordidly selfish strife of militarists into which the collapse of the Manchus had thrown the country. Six out of ten of the present heads of the executive departments at Nanking are Protestant Christians, some of them the product of Protestant schools, and one the son of a Protestant clergyman. The largest publishing house in China, — and, incidentally, in the world, — the Commercial Press, which is doing more than any other single agency to put China in touch with the printed form of the best thought of the new age and has provided a large proportion of the textbooks for the new government schools, was begun by men trained in a Protestant mission press.

In numbers of other ways missionaries have been pioneers in preparing China to take the best from the West. When in the nineties the ‘reform movement’ started in China, — the first widespread attempt to adjust China to the invading Occident, — literature prepared by Protestant missionaries was one of the chief sources of information open to the liberals. Protestants have translated and disseminated by the millions of copies, either entirely or in portions, one of the greatest religious classics of all time, the Bible, particularly the New Testament. In 1927, in spite of the stress under which missions were placed, over eight million Bibles or portions of the Bible were circulated. We hear much in these days, and rightly, of the literary revolution inaugurated by young radicals, with its substitution of the vernacular for the classical style. Yet more than a generation ago, in translating the Bible, Protestants dared to use the language of the common people. In some dialects the Bible was the first literature.

National unity in China is being assisted by the country-wide organization of the Church; for instance, by the Roman Catholic gathering of 1924, the first of its kind, and by the many Protestant national bodies, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association, the Church of Christ in China, the National Christian Council, and numbers of others, some of them now in existence for a generation. Moreover, Protestant bodies, most of them democratically governed, provide practical training in the kind of political machinery which must be adopted if China is to make a success of the Republic.

The new medical profession of China, embodying the best of modern science, and an immeasurable distance beyond the older Chinese systems, has been largely the product of Protestant missionaries. The majority of the best hospitals are under Christian auspices, as are most of the best medical schools. The China Medical Association is an outgrowth of the Medical Missionary Association. If the future medical profession of China maintains ideals of unselfish service and disinterested scientific accuracy, it will be largely because of its missionary parentage. The promotion of public health has much of it been inaugurated by the Protestant missionary. The first hospital in all China for the insane was the work of a Protestant missionary, as was the first successful attempt to teach the Chinese blind to read.

A large proportion of the famine relief of recent years has been administered by missionaries, and missionaries have usually taken the lead in stirring up Europe and America to give to famine funds. The even more difficult problem of preventing famines has been attacked by missionaries, partly through improvements in agricultural methods. Roman Catholics have extensive farm colonies, and Protestants, through agricultural and forestry schools, particularly the notable school in Nanking, are assisting the Chinese with the best that Western science has to say about increasing a nation’s food supply.

Roman Catholic orphanages, with their thousands of children rescued from beggary and death, have helped to place new value on child life, and Protestant missions for prostitutes have encouraged care for the wrecks of society. Both great branches of the Church have stood against any of their members engaging in the preparation or sale of opium. Protestants have been active in initiating and supporting local and national campaigns in China against the drug, and in Great Britain and elsewhere against foreign complicity in the traffic.

VI

In a day when not only does China need to come in touch with the best of the Occident, but the Occident must have a sympathetic understanding of China, missionaries have been among the most intelligent interpreters of the land of their sojourn. After Marco Polo, it was the Roman Catholic missionaries of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries who gave Europe its first scholarly information concerning China. Members of the Russian Mission supplied their native land with its earliest Sinologues. A large proportion of the standard books on China in English, from Williams’s Middle Kingdom through Legge’s translations of the classics, and on down to Bruce’s books on Chu Hsi, have been the work of Protestant missionaries. The Institute of Pacific Relations, that promising undertaking for bringing together, unofficially, representatives of the peoples of the Pacific, is an outgrowth of the foreign missions of the Young Men’s Christian Associations. Through their education of their home constituencies in the support of their enterprise, Protestant missionary agencies are spreading in this country a sympathetic understanding of China. Some missionaries, in their eagerness to arouse support for their undertakings, have pictured to their constituencies the seamy side of Chinese life, but on the whole China has had in this country no more discerning and fairminded interpreters, and no more enthusiastic advocates, than Protestant missionaries.

Christian missions, then, with all their mistakes and shortcomings, have been and are of inestimable service to China. No one knows what the future of China is to be, whether the nation is to disintegrate, with disaster to its millions and to the world, or whether it is to produce a new and richer culture — whether the present distresses are death throes or birth pangs. If a newer and finer China emerges, as some of us have faith to anticipate, it will be in part because in the days of its transition there were unselfishly laboring in it thousands of foreigners who sought to bring it in touch with the best that the Occident had to give.

The day of the missionary is by no means done. His relation to the Chinese churches is changing. In the future he must go out to assist rather than to lead. The Chinese churches are showing commendable vitality and are propagating their faith. They are, however, still so small and are faced with so many urgent tasks that for at least another generation they must have foreign assistance in money and personnel. His position is more difficult and more fraught with personal danger than it was a decade ago, but in some respects the missionary is more needed than he ever has been. It may be a hundred years or more before stability and order return in China. In that interval the missionary enterprise oilers one of the most effective ways for the West to ensure and hasten the coming of a better day to that great country.