July 18.
We have no hesitation in commending to all readers, laymen as well as missionaries, the series on the outlook for missionary work in China of which the first article appears to-day. It is not a long series, nor is any article in it long. And of the writer, who has spent many years in China, it may be said that his enthusiasm for the work has ever gone hand-hand with sterling common sense, No one who watches with any interest the developing of the new China can leave out of account this great question, is unfortunately true that, during the past two years, a few missionaries, or persons conner led with missionary bodies, safe ly ensconced in treaty ports, have brought undeserved odium on the whole confraternity. But no one not blinded by prejudice Jean ignore the great work that missionaries have done in China, in teaching and preaching, in hospitals and whenever famine land flood have descended. Assuredly the ordinary kindly Imasses of the Chinese people do not ignore it, But they unfortunately count for nothing in the Republic, Now the majority of the sionaries are gone and our contributor believes that few will ever returf, For the new problems that the late upheaval has left, he says, "the young are too young the old too old." And to what would they go? Where they lived before, property, the product of, many years and representing enormous sums of money, has been utterly looted and wrecked, Anti-Christian riots there have been in China, but never on such a scale.
Wherever the Nation: wave moved, they dead set at mission houses, schools and churches, plunder: ing, destroying and defi Witness the story told by the Canadian missionaries from Honan, The same sort of thing went on all through the northern expedition, in spite of General Chiang Kai-shek's solemn pledges of protection, But why be prised ab this, when in Nanking itself the buildings of the American Church Mission, stolen by the Kuomintang, are still retained by the thieves, just the Ningpo Methodisx College; and the Nationalist Government, which through the mouthpiece' of its Foreign Minister Dr. C. T. Wang, unself x Christian, claims deal with civilized' Powers as an equal, does nothing to remedy this great wrong? We decline to believe that the Nationalist, Government cannot turn out the despoilers and restore the stolen property to its rightful owners, Long experience teaches that the mandarins of China have always been able to do what they really wished to do, except in the rare instances of national revolt, which in the present case docs not arise. The people of China are not and never have beer "antimissionary." During the worst outbreaks of the past two years, again and again mission: aries' lives have been saved by compassionate peasants, With their rulers, it is otherwise, If the Nationalist Government, in spite of their sanctimonious professions, do not restore the stolen buildings, we are driven to the conclusion that it is because they do not choose restore them, In all this there is something now, something unknown in pre vious anti-Christian explosions, which we cannot but think must prevent any resumption of missionary endeavour on a scale comparable to that of the past. There" is a spirit abroad now, that China can do everything for herself at least as well as it has been done for her. We would not be thought to deride thal, feeling, far from it. Tt will bring briefs and disappointments in plenty, but it is one of the roads by which improvement may ultimately come. Meanwhile, in th: light of that conviction, it ix easily imagined that the missionaries, with their well ordered schools and colleges and hospitals, represent a form of endenvour which the Nationalists peculiarly fancy for their own field. That church organization will go to pieces, appears most probable, We know of one stance, in which, after having received full charge of a of the station, the Chi: nese committee urged the former foreign superintendent to resume control, because they found themselves unable to agree on riy point, Our contributor today has his own ideas of thi sort of missionary work which answers best, a curious one as will be seen and likely to arouse some controversy. One fact he mentions is also remarkable, namely, that the purely evangelical work suffered less during recent outbursts than any other.
That may, perhaps. suggest a solution of the problem of future endeavour,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.