And so the movement has spread through Manchuria to China. If it has lost something of its freshness, something of its force, it still remains a movement that may accomplish great things. No one who has read the history of the Wesleyan movement, and of the wonderful manifestations that accompanied its commencement, will look without interest and expectation for the work which this movement may accomplish. Let us hope that it will bring to China a sense of reality in spiritual things which the present materialist teaching threatens to eliminate from her national life. {242} CHAPTER XX THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA At the great Shanghai Conference we always spoke of the "Church in China," implying thereby that there was to be one Christian body in the Chinese empire. This ideal is lofty and not impossible. There is a reasonable expectation that the great intellectual movement in China will render the Chinese very ready to accept new ideas, and the rate of conversion in China gives one reasonable hope that the new ideas may be Christian and not those of Western materialism. If China becomes Christian there will no doubt be a great tendency to accept the unity of Christianity as an essential doctrine. As a race they clearly tend towards union as much as the Anglo-Saxon race tends towards disunion. The British empire has been held together by its fear of its enemies; the Chinese empire has been held together through their natural love of union, which is the dominant characteristic of the race. Remove the enemies of the British empire and she will naturally divide, but force the Chinese empire apart and she will naturally return to one body. Chinese Christianity will, if it is truly Chinese, tend to one body. This truth, which I think would have been {243} allowed by the whole Shanghai Conference, opens up a train of thought which is full of foreboding and yet of hope.