I write with what the Germans call "objectivity"; the Teuton within me dislikes ritual; but the Chinaman is no Teuton, and the Chinaman loves ritual as much as any man on earth. No one who has been received by a Chinese Viceroy in his Yamen can have the very slightest doubt on this subject. If the Protestant bodies hope to force on the Chinese a non-ornate form of Christianity, they will be doing exactly what the Italian Church did to the Northern races, and which produced the great upheaval of the Reformation. The Reformation was essentially the rebellion of the Teuton mind against a forced acceptance of the Italian view of Christianity. To force on the Chinese converts a Christianity shorn of all ritual and display will produce in years to come some similar upheaval. {247} There is yet a third possibility. The Anglican position affords the means of avoiding such an upheaval, and of permitting a union of all Christians on the basis of an ornate service and evangelical Christianity. For while it permits a service equal in dignity to that of Rome or of Russia, it insists equally with the bodies who pride themselves on the name of Protestant on the supreme value of the Bible. The very hope I have that Christianity will conquer China makes me fearful for the future. The age of persecution is past, the blood of the martyrs has been shed, and the seed of a Church freely sown. But after the age of persecution comes the age of heresy, and to preserve Christianity in China from future dangers, not only is union necessary, but a well-ordered Church bound by creeds, respecting tradition, which shall embrace all those Christians by whomsoever they have been converted who love the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. The great danger I fear for the future Church in China is one of Eastern and not Western origin. I do not fear the domination of Rome. I doubt that the Protestant Communions will succeed in ultimately persuading the Chinese to worship God in a bare building and without vestments. China and Japan will, if they are conquered by Christianity, be neither Protestant nor Catholic any more than we are Nestorian or Eutychian. Their divisions, their dangers, their struggles, will arise from a wholly different set of circumstances. I fear {248} the dangers will come from an effort to incorporate Buddhism and Christianity in one religion. This is all the more probable as it has doubtless happened before. Nestorianism and Buddhism are the probable parents of the present Chinese Lamaism. It is, however, not given for us to see into the future, but we can look back into the past, and we can see that our predecessors in the faith nearly invariably made the mistake of supposing that the old dangers were going to recur, and of therefore depending on the old measures of defence.