The future Church in the Far East must fight her own battles. She must
solve her own problems. All we can do is to hand over to her the truth
in all its fulness, and teach her to look for divine guidance, to
forget such words as Protestant, Roman Catholic, Nonconformist, and
Anglican; to learn merely the word "Christian" and the word "Love." If
Far Eastern Christianity will have its battles to fight, it will have
also its message to give to the West, "that they without us should not
be made perfect." It may be that the message of the East to the West
will be that as God is One, so must His followers be; that strong and
mighty as is the West, there is in her an element of the very greatest
weakness; that the discord that reigns between Christian and Christian,
between race and race, between class and class, is not the will of the
Creator, but is the result of the national sins of the white races.
The Far East, with its greater power of unity, {249} may illumine the
West with a higher conception of this great virtue, and the world may
be a far holier and happier place when the yellow race has preached to
the world the great doctrine of peace on earth and goodwill to men.
{253}
THE NEW AND THE OLD LEARNING
CHAPTER XXI
EDUCATION, CHIEFLY MISSIONARY
I have before had occasion to refer to the great influence education
has had on the awakening of China, and I think the Americans can fairly
claim to have been the greatest workers in this field. The Roman
Catholics have from time immemorial been most careful to train children
in Christian truth, and they have wonderful institutions for this
purpose. In 1852 the Jesuits founded the College of St. Ignatius for
the education of native priests, and since that day they have founded
many educational institutions. They have besides a very large number
of primary schools, intended originally merely to preserve their
converts from too intimate contact with the heathen world, and they
have also many higher schools. In those schools they teach modern
knowledge, making a speciality of teaching French, which they can do
with great efficiency, as many of their number belong to the French
nation. In the German sphere of influence there are Catholic schools
where German is taught; but though the work is excellent, it cannot be
compared with the work of the Americans, who were really the pioneers
of higher education in China.
{254}
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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