A very different effect is made on the mind of the onlooker when he
comes upon some mission that {256} has made education a speciality.
There all is life, vigour and success. One of the most successful of
the American missionaries, Bishop Roots, of the Episcopal Church of
America, explained the system by which he is succeeding in making
Christianity an indigenous religion. At his large college, presided
over by Mr. Jackson, many are heathen. Some go through the college and
imbibe a certain respect for Christian ethics, which will not only make
them a benefit to China but will make an intellectual atmosphere
sympathetic to Christian teaching. Some, however, will become
Christians who will mostly go out into the world and take their place,
and a high place too, in the leadership of the future China, as much
owing to the excellence of the teaching that they have received as to
the high morality which is produced by their Christian faith. Then
there will be a few who will feel a distinct call to go out as
missionaries to their own people. These men will have no temptation to
become Christians for the loaves and fishes, because, owing to the
excellence of the education that they have received and the great
prosperity that is dawning over China, they could command a large
salary in the open market. These highly-educated clergy are able to go
out and put Christianity to the Chinese in a manner which no white man
could hope to equal.
What Bishop Roots told me can be well illustrated by two little
incidents. In Hankow, where his work is increasing by leaps and
bounds, the Lutheran {257} Mission failed, and therefore it resigned
the chapel to him. He accepted readily, and soon his Chinese clergy
were preaching to crowded congregations. The second incident was this:
I expressed a wish to make a present to one of these Christian
scholars, and I asked what books he would like to receive. I was told
that such books as Balfour's "Defence of Philosophic Doubt" and
Haldane's "Pathway to Reality" were the kind that would appeal to such
young men. Not only will these men carry the Gospel to their
fellow-countrymen far more efficiently than can the alien, but they
will to a great extent be able to live on the subscriptions of their
congregations, and so the communion to which they belong will become
not only self-propagating but self-supporting.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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