Again the development of the Press on Western lines takes place rapidly in China, where newspapers have long been known, and which boasts of being a country possessing the oldest newspaper in the world, the _Peking Gazette_. Translations of Western literature issued by the Christian Literature Society are read with avidity by a race that esteems literature highly, no matter with what subject it deals, {169} and who has no worse an epithet for one of its emperors than "book-burner." Though Confucianism is not antipathetic to Western civilisation as a whole, and by its philosophy and literature encourages education in Western ideas, yet those ideas will, I fear, be fatal to that mighty system of ethics that has kept China together, and has enabled her to conquer her conquerors so many times. The countries that have never known Confucius are succeeding far better than the countries that have been taught by him. The fact that he always claimed that any race who followed his teaching would be prosperous, coupled with the fact that China, with her splendid resources and immense population, is far poorer and weaker than nations who know nothing of his teaching, is sufficient to bring its own condemnation to this philosophy. There is a marked difference in the teaching of Christianity and Confucianism in this respect. Christianity, by the example of its founder, teaches that the world must be reformed through the individual; and that the destruction of a State, whether it be Jerusalem or Rome, is only a painful incident in the upward advance of mankind. If every Western State were destroyed, the true Christian would only pause longer over his reading of the prophet Jeremiah; but when China, the home of Confucianism, realises her powerlessness in the face of the West, in sorrow and regret she will close the books of Confucius, as the books that guided the {170} State to destruction, even though that teaching was pleasant and beautiful. A great Chinaman realised that this was the position of Japan, and told me that he did not believe that in Japan any one really believed in Buddhism or in Confucianism or in the new-found Shintoism; and that, as they had not yet accepted Christianity, they were in a state, odious to the Western and Eastern alike, of being without moral guidance in this world. The position of Japan to-day will, in all probability, be, both in regard to the constructive and destructive effects of Western civilisation, the condition of China to-morrow, unless indeed Christianity can fill the vacant place in Chinese thought. Never before has such an opportunity been presented to the Christian world as this vast mass of population included under the name of China, left homeless by the action of world thought.