On the whole, Christians in Europe and America may well have stronger sympathy and respect for their fellow-Christians in China who have suffered so much for conscience' sake. Purified and chastened by the fearful holocaust through which they have passed, they are stronger spiritually than ever before. Like the apostles after Pentecost, they are giving ``with great power their witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.'' ``The Chinese Church is not yet strong enough to stand entirely alone, but it is far stronger and more self-conscious of the eternal indwelling Spirit than ever before. It has learned the power of God to keep the soul in times of deadly peril, and to enable the weakest to give the strongest testimony. It has learned by humiliation and confession to put away its sins, and to gird itself for new conflicts and new victories.... Its ablest leaders are more trustworthy men than before their trials, and the body of believers has a unity and a cohesiveness which will certainly bear fruit in the not distant future.''[83] [83] Smith, ``Rex Christus,'' p. 212. XXIII THE STRAIN OF READJUSTMENT TO CHANGED ECONOMIC CONDITIONS THE economic revolution in Asia, discussed in a preceding chapter,[84] bears heavily on the Chinese Christians. So far as the pressure affects the rank and file of the membership, the mission boards cannot give adequate relief. Abroad as well as at home, it must remain the inexorable rule that a Christian must live within his income and buy new things only as he can pay for them. Any other policy would mean utter ruin. Here also, men must ``work out their own salvation''; and the missionary, while trying to lift men out of barbarous social conditions on the one hand, should on the other resolutely oppose the improvident eagerness which leads a blanketed Sioux Indian to buy on credit a rubber-tired surrey. [84] Chapter IX.