Changing China Part 6

If Christianity is to be a.s.similated by China and become part of their national existence, the buildings in which it is proclaimed should be essentially national. The intention of the Christian should be written clearly on the face of every landscape where the new and beautiful Chinese building rises up for the religion which is, as we maintain, as essentially fitted for the Chinese as it is for the English. We do not worship in a Roman basilica, but in the buildings that the northern architects have devised as suitable, both for Christian worship and for our climate. The new Chinese churches need not be replicas of the Chinese temples; the object of the building is different, therefore the building should differ, but there are many other forms in which it is possible for the architect to express in Chinese architecture the eternal truths of Christianity.

Again, why are all the schools and colleges erected on Western patterns. The Chinese are used to and prefer their own architecture, and from a sanitary point of view I hardly think it is inferior. The average Westerner in China has but one idea, and {140} that is that the Chinese must become like a Western nation or must remain untouched by Western civilisation. He absolutely refuses the suggestion that the architecture of China can be altered to suit modern conditions.

It is said that the thoughts of all nations are written in their architecture; that you can see the n.o.bility of the Middle Ages in the Gothic cathedral, or the fulness of the thought of the Renaissance in the Palladian facade; certainly on the modern Chinese town the story of their change of thought is being rapidly written, perhaps with truth, but certainly not with beauty. The Western man absolutely despising all things Chinese refuses to erect any building which preserves even a detail of the national architecture; the Westernising Chinaman in faithful imitation erects Western buildings, but with this difference; whereas the buildings of the Western have some beauty--for instance, the cathedral at Shanghai is a n.o.ble building and the Pe-T'ang at Peking would not disgrace an Italian town, even the bankers' palaces at Hankow are not unworthy dwellings for merchant princes--the Chinese imitations of these Western buildings have but little beauty to commend them, and as far as I could understand they are really less serviceable than a true Chinese building.

No European resident in China will ever allow that Chinese buildings are either beautiful or useful, and if any one suggests that a Western house shall {141} be built in the Chinese style the suggestion is scouted as absurd; yet the British Legation at Peking is an old Chinese palace, and no one who has seen it ever doubts that it is one of the most beautiful buildings in the whole of China, and if this building has been found fitting for His Majesty's Representative, surely some such building might serve for others of less high station.

As to the spiritual ideals in Chinese architecture, who can doubt them when they look at some of the paG.o.das that the reverence of Buddhism has produced. These paG.o.das tell in every line of a nation that would reach up above mere utilitarianism to higher thoughts. The uselessness of the paG.o.da which so often annoys the practical Englishman is one of its chief merits. It stands there in all its beauty pleading with mankind for a love of beauty for its own sake and a belief in a beautiful spirit world. The whole of Buddhist thought is intimately connected with the love of beauty. When a Chinese gentleman was asked if the Chinese had any love of beauty, he said: "You will notice that their temples are always built in beautiful spots, so that they who worship in them should satisfy their love of beauty."

Even if the paG.o.da is merely regarded as a thing to bring luck to a town, it still merits admiration, for there must be something fine in a race that believes a beautiful thing can bring the blessing of the heavenly bodies on the earth. No one can {142} study the details of any of these paG.o.das without being confident that those who erected them had as their main object the erection of a beautiful building.

Or again, take the Temple of Heaven. Is there any monument in the whole world that has more feeling of beauty about it? The white altar lying uncovered testifies to the fundamental faith of the Chinese that there is a G.o.d in heaven who dwelleth not in temples made with hands, while the detail of the carving, though showing a certain sameness, yet indicates their belief that G.o.d must love beauty. To see the white Altar of Heaven together with the blue-roofed Temple beyond on some sunny day when the flowers are blooming and the dark green of the pine grove is in strong contrast with the light green of the spring herbage, is one of those visions of beauty which make a man dream and dream again of the n.o.ble future that may be before a race which has its holiest places in such lovely surroundings.

As most of the readers of this book may never have seen a Chinese building, perhaps it should be described. The architecture of the Chinese differs from that of the West in almost every detail. A Chinese town is a town without chimneys, and yet the absence of those chimneys which Renaissance architects made such a feature of domestic architecture is never missed, for Chinese roofs are curved and decorated with quaint figures; they are often {143} coloured, bright yellow if the building is an imperial building, or bright blue or blue and green with yellow lines, as taste may direct. Common houses have not such ornate roofs, but I am speaking of the houses which have some claim to architectural excellence. This great roof is carried directly on pillars, so that it is possible to have a Chinese house without walls, and these wall-less houses are most suitable to a country where the summer is hot. The ma.s.sive character of the roof prevents the heat of the sun penetrating, and the absence of walls allows of a free current of air; if there are walls they are generally wooden screens filled in with paper, and the effect in some old Chinese houses is very lovely.

For winter weather these houses seem cold to us, but the Chinese have always believed in the open-air policy. They never heat their houses; they rely either on warm clothing or on a flue-heated bed at night; and as they are as a race very subject to consumption, probably this policy is one which is best suited to their const.i.tutions. At any rate it seems strange that while we in England are advocating open-air schools, open-air cures, and sleeping with the window open, in China Western influence should be destroying the admiration for a splendid form of architecture, the characteristic of which was that while it was of great beauty, it also shielded the inmates from the intense heat of summer and gave them ample fresh air.

When some Chinese literati were questioned {144} about this architecture they freely confessed that they preferred their native buildings, but they seemed to think that a Western school could not be efficient unless it was held in a Western building. Missionaries and others being questioned on this point maintained that Western houses were in the end the cheapest, but the Chinese would not allow this.

They said that a Chinese house would cost far more than a Western house if it were beautifully adorned with carving, but if it was built simply it would work out at less cost.

Chinese architecture is obviously a construction which lends itself to the use of iron. A Chinese building with iron subst.i.tuted for wood would look as well, for they always paint their wood; this ought to be a very cheap form of construction in a land which is going to produce iron at a very low rate. The truth is that it is neither a question of cost nor of efficiency which makes the Chinese architecture despised; it is part of the great movement which expresses itself in stone and brick--a movement which is tending to bring the Eastern countries into misery--a movement which is planting in the East all that is commonplace, all that is hideous in the West, and that is destroying all that is beautiful in the East both in thought and colour and form.

It is the counterpart of the movement which is destroying the faith of the Eastern nations and is only subst.i.tuting the materialism which has degraded the West.

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RELIGIONS OF CHINA AND THE MISSIONARY

CHAPTER XII

RELIGIONS IN CHINA

The real power of a race lies in its religion; other motives inevitably tend to egotism, disorganisation, and national death, and China is no exception to the rule; the strength and the weakness of China lies in her religion and in its absence. There are few nations who set less store by the outward observance of religion and yet there are few nations with a greater belief in the supernatural. On the one hand, the temples are deserted or turned into schools, and the Chinese are believed to have no other motives than self-interest. On the other hand, the whole of Chinese life turns round the relation of man to the spirit of his ancestors and to the spiritual world, and the Chinaman obviously believes that a man's soul is immortal and that its welfare has the very closest connection with the welfare of his descendant.

The commercial man will tell you that the Chinese are materialists--people who have no faith; and yet with glorious inconsistency he will explain that the difficulty of using Chinese labour abroad is that even the commonest coolie demands that his body shall be repatriated and shall lie in some place which will not hinder his son doing filial {148} worship to his spirit. The whole question of what the race believes is rendered more difficult of comprehension to a Westerner by the confused nature of that belief, and is complicated by the characteristic of the Chinese of mixing all religions together regardless of their natural incongruity. It is hoped that the reader will bear this in mind during the following explanation.

The religions of China are usually cla.s.sed as three. Not three well-marked religions in our sense of the word, but three elements which tend to merge into a common religion. There are separate religions. A large number of Chinese, for instance, are Mohammedan, and they neither marry nor are given in marriage to the other Chinese; there is a very small Jewish community; and there is also a native Greek Christian village still tolerated by the Chinese, which was transplanted from Siberia as the result of a Chinese conquest in the days of Peter the Great; there are a quarter of a million Christians converted by non-Roman missions, besides a million belonging to the Roman Catholic Communion. But Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism put all together, form but a small part of the Chinese community, and the greater part of China believes, according to all orthodox expositors, in three religions--Buddhism, Taoism, and what is termed Confucianism.

This conglomerate of three religions consists in its turn of composite faiths. Buddhism in China is not like the Buddhism of Ceylon with its agnostic {149} teaching. Buddhism is divided into two great divisions--the "greater vehicle" and the "lesser vehicle." The "lesser vehicle" is known to the world as pure Buddhism; the "greater vehicle"

contains many sects, all of which claim that the revelation extended to Gautama was only a partial revelation, and that the truth has been more fully revealed to those who succeeded him. This is called Lamaism, and in China has incorporated much of the idolatry which it supplanted and perhaps some of the Nestorian Christianity which succeeded it; in fact, the Buddhist temple in China is nothing more than an idol temple.

Buddha of Gautama is always the princ.i.p.al idol; he is represented calm and without thought or trouble; he sits, the embodiment of peace and rest; but though he may be the first in the Buddhist temple, he is far from being alone; close behind him in popular estimation come two other deities, Amita and Kwannin. Amita, Amitobha or O-mi-to, is held by some to be the father of Kwannin, and is at once a guardian of the Western Paradise and the personification of purity; to this wholly mythical personage is attributed such virtue that the mere repet.i.tion of his name will secure salvation. In j.a.pan a sect holds that every Buddhist law can be broken with immunity as long as there is faith in Amita. In China such statements are made as this: to follow the strict law of Buddhism is to climb to heaven as a fly crawls up the wall, but to attain Salvation by repeating {150} the name O-mi-to is like sailing heavenwards in a boat with wind and tide behind, at the pace of a hundred li an hour. There is a general agreement that adherence to the strict Buddhist law of chast.i.ty, honesty, truth, temperance, abstinence from anger and serenity of mind, is an ideal which is impossible at any rate for the laity. But the exact method of escaping this burden differs in various sects. The most popular is by a "saving faith" in Amita.

If the origin of this deity can be attributed to the personification of a spirit of purity, the origin of the next, Kwannin, is probably from some source outside Buddhism. She is the G.o.ddess of mercy, but whatever her origin, she at present represents the remnants of either the Nestorian or the mediaeval Roman teaching. In Peking they have a curious image of her which any one might mistake for a Madonna, the truth being that there was at one time an intimate contact between Christianity and Buddhism, when many of the externals of the Christian religion and some of its doctrines were transplanted. The Buddhist temple with its altar in the centre looks strangely like a Christian church, and the Buddhist monks and nuns, with their rosaries and their regular hours for chanting and service, recall the Roman Catholic services; the picture of the Buddhist h.e.l.l which stands in the great Mongol temple at Peking reminds one of a scene from Dante's Inferno, and among the many things the Buddhists borrow from Christian sources {151} are these two ideas, embodied in two idols, the G.o.ddess of mercy who intercedes for mankind, and the G.o.d of faith in whom the worshipper should put all trust and confidence. Besides these G.o.ds there are the G.o.d of war and the G.o.d of good-fellowship, probably taken from old heathen sources. Again, there are hundreds of Buddhas, or as we should call them, "saints," whose position is somewhere between human and divine, much the same position that the saints occupy in the mind of a Neapolitan peasant.

After Buddhism comes Taoism. Taoism is again a conglomerate faith.

Technically it is the faith of Laotze, who was an opponent and a contemporary of Confucius. He taught a dualism which reminds the Westerner of the doctrine of the Manichees. Again, Western and Eastern thought have been confused; Manichees are known to have existed in China, and whether Manichaeism originally came from the East or whether subsequently Chinese thought has been affected by Manichaeism is hard to decide. At any rate, Laotze did not claim that his teaching was original; he was merely the prophet of an established school of thought. The greater part of China follows his rival and despises Laotze's teaching, yet the dualism that he taught is part of the essential faith of China, and a part which is most opposed to all that is good. He taught that good and evil were essentially divided, were halves, as it were, of one whole. He called them the "Yang" and the "Yin"--terms {152} which are in no way confined to the few disciples who now follow him. This division between good and evil makes up the mystery of the world--light and darkness, heaven and earth, male and female, each couple makes up one whole divided between good and evil; and so the world beyond is peopled with good and evil spirits, the "Yang" and the "Yin." Obviously such a faith has all the evil which we recognise in Manichaeism, and its practical disadvantages are very great. For instance, the inferior position of women is defended as inevitable; they are "Yin." No mine must be sunk or cutting made for fear of angering the earth spirits, for as man is as essentially a part of the world as the earth, those earth spirits will avenge themselves upon him. Even such great men and such good Confucianists as His Excellency the late Chang-Chih-Tung are not insensitive to such a superst.i.tion. The town over which he ruled was divided by a steep gravel hill. A Western engineer recommended that this hill should be cut through to facilitate access from one part of the town to the other, and the Viceroy, ever ready to accept new and Western ideas of practical advantage, immediately ordered the suggestion to be carried out. Shortly afterwards a large wen developed on his neck, and, arguing that an evil spirit of the earth, who had originally made the gravel hill, was so angered at the destruction of it that he determined to re-make it on the neck of the offender, the Governor had the cutting filled up, and there it stands to this very day, a {153} witness of the evil influence that an evil religion can have on the greatest men of a nation. Taoism has now but few adherents, and yet there are many Taoist priests, since these priests are regarded as particularly efficient in dealing with the evil spirits in whom Taoism believes so fully.

The third religion is generally called Confucianism, and this may easily lead to a great misunderstanding, for under the term Confucianism two very different things are included. First, a belief in the philosophy of Confucius. This for the most part is outside what we are accustomed to call religion, and we shall have occasion to deal with it later on. Secondly, and more commonly, the spiritual beliefs of those who call themselves Confucians, and who, owing to his silence on religion, have to find other authorities for their faith. Sometimes they claim that their faith was the same as the faith of Confucius, that the background of his philosophy was the religion that they believe, but more commonly they accept it without any question. This religion is commonly mixed up both with Buddhism and with Taoism, but its essential doctrine is very distinct and has great weight in China, namely, that the spirits of men who are dead live and have influence over the lives of their descendants. I was told by a Chinese Christian that a religious Chinaman of the lower cla.s.s never goes out without burning a stick of incense to the tablet of his father, and no one can go through Chinese towns without being impressed by the number of people who in that {154} poor country are kept hard at work manufacturing mock money to be burnt for the use of parents and ancestors.

The missionaries find that this doctrine is the hardest doctrine for Christianity to a.s.sail; and there are not a few who, despairing of success, suggest that the position must be turned, and ancestor worship must be Christianised and accepted as an essential part of a man's belief. The logical Western mind immediately wants to know what is behind the ancestor; if an ancestor is to have power he can only have it, says the logical Westerner, by being in contact with some higher power. One of the greatest missionaries that China possesses answers this difficulty by saying that the Chinese mind is not the Western mind; that he does not concern himself very much with remote speculation; he has not that itching longing to use the word "why,"

which is at once the glory and the difficulty of the Western mind, and therefore he looks at the spiritual world much as he looks at the earthly world; the man immediately over him in the town is the magistrate, and, to use the Chinese phrase, "is the father and mother of his people," and so over him in spiritual things is his father and grandfather. Behind the magistrate there is in his distant thought the prefect--the head of the prefecture or Fu town--a being who only comes into his village life when there is trouble and difficulty; he comes to punish, rarely to reward, and so behind his father and grandfather in {155} the spiritual world are the great clan leaders whom he worships at regular intervals with the rest of his clan. In civil government there are in a distant background a Viceroy with awful powers and awful majesty, and an Emperor whose very name is so divine that he scarcely likes to use it; and behind the clan leaders are many beings borrowed from Buddhism, relics of old idolatry, muddled up with Taoism; and in the dim and distant background is the Supreme Being--the Supreme Being Who rewards the just and punishes the unjust, Who can in no way be deceived, Who refuses the rain to the sinner and makes the land desolate, Who has power to dethrone the earthly Emperor and to place China under a foreign domination. This great and awful power is, however, so far distant that the average Chinaman thinks but little about Him.

The Temple of Heaven at Peking is the beautiful shrine of this Supreme Being. Here once a year, after spending a night fasting, the Emperor, as the father of his nation, worships the great G.o.d who made heaven and earth. The chief feature of this worship is that it is performed in the open air on a beautiful marble dais. No place in China is quite so lovely; it is the fitting shrine of the beautiful faith of China's most glorious days, a faith which though dormant is not dead. The traveller who stands there should remember that the worship which is here performed is as old as the date of the patriarchs and not un-akin to their religious {156} ideals; and if there are some things which are not sympathetic to the Christian idea, they are subordinate. In the main it is the worship of the One True Being.

This faith has no right to be called Confucian. There is great doubt about the faith of Confucius. He is silent about religion, or he refers to it only indirectly; it is no part of his teaching; but his indirect references to it apparently express a belief in a Supreme Being whom he calls "Heaven," a Supreme Being who has an influence on human affairs. He also recognises ancestor worship, but with such a dubious phrase that many Chinese and English scholars have doubted his meaning. Neither is this the faith of all the leading Confucianists in China, many of whom are professedly agnostics in matters of religion, and follow the teaching of Chu; but it is the faith, the ill-understood faith, of the great mult.i.tude of thinking and non-thinking Chinamen, and it is looked upon as the State religion of China. Its power over China is universal and yet insecure.

Many ages ago it was partially defeated by the more logical and more sympathetic faith of Buddhism. The fight was bitter, the persecutions were cruel, but Buddhism conquered. Now Buddhism fails. With its failure a vast ma.s.s of superst.i.tion, kept alive by the sacrifice to the ancestor, once more rises up and stands right in the path of progress--right in the way of civilisation. It was superst.i.tion that moved the Boxer, and this it was that lost credit when {157} Boxerdom failed. Story after story is told of the influence of this incoherent but vital ma.s.s of religion. The junk will dart across the bows of your steamer; there will be much whistling, reversing of engines, peremptory commands in English, abuse in Chinese; and when you inquire why the lowdah of the junk risked his cargo, perhaps his life, and put the steamer and its pa.s.sengers in a state of excitement, if not in jeopardy, the answer is that every junk lowdah is afraid of the evil spirit that is following him, and if he crosses the steamer's bow he expects that the evil spirit, seeing a more worthy quarry, will neglect him and follow the steamer. The head of the Shanghai Telephone Company tells how he is not uncommonly met by some sleek well-to-do Chinaman who is most distressed because the shadow of a telephone pole falls over his door, so that as he goes out he pa.s.ses beneath it, and that will bring bad luck. The houses in China stand unconformably with the road, because a certain aspect is lucky; a cracker is exploded to frighten the evil spirits away, and so on through tales innumerable.

The world around is full of evil spirits to the Chinaman. Every village has the witch doctor who is learned in the ways of these evil spirits. Diabolical possession is as present with them as ever it was in Bible times. Your hard-headed commercial man smiles when he relates these stories, incredulous that there can be any foundation for them; but those who have dwelt among the Chinese take much the same line {158} about these stories as we do about spiritualism. Much is folly, more is fraud; but behind both the folly and the fraud there is a mysterious reality. The faith of the ma.s.ses of China in the spiritual world has never been encouraged by its philosophers. It owes its vitality to the fact that, as with us, so with them, manifestations of powers beyond this world are real if ill-comprehended, and connected too often with man's evil side. The Psychical Research Society will do well to inquire closely into many of these phenomena. Nothing convinced me of the reality of this belief more than the line that was taken by one of our English missionaries. He was speaking of diabolical possession, and he related the same story which one has heard so often that a man suddenly spoke as another personality; and then he added, "I realised that it was not he who was speaking to me, but the evil spirit within him;" and he went on, "I was afraid to speak to him, because if you speak to those who are possessed with an evil spirit, the evil spirit will take possession of you." It was strange to hear such a testimony to the reality of diabolical possession from an Englishman, but you will hear it from every Chinaman. Those who have read "Pastor Hsi" will remember how firm was his belief in such possession.

Against all this ma.s.s of the evil world the Chinaman has but one defence: his father and his ancestor belong to that world and they will defend him; and so the ancestor cult is intimately connected with this {159} belief in evil spirits. If the father does not bestir himself the son may come to harm--in fact, the main part of a Chinaman's religious idea centres round ancestor worship; and there is no such awful moment in a Christian convert's life as when he is required to destroy the tablet of his ancestors. A Confucianist cannot understand the missionary position; to his mind contempt for the ancestor only means a deep and spiritual scepticism, an absence of all faith in the supernatural, a negation of all sense of duty. A missionary recounted a story ill.u.s.trative of this difficulty. He was travelling up-country in China, and his road lay along the same way down which a well-to-do merchant was travelling, and as they journeyed on side by side and met every night at the inns at which they put up, he noticed that the Chinaman eyed him askance; but as the missionary spoke Chinese well, and as travellers have many little wants which another traveller can supply, it was not unnatural that in spite of the mistrust manifested by the Chinaman they should fall gradually into more intimate converse.

One night as they were sitting at an inn the Chinaman said to the missionary, "Do you know I thought you were a Christian, but I see you are a good fellow." The missionary a.s.sured him that he was a Christian, and did not deny that he was a good fellow. He felt, however, that there was some obstacle in the Chinaman's mind that kept them still apart, and as they journeyed on from day to day and had grown more intimate, the Chinaman said, "You know {160} people do tell such lies that one cannot believe a word they say." The missionary a.s.sented to this general proposition as true of all the world, but asked for a more immediate application. The Chinaman continued: "Well, I hope you will not be offended if I tell you the lies they tell about you--lies that I am afraid I believed till I met you and could see what a good fellow you are. They say--" but he broke off. "Pardon me, it is such a horrible accusation that I do not like to repeat it, even though I know that it is untrue." The missionary pressed him to tell what this accusation was, and the Chinaman continued apologetically, "I know that it is such a lie that I am ashamed that my people should tell such lies, but they do say that you Christians actually teach men to break up the tablet on which their father's name is written;" and the missionary realised all at once the depth of the conviction of the Chinaman and the wide gulf that separated him from Christianity. And so many and many a person who knows China best confidently a.s.serts that Christianity will never become the religion of China till it permits and recognises this ancestral worship.

But now a new factor has entered into this problem. Western materialism is spreading its malign influence over China; the educated cla.s.ses of j.a.pan boldly profess that they have long since ceased to believe in any religion, and they are calling upon China with great effect to follow their example, and so the position changes altogether.

Ancestor worship, {161} with all its accompanying superst.i.tion, tends to disappear where Western knowledge is taught. The Boxers were not untrue prophets when they told their people that they or Western civilisation, as they knew it, must leave China, and that they could not co-exist. The position is surely one that must excite the very deepest interest. It is scarcely conceivable that a race so deeply convinced of the realities of the spiritual world will, as a whole, accept the belief that there are no spirits. It is equally inconceivable that with modern Western education the people shall believe in the spirit that follows the junk, or in the spirit that is angered by a mining operation. The religious sentiment of China will, as it were, be turned out of doors by Western knowledge. There will be a terrible moment when, with all the insolence of youth, the young man refuses to believe in G.o.d or in a devil, and rushes into every wild anarchical and socialistic scheme to satisfy his craving for action.

It is a terrible moment, and one which one sees rapidly developing in j.a.pan and among the Westernised Chinese; but beyond that terrible period there dawns a brighter day when China will rea.s.sert its natural sentiment and will accept Christianity as the only reasonable religion that is consonant with modern science and a belief in the spiritual world. The question of policy that needs solving is whether it is wise in the face of this great Western unbelieving movement to treat respect for {162} ancestors too drastically. Western education must remove its objectionable features and Christianity might accept the modified form of this belief which is not wholly inconsistent with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.

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CHAPTER XIII

CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY AND WESTERN CULTURE

It is not realised in the West how much the modern movement in j.a.pan owes its power and vitality to a native movement which welcomed change.

In j.a.pan Buddhism had failed, the one school of Confucianism which believed in change was dominant, and therefore it was a comparatively easy matter to introduce the extensive changes of Western civilisation.

There was no religion with roots deeply entwined in the hearts of the people to oppose such a change. Shintoism had not yet been rediscovered and established, and it consisted merely of a ma.s.s of superst.i.tion, without any literature or organisation. Thus it was the combination of these facts, with the threatening att.i.tude of Western powers, which made all the prophecies of men who knew the East untrue.

No one understood the vital power of the movement in j.a.pan. If, thirty years ago, some one had written a book to prove that j.a.pan would one day defeat Russia, people would have laughed at the suggestion, and the authority of people who had lived in the East all their lives would have been quoted to prove that an Eastern race could never fully accept Western civilisation. The prophets were misled by {164} the precedent of India and Turkey. The Western civilisation is met there by religions whose tenets are opposed to Western thought, and as long as those religions hold, Western views will make but small progress; but in j.a.pan there was no such religion, and in China to-day there is no such religion. The Buddhism of China, like the Buddhism of j.a.pan, may satisfy the cravings for spiritual religion of the uneducated and the ignorant; but the thinkers of both races--the statesmen, the writers, the leaders--are uninfluenced by Buddhism. Taoism has contributed to the thought and superst.i.tion of China, but is in no way now an important factor in her development; the philosophy of Confucius is the one vital force in the land.

Its doctrines are in no way opposed to our civilisation; it teaches mainly that a man must be sincere to his own higher nature; it has a profound belief in the greatness of human nature, and a very inadequate explanation, therefore, of the failures of that nature. That man must be sincere, so that the full beauty of his nature may appear, is one of its main tenets, and that this beautiful thing must be decorated with knowledge is a natural corollary. It undertakes the reform of the world, by convincing the ruler of his duty, and through him compelling the ruled to tread the right path, contrasting here very strongly with the religion of our Bible, though perhaps not with political Christianity. All through its teaching there is an underlying suggestion that {165} subjects will obey their rulers not only outwardly but also inwardly in their opinions and convictions.

Confucianism does not believe in government by the people, of the people, for the people; but it believes very strongly in government for the people by the rulers. Many of its maxims might be cut out as texts, and hung up in the House of Commons with great appropriateness.

It constantly pictures a well-ordered peaceful state, in which the dignity of government is well maintained, and where the working-man shall profit by his work through justice and peace, and the trader grow rich in confident security. In all this teaching it is not opposed to Western civilisation. Confucius advocates the reform of society by the action of the State. Thus the sanitary laws, the education laws, the temperance laws of the West are thoroughly consistent with the teaching of Confucius. Where that teaching differs from the West is that it disbelieves in democracy. Yet Confucianism cares nothing for a man's birth: all men are born equal to the Confucianist as to the Christian; and so Confucianism has, for many centuries, welcomed people of the lowest birth as Governors, if they could pa.s.s the requisite examinations, and, having given every opportunity to men of all cla.s.ses to become officials, it entrusts them and not the people with the government of the country.

In another way Confucianism is opposed to Western civilisation.

Confucianism believes intensely in the dignity of government; their cla.s.sics are full {166} of examples of people who, at the risk of their lives, defied kings and maintained the dignity of their positions; and this doctrine of dignity is consequently very deeply ingrained in Chinese thought; it is in reality the base of that curious doctrine of "face" by which a man will do anything rather than confess that he is wrong. A great missionary recounts how his wonderful work at Tientsin was once threatened with destruction because a boy from the south of China knocked a boy from the north off his bicycle, with the result that the college was soon divided into two factions on the question as to who should pay for the injured bicycle. The matter was only with difficulty arranged by the President paying for the bicycle and charging it to the guilty boy; but the boy did not mind paying--he minded confessing that he was wrong. There was another case in this same college where a boy had been induced to confess privately his sorrow that he had wilfully insulted a master. He was prepared to suffer expulsion rather than confess his fault openly. He was miserable at the prospect of leaving the college, and when a great appeal was made to his better feelings to say that he was sorry, he shook his head sadly. At last he was asked, "Have you never allowed you were wrong in your whole life?" "No," he said, with a look of pride, "_never_." Odious and detestable as this doctrine is in private life, I think I have the authority of St. Augustine for saying that it is a maxim of good government that however wrong an {167} order may be, a superior should not confess his error, so necessary is this doctrine of dignity to government. Thus the Chinese expression "face" has been commonly accepted as a good English expression when speaking about governments.

No doubt it is this sense of dignity which gives such authority to the Chinese official. In many ways it may be an element of weakness. I was surprised to learn that the officials in the Yamen had never been in the shops of the city; it is beneath their dignity. Goods are brought to them and they buy in their own houses. For instance we were told how in Changsha two patriotic bas-reliefs were put up in a shop, one of them representing the Westerns bringing tribute to the Emperor of China, and the other depicting a Western woman, chained and dishevelled, being led in as a slave. Of course our very excellent and most efficient representative, Consul Hewlett, made instant representation to the Governor and the objectionable figures were removed; but the Chinese officials claimed that they were completely ignorant of what was happening in the shops of the town, because they never went there.

It is obvious that this high estimation of dignity makes much of Western government antipathetic to a Chinaman; he cannot sympathise with a civilisation which admires government by noisy agitation, vulgar posters, indecent journalism. Such an agitation as that in favour of women's suffrage is inconceivable and disgusting beyond words to the mind of {168} a Chinese thinker; that women, whose dignity is such that they should never be tried in a public court; that educated ladies, whose names, in China, must scarcely be mentioned owing to their exalted position, should wrestle in a public crowd and be arrested, is one of those mysteries in Western government that the dignified Eastern mind can never hope to understand.