China-Greatest of Problems
Ward, Patrick J.
November 25, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL CHINA: GREATEST OF PROBLEMS By PATRICK J. WARD INSISTENTLY and impatiently there knocks on the portals of the western world, the most critical and vital...
...Although a tablet found by the Jesuits, gives foundation for the tradition that the Nestorians introduced Christianity in the sixth century, authentic records begin with the historic fact that the first western religion to come to China was Catholicism in 1582, and that it has survived and grown for 300 years...
...Both Russia and Japan mean business...
...In the experiences of the past seven years many have become sceptical as to whether the world conflict taught human nature a lasting and effectual lesson...
...How can they, when a hundred contradictory creeds rushed in upon them claiming their allegiance in the name of Christ...
...Protestantism has 35,000 missionaries...
...This outlook on the Chinese situation Is no doubt pessimistic, but what I have reviewed are plain hard facts...
...In the teachings of Confucius and Lao-tse, and later of Meng-tse, supreme place is given to morals...
...There is nothing un-Christian in that...
...To show that the ethical character of Chinese civilization can be paralleled in the development of now generally accepted western teaching, permit me, very sketchily, to show a few points of contact which might strike the Chinese mind when pagan doctrines are presented impellingly by enthusiastic professors...
...it is even more difficult for nations to change time-honored, or rather discredited, ways of looking at things and of dealing with them...
...Both are the spirit of the few and selfcentered, dominating the many...
...It is difficult for the individual to throw off the thraldom of evil habits, especially habits of mind...
...he will see virtue in every commercial or political transaction that gives "practical results," and answers his own or his country's needs...
...Stoicism reached quietism in the serenity of self-contemplation as the highest form of vjrtue...
...Now comes the new imperialism, the new freedom, the new democracy...
...Politically, China had until recently as unbroken tradition, of the emperor as lord of heaven and earth, identified even with God himself, of the service of the state as one of the greatest marks of distinction, of the state as all in all...
...That factor is the Catholic Church...
...Bolshevism was born in Germany...
...This being the temper of most newly awakened peoples infected with westernization, one wonders if men who speak glibly of Chinese nationalism and selfconsciousness appreciate all that these terms imply...
...All these are in direct antagonism to the spirit of trde democracy which proclaims all men created equal in their right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness...
...Its directorate in the various departments number ten Russians and eight Chinese...
...What are they going to accomplish in bringing stability of government to China, and in making western civilization the bond of security, not only for China and the East, but for Europe and America...
...It is perhaps not without significance that Martin Luther and Immanuel Kant were born there also...
...Keeping to the moral mean is virtue...
...Expediency then is to be the bond of understanding and security between East and West...
...We find its ancestry in Greece and Rome...
...What if it becomes the bond of the whole East...
...Therein lies the protection not only of Asia, but of all...
...Seeing the difficulty, not only in China but elsewhere, the various agencies suffering under this disability of conflicting doctrines, no longer claim their allegiance in the name of faith, but in good fellowship and the material blessings of civilization, material blessings, the full flavor of which we become conscious when a group of business men protest to those missionaries who now strongly advocate the abolishing of extra-territorial rights, that they "seemed to forget their year to year monetary support comes from the business man...
...In her alone is the family of nations a reality and not a sentiment...
...Did Russia escape them...
...On such a tradition it is a somewhat dangerous experiment to graft western ideas, represented till a short time ago, by the Roman theory of kingship, and now characterized by an equally extreme and indefensible advocacy of the supremacy of the state...
...We can readily understand why Japan has adopted so conciliatory an attitude in the past few weeks...
...In the return to pagan ideals after the Protestant revolution, Hume is the link with the final atrophy of the ancients, through his scepticism and phenomenalism, and finally Kant gives the mold to all modern thought in the return to the supremacy of the moral law, the anvil of non-dogmatic Christianity, on which is being forged the intellectual temper of every Chinese in European and American universities...
...No matter what "their deepest meaning" may be, that Chinese youth, steeped in the same thought, imbibed from the same sources, which has swept the rest of the world before it, can escape the logical consequences, is impossible...
...There is also the fact that the nation first to seek forcible entrance was supposed to be a Catholic nation, an erroneous supposition, and the bitterness thus became associated with that form of Christianity China first knew...
...In virtually all western educational establishments pagan philosophies are the order of the day...
...Let us not forget either that a Russo-Japanese treaty was signed early this year, and that the old antagonism between Russia and Japan is disappearing...
...Bishop Logan Roots of Hankow, addressing the Institute of Politics said— Echoing and reechoing in the speech and writings of the young patriots of China are the watchwords which indicate how closely these young men are in touch with the youth of other lands and how deeply they are moved by the tides of thought which are sweeping over the rest of the world...
...Aristotle's God never left his solitary self-contemplation, and so had but an unconscious and not voluntary activity in the world—silent, simple, inexorable...
...The results of the ethical and pragmatic aspects of Christianity on the mind of the young Chinese (and it is getting virtually no other interpretation) is of the most serious import...
...November 25, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL CHINA: GREATEST OF PROBLEMS By PATRICK J. WARD INSISTENTLY and impatiently there knocks on the portals of the western world, the most critical and vital problem of many years—the autonomy of China...
...Protestantism with its vast army and unlimited funds has 400,000 souls...
...How is it then that Catholicism in the present trials has received greater toleration than non-Catholicism...
...It must be remembered that China has just broken for the first time the thread of her indigenous philosophy, and having reached now a period of uncertainty on the threshold of a new world, she may gather up here and there, through unconscious but no less powerful impulse, dangerous fragments of ethical and political thought...
...In Mongolia the Bolsheviks entered outer Mongolia after the "whites" in 1921, and have stayed there despite the fact that the "whites" are gone...
...The Catholic Church, without funds, has in her fold in China over two million souls...
...They breathe criticism and hostility which characterize the attitude of present-day youth generally towards established institutions . . . But while they appear outwardly to indicate a negative and destructive purpose, I believe their deepest meaning is both positive and constructive...
...Nationalism in this sense bears the same relationship to democracy that imperialism bears to oligarchy...
...This spirit is in evidence in passionate emotional patriotism, in antipathy to the foreigner, in exaggerated relative importance of one's country in the world at large...
...There is just one factor which can be relied on to bridge, if it is not too late, an ever widening sea between West and East, on which Asia is sailing off on the barque of modernism...
...In the teaching of Socrates, obedience to the dictates of his "daemon" (conscience or righteous conduct) was a cardinal point —"Moral action consisted in a searching and calculating selection of the more useful or more agreeable...
...Russia and Japan thus courting Chinese friendship and prepared to make large concessions to gain that friendship should give food for serious thought...
...Christianity forms in numbers an insignificant group in a country of 400,000,000 souls...
...Because in the evolution of eighty years the doctrines of non-Catholicism have been driven into the open and because they have had perforce to align themselves with the offspring they have produced in order to preserve their existence, and continue their work...
...Thus we have a closed circle, a complete answer to the inquiring Chinese mind as to how Christianity fits in with his own tradition, and offers him a code admirably suited to his adoption of western business and political methods...
...In the East as in the West the old imperialism and its diplomacy have crumbled under the acid test of time and of the changed outlook of China upon the world...
...Russia is the great example of the flowering of western doctrine...
...It is significant that the Chinese attitude towards Catholicism, except where directly influenced by Russia, during the bitter anti-foreign and anti-religious feeling of the past few months, is different from that towards Protestantism...
...By the agreement with China in 1924, it is said that China's gains were more ideal than real, while Russia gained materially...
...But the whole question and its possibilities are in review...
...To Aristotle, evil is simply good in potentia...
...The ancient Chinese conception was of the deity, and with THE COMMONWEAL November 25, 1925 it the natural order, carrying on its work "silently, simply, yet inexorably...
...A people cannot imbibe pagan philosophy which is intensely individualistic, and escape nationalism...
...Plato's ideal citizen was he who gave the highest obedience to the state...
...In all there is an intense individualism, and morals and conduct are the touchstone of truth...
...It is in direct antagonism to Christianity...
...Russia has not been purposeless in making desperate efforts to win China's friendship...
...On the solution of that problem depends the fruition of all that hope and promise which has just come from the little Swiss town of Locarno, to assuage the feelings and longings of a war-embittered world...
...What are the effects of these teachings on the Chinese mind, on the student of today who is to be the political and religious leader of his country tomorrow...
...Nationalism" now has an interpretation distinct from "nationality...
...The Catholic missionary, who for three centuries had braved the dangers of the unknown, was in this later day made the flimsy pretext of punishment and retribution by nations who had no more right to speak or act in the name of Christianity than the Mussulman or Jew...
...The Chinese do not understand that, for the simple reason that they do not understand Christianity...
...One can but hope that in the wisdom of Divine Providence, the two million, guided in the true meaning of Christian principles and practice, may "leaven the whole lump...
...Modern progress is an all-impelling and indiscriminating force...
...It is an attribute of youth...
...Nationalism and the new imperialism are virtually synonymous...
...I do not suppose that every Chinese who comes in contact with western teaching is so conscious of the philosophies of his race that he will see an analogy between their traditions and concepts and those of the West, or if he does that he will accept for that reason western ideas as truth...
...From the fact that unfortunately the penetration of China was contemporaneous with the great industrial revolution in the West, here in more vivid characters than anywhere else, Christianity has been painted into the same picture side by side with industrial Mammon...
...An "understanding" between Russia, Japan, and China, with Russia as the inspiring agent is by no means a dream...
...It is a lack of proportion due to inability to keep the middle road...
...Naturally Catholicism sought protection from recurrent persecutions when the opportunity offered...
...and it shall go hard for us, but he may better the instruction...
...To the Chinese then, Christianity as represented in missionary activities, for their moral good, is an attempt to approach them along an avenue which Confucius himself might have traveled...
...Young China's view of Christianity simply as a preparation for modern contact with the West was emphasized over and over again in the writer's recent association with a number of representative Chinese students...
...Nationalism began with the "new democracy," a lineal descendant of the renaissance...
...We know that philosophies have a way of piecing themselves together and that they often take a final form pointing in a very different direction from any of the contributaries...
...Among the Greeks, Socrates recognized the deity in its works, in a providence rather than in a knowledge of God...
...She alone in all the world can undo, if such a thing be possible, the problems and entanglements of neo-paganism in modern life, for she has never wavered in teaching a moral law resting on the security of revealed and unchangeable doctrine: she alone, belonging to no single race, color, or territory —for she belongs to them all—can speak with parental authority and claim obedience from all...
...She holds the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria, over one thousand miles, subject to China, financially embarrassed, paying her 700,000,000 rubles...
...The tendency of Chinese philosophy was towards quietism and self-abnegation...
...Great reliance seems to be placed on China's awakened nationalism as a necessary attribute or rather phase, in that country attaining the blessings of selfgovernment and self reliance...
...Thus Russia virtually controls Manchuria and Mongolia...
...But it has this additional advantage: it is giving them something that Confucius could not give, namely, scientific speculation, modern institutions, colleges, schools, hospitals, all sorts of foundations, and is enabling them to take what they think Christianity and the West only have to give them, their place in the modern world...
...The Chinese feels there is a difference...
...To minister to these, Catholicism has 2,400 European and native priests...
...in fact, he will realize that to keep up with western commerce and progress he will have to adopt without question western methods, so that what we teach him he will execute...
...He will see the wisdom and propriety in business for the end to justify the means...
...In the moral order the possibilities are of even greater moment...
Vol. 3 • November 1925 • No. 3
