Ways that are Dark: The Truth about China by Ralph Townsend

Author:Ralph Townsend [Townsend, Ralph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2017-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Under the incitement of his anti-foreign efforts, Chinese mobs roamed the streets and beat foreigners, and most of the foreign population had to be evacuated down river to Shanghai for safety.

General Feng Yu-hsiang is another prominent Chinese who a few years ago pleased the missionaries a great deal with his alleged Christianity. He is the one who felt its blessings so powerfully that he baptized his army wholesale by marching the troops past a splashing fire hose. But the last year or two Feng’s racketeering and nefarious double-dealing with the Chinese and Japanese, squeezing what he could out of both, have taken so much time he has had little left for holy works, obliging the missionaries to seize upon new enthusiasms elsewhere.

The names of Chinese Christians of “promise” who have in an opportune moment turned renegade after being long a power for the Cross would make a list as long as a small city telephone directory.

“It is our challenge,” say the missionaries. “We must look upon disappointments as a renewed obligation to go on — to persevere for the Kingdom.”

Again a non-missionary foreigner is reminded that when you hear of a Chinese being enthusiastically hailed, it is for his promise, seldom for his tested delivery of the goods. If you are old enough, check the Chinese students you knew in college or university ten years ago or twenty years ago, particularly those whom professors lauded as “brilliantly promising” and see what became of them. Collectively, the answer is found in the destitution of China today in the matter of forceful and at the same time honorable men, a condition striking in view of the relatively large numbers that have gone abroad, the pick of the country, for decade after decade, all with exceptional opportunities. First rate men are not numerous anywhere, but it is to be remembered that the life of returned educated Chinese is centered in a few cities, where there is excellent opportunity for ability in leadership to make itself seen, even allowing that the conditions of the country are against its making itself felt. A foreigner in one of these cities soon meets or learns about the Chinese with any claim to merit, because they are so scarce the field is soon covered.

“All that may be true,” answer the missionaries in substance, “but it is cynical and un-Christian to look at the matter in such a light.”

Reminders of reality are no more popular among missionaries than suntan lotion in Harlem.

If the missionary perseverance is astonishing, some of the circumstances of it are more so. It is not generally known in America that since 1927 the missionaries have rested under an injunction of the Nationalist Government, to which they meekly acquiesced, whereby they are not to teach Christianity in the lower schools, and may teach it only as an elective subject, requested by the student, in institutions of college grade. Thousands of schools are thus financed in America by appeals to people to hand over money to propagate Christianity in China.

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