The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-09-03

1 the average of our home Workers LII their doings with the natives they 1 prove to be influenced by the highest principles of good will and humanity as well as by Christian charity. They are i men and women of whom America may we'll feel proud.
 The home of the missionary Is cen l ter of light for all the surrounding dls- tricts. The children of the mission schools and colleges see the nome l!le of the missionary families learn the meaning of the stars and stripes or the national flag, understand their feehns of patriotism in its highest sense, ana 1 delight to learn the history of tile coun- try that has sent them so much help , from purely philanthropic motives It is the spirit of patriotism that the Chi nese need next to the spirit of Chris tianity; and it is the American mission ary who is emnently qualified to teach it to them even in the face of the cor rupt gobernment of China
 | Some who crticise the labors of mis- eonaries depend only upon bare stat1s- | ticks. They reckon up the numpef or mission stations and church members with the number of years of work. ana | take these as theme asure Of userulhess' Such people do not realize the ditf1cul- ties of the situation, which make the results beyond the reach of arithmetical computation. The religious beliefs, the customs and prejudices of the Chinese are entreiched behind centuries upon centuries of superstition. It must be remembered that China Is the most an- cient empire in the world. Before the | Jews became a nation, say twenty-five centuries before Christ. China's civiE- 1 zation had already reached a hiSn standard. Her wealthy inhabitants wore silk hats and satins while the ls- raelites were in Egypt, and long ccntu- ries before Greece and Rome were l thought of. Her ethics, her laws and administration of government nave come down almost unchanged through all those thousands of years. As far back as history goes the Chinese were governed by almost the same form of { paternal or patriarcha1 government that has stood unshaken amid the rise and fall of western empires, and IS stlll as influential in its strength and vigor' It is this antiquity which the Chinese 1 fall back upon with SO much pride that etands in the way of their accepting anything so modern as Christianity.
 But in the consideration of the dift1- culties the missionaries has to encoun- 1 ter there is not only the antiquity, but also the enormous size of the nation and the extent of country. Out of to- [ tai of five million square miles the ] eighteen provinces or China proper, contain fifteen hundred thousand square milee. In the middle Of Chlna is one of the greatest and most densely populated plains in the world, through which flow the Yellow river and the | Yang-tse This one plain supports a population of one hundred and seventy five million, or nearly three times as many people as inhabit the united States. The emperor of China rules over one-tenth of the surface of the habitable globe, and nearly half of the population of our planet Both the land and the people are not only immense and overwhelming, but strange, unique and without analogy. The methods used for preaching the gospel in our own Iande or among unclvilized races have to be modified greatly, If not en- tirely changed, when applied to the civ- ilization of China. The mass to be moved is enormous, and the power ap- piled must be great in proportion.
 Added to this difficulty of the size of the nation there is the complexity of the language The old saying that "the devil invented the Chinese characters to keep Christianity out of China" ap- pears to have some show of reason when we find that in place of Chinese alphabet there are tens of thousands of formidable hieroglyphics of pictorial characters. and that each constitutes a separate monosyllabic word. Further more, this written language is to be seen and not heard to be read and not spoken. Then there is the official or court language used in the northern and central provinces, with hundreds of different dialects spoken south of the Yang-t tse The missionary there has therefore to learn the local dialect, the court language and the written or clas- sical language, before he can .apreach, read the translations of the scriptures and carry on oral and written inter course with all the different classes of natives he meets. This alone Is the work almost of lifetime.
 But when the missionary has over come these difficulties, which few sue ceed in doing beyond a certain limited extent his task is only just begun. He has to learn all that the ordinary Chi nese know from their classical and oth- CT books and teachers. In order to meet them on their own ground. Then he must begin to attack the sentiments the Chinaman holds most dear, and which are hallowed by the earliest as- sociations and parental love. These ancestral teachings and examples. with his methods of religious worship, are deeply imbedded in his inmost heart. Yet the missionary has to ask him to give up many or most of them and &C., cept untried foreign dogmas and meth eds in their place. Is 1t any wonder that the conservative principle in Chi nese human nature rebels and that the Chinaman naturally is opposed to all missionary propagandisn? It is all most impossible to realize the immense sacrifice a Chinese, even of the lower class, has to make when in the face of the opposition and the contempt of his family, his kinsman, his whole clan and his friends, he determines to become sincere Christian and to follow the l 0HR NEW ?