Specimen of the Ancient Buddhistic Art of Java. (Royal Museum of Leyden.) Frontispiece to The Open Court. A MONTHLY MAGAZINE Devoted to the Science of Religion, the Religion of Science, and VOL. XV. (NO. 6.) JUNE, 1901. Copyright by The Open Court Publishing Co., 1901. NO. 541 OUR GOLDEN-RULE-TREATY WITH CHINA, AND OUR MISSIONARIES. BY MONCURE D. CONWAY. N 1796 President Washington sent to the Senate a treaty with Tripoli whose opening article is as follows: IN seat "As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion,-as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Mussulmans,and as the said States have never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony between the two countries." This treaty was at once ratified by the Senate. Precisely seven centuries before (1096) began the Crusades which for nearly two centuries hurled the armies of Christendom against Islam. But even from the time of Constantine in whose vision shone a Cross with suffering Jesus detached from it,-a mere blazon of victory,Christianity was known to nonn-Christian mankind as the banner of conquerors, fierce avengers, sharp traders, lax in morals, rigid in creed, cruelly intolerant. The words of George Washington quoted above were not casual, nor was their ratification by the Senatewhich contained great men-thoughtless. They had severed a nation from the old world and meant it to be an asylum for all mankind, and they seized the first occasion that arose to separate the New World boldly from the evil, blood-stained, and intolerant history and reputation of Christianity. By implication the treaty affirms that the Christian religion has in itself a character of enmity against the laws, religion, and tranquillity of Mussulmans. Although political and commercial exigencies have necessitated some modus vivendi between the so-called Christian nations and so-called pagans, it is obvious that Christianity has in its claim to be the only divinely revealed religion a character of enmity to all non-Christian religions. This character it possesses "in itself," and it was as genuinely, however subconsciously, in the missionary besieging the pagan's soul as in the crusader slaying his body. From what were pagan souls to be saved? From their religion. The raison d'être of the missionary was that other religions systematically bore souls to perdition, and must be supplanted by the only saving faith-the Gospel. Belief in the inevitable damnation of unconverted heathen carried into the mission fields able and self-sacrificing men like Cary, Heber, Judson, Morrison, Groves, and the notion lasted long enough to enlist the youthful energies of greater men, among them Francis. William Newman, Dr. Legge, Dr. Livingston, and Colenso. But meanwhile the doctrine that a good man must be damned because he was a Buddhist or a Mohametan fell into disrepute. Sixty years ago the clergy began to retreat into phrases about "the uncovenanted mercies of God," and to extort our dimes and dollars by blood-curdling fictions about mothers casting their babes to crocodiles, devotees crushed under Juggernaut (the death-hating deity, near whom no destruction of life is possible), and especially by the immortal falsities of Heber's hymn,-the deadliest being "They call us to deliver Their land from error's chain." That the poor heathen call for our missionary and long for him instead of trembling at sight of him and see their chain in his hand, will of course remain the faith of vulgar conventicles, but among educated Christians the old foundations of proselytism have crumbled. The learned men relinquished that field: Legge to introduce Christians to Chinese sages greater than their own, Livingston to devote himself to exploration and science, Colenso and Newman to show Christendom that its religion is untrue and that it needs missionaries more than the foreign lands. The mission fields are now filled by inferior men. There is no educated Christian who believes that a man will be damned for being a Buddhist or a Confucian. The missionary Boards continue their assemblies, and go on singing Heber's fantasies, such as that about Ceylon "[Where] every prospect pleases And only man is vile," though every instructed person knows that in any large city in Christendom more crime and immorality occur in one day than Ceylon knows in a year. (A Singhalese in Ceylon told me that it is well-known there that Heber wrote his lines because a Moslem in Colombo sold him a large emerald that turned out to be glass.) The missionaries in Ceylon and India seem to be well aware that they cannot claim any superior moral fruits for the Christian tree, and the only argument I heard from them was the larger prosperity and progress of Christendom. And I remark, by the way, that the Rev. William Weber (in The Monist, April, 1901) uses a similar argument with regard to modern Christian nations, "that they rank on the scale of progress and civilisation in exact proportion to their more or less thorough acceptance of the yoke and burden of Christ." The rationalist would say that the most thoroughly Christianised countries are the most backward, and that the progress of the leading nations has been pari passu with their growth in scientific materialism and skepticism, but my citation of the idea is only to note a certain gesture in contemporary Christianity. At a time when the progress and civilisation of the foremost nations are saliently represented by their exploitation of the weak, by the unrestrained murder of innocent negroes in the United States, the desolation of homes and farms in South Africa, the looting of China, their yoke and burden of Christ appears painfully like that imposed on Europe by the swords of Constantine, Theodosius, and Charlemagne. To recur to the missionaries, their main claim, that the superior progress of Western nations results from their Christianity, is a fallacy: each Western nation is, so to say, a cord of many racial strands, the Asiatic countries being more nearly single races. One need only contrast the greatness of pagan Greece with the insignificance of Christianised Greece to find that the finest civilisation is by no means a fruit of Christianity. In fact there has never been a real civilisation planted in any nation by a propaganda of Christianity. National prestige once involved, a flag lifted, and the one great necessity is to win; success, at whatever cost, comes to mean "progress"; all sorts of meanness, trickery, crime, inhumanity, are condoned for the sake of triumph, and the world is thus gained for a religion through the loss of its soul. Jesus, prophet of the individual heart and happiness, concerned for no kingdom but that "within," warned his friends against foreign missions, even so near as Samaria, and in trying to reform their own countrymen to withdraw from cities where they were persecuted. Their outward victories would there be inward defeats. What becomes of humility, charity, of sweetness and simplicity, amid the egotism, ambition, and other vulgar passions awakened by a competition in pushing, shoving, elbowing others to get ahead? A proclamation of the "Twentieth Century National Campaign," signed by leading ministers of various sects, aims at the conquest of the world for Christ. "To Him all power has been given in heaven and on earth.' In Him and His Gospel lies the solution of every problem which besets and troubles humanity." It is not the wild unreason of such talk as this that is so distressing, not the familiar absurdity of appealing for a fund in aid of omnipotence, but it is the vulgar war-whoop in it. All the religious teachers in America put together would not produce one Confucius, or a Buddha, or a Zoroaster, but the war-god called Christ is to exterminate those great brothers of Jesus! The edict goes forth from a land whose only founders of religions are thus far Joe Smith and Mrs. Eddy, and from a nation which has seen the Gospel quoted equally for and against slavery, for and against. peace, for and against polygamy, for and against Christian scientism, for and against silverism, socialism, divorce, proving itselfthat same Gospel-unable to solve any problem that has ever beset and troubled this country! Of course our Twentieth Century campaigners would disclaim all carnal weapons in carrying out their aims; their millennial vision of all the varied fruits in the garden of the earth transformed to American pippins is to be fulfilled by Christian horticulture; but recent experiences in Turkey and in China prove that if the new crusade requires bloodshed blood will be shed. The one thing needful is triumph. The clamor that we should make war on Turkey unless some ruined mission property was paid for was not because of $90,000, which excited the ridicule of Europe, but because, first, of the necessity that Christ should score a victory over an "infidel" sovereign; and secondly, that the position taken up by President Washington should be reversed, and the Christian propaganda avowedly adopted by the United States and protected by its military forces in a salient way. No government is responsible for property destroyed by a mob unless collusion of its officials be proved in its own courts, yet such was the missionary pressure that a warship would have been sent, as I have reason to believe, had not one of our foreign ministers cabled, "Remember the Maine!" To satisfy the missionaries the fiction was invented that the ninety thousand had been indirectly paid. The first steps of the United States in its new career as a world |