Christian organizations. A counter reformation can also be
traced which attempts to revive Hinduism by purging it of its
grossness and allegorizing its fables and legends. A new Islam
is also a factor of the situation. Comparatively few converts
have been made from Mahommedanism to Christianity, and these
have been chiefly among the learned. But there is a wide
prevalence of free-thinking, especially among the younger and
educated classes of the community.
The special difficulties of mission work in India may be thus summarized. (1) Racial antipathy. (2) The speculative rather than experimental and practical nature of the Hindu consciousness—historical proofs make no appeal to him. (3) The lack of initiative: in a land where the joint family system is everywhere and all powerful, individualism and will-power are at a discount. (4) The ignorance and conservatism of the women. (5) An inadequate sense of sin. (6) The introduction of European forms of materialism and anti-Christian philosophy. Perhaps, too, the methods adopted by missionaries have not always been the wisest, and they have sometimes failed to remember the method of their Master, who came “not to destroy, but to fulfil.” In spite, however, of all the difficulties, permanent and increasing results have been achieved along all the lines indicated above. The establishment of a strong native church is far from being the only fruit of the enterprise, but it is a fruit that can be gauged by statistics, and these are sufficiently striking. In a necessarily inadequate sketch it is impossible to give more than the barest mention to one or two other features of modern missionary achievement in India, e.g. the development of industrial schools, the establishment of a South India United Church, in which the Congregationalist agencies (London Missionary Society and American Board) and the Presbyterians have joined forces, and the endeavour to train an efficient and educated native ministry, which is being promoted especially at Serampur, where an old Danish degree-granting charter has been revived in what should become a Christian university, and at Bangalore, where Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Wesleyans collaborate to staff and maintain a united theological college. The government census for India and Burma (1901) gives a Christian population of 2,923,241 (native Christians 2,664,313) out of a total population of 294,361,056, or about 3%. The inclusion of Portuguese and French possessions would add about 350,000 to the Christian total. Though the number does not seem relatively high, it is significant when compared with that of former censuses—in 1872, 1,517,997; in 1881, 1,862,525 (increase 22·7%); in 1891, 2,284,380 (increase 22·6%); in 1901, 2,923,241 (increase of 28%). The increase of 28% between 1891 and 1901 has often been compared with the fact that the total population of India only registered an increase of 212% in that decade. In the words of The Pioneer, “this is a hard fact which cannot be explained away” and “the most remarkable feature of the returns.” The increase was shared by every province and state in India. In 1910 there were 4614 missionaries (including wives), representing 122 societies, 1272 Indian ministers, and 34,095 other native workers, including teachers and Bible-women.
The growth of the Protestant Native Christian community between 1851 and 1910 is shown in the following table:—
| Native Christian Community. | Communicants. | Native Agents. | |||||
| Number. | Rate of Increase. | Number. | Rate of Increase. | Proportion of the Community. | Ordained. | Unordained Preachers. | |
| % | % | ||||||
| 1851 | 91,092 | — | 14,661 | — | 16·0 | 21 | 493 |
| 1861 | 138,731 | 52·3 | 24,976 | 70·3 | 18·0 | 97 | 1266 |
| 1871 | 224,258 | 61·6 | 52,816 | 111·4 | 23·5 | 225 | 1985 |
| 1881 | 417,372 | 86·1 | 113,325 | 114·5 | 27·1 | 461 | 2488 |
| 1890 | 559,661 | 34·0 | 182,722 | 61·2 | 32·6 | 797 | 3491 |
| 1900 | 854,867 | 52·8 | 301,699 | 65·1 | 35·3 | — | — |
| 1910 | 1,472,448 | 72·2 | 522,743 | 73·3 | — | 1,272 | — |
The Protestant community in India in 1910 was over a million strong, well distributed among the chief provinces, a fine spiritual force, easily first in female education, and rapidly growing in wealth, position and influence. A recent report of the Director of Public Instruction for the Madras Presidency says: “I have frequently called attention to the educational progress of the native Christian community. There can be no question, if the community pursues with steadiness the present policy of its teachers, that in the course of a generation it will have secured a preponderating position in all the great professions.”
What India wants (as Nobili 300 years ago saw, and attempted, though by fatal methods of deceit, to supply) is a Christianity not foreign but native, not dissociated from the religious life of the land but its fulfilment. Though there are many Christians in India to-day, the Hindu still looks askance at Christianity, not because it is a religion but because it is foreign. “India is waiting for her own divinely appointed apostle, who, whether Brahmin or non-Brahmin, shall connect Christianity with India’s religious past, and present it as the true Vedanta or completion of the Veda and thus make it capable of appealing to the Hindu religious nature.”
It only remains to be said that the work of the missionaries individually and collectively has over and over again received the warmest recognition and praise from the highest officials of the Indian government.
China.[1]—The earliest Christian missionaries to China, as to India, were the Nestorians (q.v.). Their work and that of the Roman Church, begun as the result of Marco Polo’s travels about 1290, faded away under the persecution of the Ming dynasty which came to power about 1350. The next attempt was that of the French Jesuits, following on the visit and death of Xavier. They established themselves at Canton in 1582, and on the accession of the Manchu dynasty (1644) advanced rapidly. In 1685 there were three dioceses, Peking, Nanking and Macao, with a hundred churches. The Orthodox Eastern Church gained a footing in Peking in the same year, and established a college of Greek priests. Friction between Jesuits and Dominicans led to the proscription of Christianity by the emperor in 1724, missionaries and converts being banished. The story of modern missions in China begins with Robert Morrison (q.v.) of the London Missionary Society, who reached Canton in 1807, and not being allowed to reside in China entered the service of the East India Company. In 1813 he was joined by a colleague, William Milne, and in 1814 baptized his first convert. In 1829 came representatives of the American Board, in 1836 Peter Parker began his medical mission, and on the opening of the Treaty Ports the old edicts were withdrawn, and other societies crowded in to a field more than ample. After the war of 1856 a measure of official toleration was obtained, and the task of evangelizing the country was fairly begun. Though the missionaries were chiefly concentrated in the treaty ports they gradually pushed inland, and here the names of W. C. Burns, a Scottish evangelist, J. Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, and James Gilmour, the apostle of Mongolia, are pre-eminent. But for more than half a century China seemed the most hopeless of mission fields. The upper classes were especially anti-foreign, and the whole nation vaunted its superiority to the rest of mankind. In 1857 there were only about 400 baptized Protestant Christians in the whole of China. Even after the removal of the edicts the old prejudices remained, and the missionaries were regarded as political emissaries, the forerunners of military aggression. Native Christians were stigmatized as traitors, “followers of the foreign devils.” In 1870 there was a great outbreak concentrating in the massacres at Hankow and Tientsin; in 1891 at Hunan and in 1895 at Ku Cheng there were other attacks which were only preliminary to the Boxer uprising of 1899–1900, when 135 missionaries, besides 52 children and perhaps 16,000 native Christians, whose heroism will always be memorable, perished, often after horrible tortures. There is little doubt that this savage outburst was directed not against religious teaching as such, but against the introduction of customs and ideas which tended to weaken the old power of the mandarins over the people. These leaders skilfully seized upon every breach of tradition to inflame popular passion, attacking especially the medical work as a pretext for mutilation, the schools as hotbeds of vice, and the orphanages as furnishing material for witchcraft. Out of the agony, however, a new China was born. The growing power of Japan, seen in her wars with China and Russia, and the impotence of the Boxers against the European allies, made all classes in China realize their comparative impotence, and the central government began a series of reforms, reorganizing the military, educational, fiscal and political systems on Western lines. Educational reforms became especially insistent, and modern methods and studies supplanted
- ↑ See A. H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics; Village Life in China; J. C. Gibson, Mission Problems and Mission Methods in South China.
