The East of To-Day and To-Morrow (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ered, I believe it cannot be impugned. That there have been mistakes in missionary enterprises in China cannot, however, be denied, and these might, I think, in many cases where they are still persisted in, be wisely recognized and remedied, as they easily may be. In his interesting and, on the whole, impartial work on the East, the present viceroy of India, Lord Curzon, alludes with considerable reserve, but with sufficient explicitness, to some of these which have long existed. Generally they refer to the somewhat careless disregard of local or national prejudices by which our modern missions have been widely characterized. I confess I cannot see why such disregard should be indulged in. At home and among ourselves we are all agreed that people cannot always do things that are in themselves entirely innocent, if they are liable to be misunderstood; and it might well be a rule with all our missionary authorities that in the matter, for example, of the conventionalisms of mission stations, unmarried women, traveling missionaries, and the like, the missionary should not violate Chinese social conventions, which, however contemptible they may seem to us, are too widely and deeply rooted in heathen lands to be lightly disregarded. Again, the modern missionary to a people whose nobility are its scholars should be a man of education and of refinement. The ceremonial of Chinese life is doubtless often irksome, but a man with not only the instincts but also the training of a gentleman?and, unfortunately, the two things do not always go together?will not lightly disesteem it. And yet again, the modern missionary, like his greatest predecessor, the Apostle Paul, may wisely strive to understand and respectfully to refer to the religion that he has come to supplant. If it be true, as C...