Social problems and the east : a point of honour

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Preface

This book is an attempt to skow to all who are interested in tte social problems of their own country how deeply Christian missions are committed to the solution of similar problems in foreign lands. Before I began to collect the material I had no doubt that the case was a strong one, but I am bound to say that its full strength has surprised me. The foreign missionary and the social worker in Great Britain are allied, bound by a community of purpose far closer than we commonly remember. Neither will lose by a fuller recognition of the alhance.

Anyone writing a new book in this series is Ukely to be a httle daunted by the excellence of those that went before, and in this book the wide reaches of the subject make it certain that many readers will be disappointed. The necessary Umits of space have compelled me to leave out a great quantity of material which is nearly as relevant as that which finds a place, and those who are specially interested in the omitted subjects are sure to regret their omission. Another cause of perplexity has been the tangled way in which the different aspects of the problem are intertwined. To secure any sort of order it has been necessary to cut many of the hnks. The reader will do well to remember that the artificial classification is only adopted to permit of clear thinking, that Society is one body, each member closely related to the rest, and that hfe difiers from a book because its different hmbs cannot be separated from one another. Space, too, has made it difiicult to do justice to the points of view of the several parties concerned in any single problem. It has been, necessary to paint with a broad brush, and to leave minor lights and shades to bare suggestion. Thus, while I have always sought to be just, many statements will still require qualification, and I know well that the picture is not complete.

The purpose of the " Relevant Quotations " at the end of the chapters is sometimes to give further illustrations from the countries dealt with in the text, sometimes to remind the reader that the same problems call for solution in other lands. Those who work upon the book in Mission Study Groups will find it stimulating, after a careful study of the ideas of each chapter, to apply them to spheres which the chapter has left untouched.

Where I have quoted testimony to missions, or where on the other hand I have criticized Governments, rehgions, etc., I have, as far as possible, used evidence from non-missionary sources. There has been no space to refer to the missions of the Roman or the Greek Church, and the references to American missions are fewer than I should have hked.

A word as to the title — " Social Problems and the East " is only a convenient label. Africa and South America, in spite of geography, count as the East, and the West includes America and Europe as well as Britain ! In general I have avoided the use of the word " native," but when deahng collectively with several countries it is indispensable and should be no more ofiensive than " foreigner."

Finally, I have to thank numerous friends, more than I could mention. Anything that is efiective in this book is largely due to their suggestion and counsel. May it serve in some small way to bring a httle nearer the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ.

F. L.

Contents

CHAP.

I. The Houh of Need .

II. The Value of Life . . ,

Chapter I The Hour Of Need I

The world has become one in a sense that is altogether new. Prior to 1914 thinking minds were already mastered by the sense that social problems were interrelated all the world over, and could not be discussed, still less handled, in isolation. The Lancashire mills were affected by the competition of Bombay, and Japan was the rival of both. Indian sailors took the place of Englishmen on P. and O. steamers, and Chinese of Gtermans on the Norddeutscher Lloyd. These two latter developments may have been for good or evil, but they were plainly of some social importance. The islanders of the Pacific were providing dried coco-nut to make margarine, and our dairy farmers felt a new influence in their trade. The Japanese could send to Australia a man's suit equal to the best Melbourne tailors' at less than a third of the cost.^ This was one of the reasons for a high tariff and the " White Australia " policy. Every means of communication — telegraph, steamers, railways — ^was tending to make the world

one in its social, and especially in its economic, problems.

But since August 1914 this progress towards oneness has gone forward with tenfold rapidity. During the war we learnt much from the letters of boys campaigning in lands of which we had scarcely heard. How often they told of the new relations into which they entered with the inhabitants ! On the economic side our dependence on other lands was brought home to us at every meal. Our puddings no longer had currants from the Levant, and the bananas, which used to come so freely from the West Indies, were a dozen times their old price. The results of the blockade of Germany and the submarine campaign against England have taught us the underlying principle : we cannot live without communication. No nation now can sit self-sufficient within its own borders.

In just the same way there are moral communications. In the past four years there have been gathered in France (to say nothing of other campaigns) black troops from the North and West of Africa, black labourers from the South, Chinese by the scores of thousands, Indo-Chinese from the French colony, and great hordes of Malagasy. Maoris from New Zealand, Indians from the Pimjab and the foothills of the Himalayas, have fought alongside the men of Blackburn and Birmingham. From the Islands of the Pacific — Tahiti, New Caledonia, Niue, the Cook Islands, Lifou — and from the West Indies, we have drained their yoimg manhood. Never since the Tower of Babel have so many tongues been heard on one soil.

What sort of impression will these various peoples carry home ? One hears many stories. They have seen the white man under war conditions with his dignity laid aside. In some cases white women have made themselves cheap before them. (Anyone who knows the East will tell you how much is to be lost by destroying the convention of the inviolability of the white woman.) They have walked the slimis of London, Paris, and Marseilles with eyes wide open and minds alert. They have learned much good too — ^lessons of faithfulness, duty, and compassion, a contempt for old fettering customs and caste prejudices, comradeship with men of other races, and the beauty of humble, unselfish service as they have seen it in the Y.M.C.A. and elsewhere. But these influences, whether they bring gain or loss, are so many symbols of the way in which the knowledge of good and evil is drifting across the most primitive and the most sophisticated parts of this little world.

Take one of the most up-to-date influences, the cinema. A missionary writes : —

" In every distriot of Hongkong large cinematograph theatres are open twice daily. In these, episodes of unreal Western life and of doubtful morality (' thrilliag, startling, enthralling ! ' as the posteia say), depicting passion exalted, and trickery and cunning, are thrown upon the screen brought from the West to enlighten and instruct the youth of the Bastl What wonder that the narrow home is deemed dull beyond endurance, and school restrictions irksome and galling 1 What wonder that the teacher is not beheved, and is thought old-fashioned and out of date when she tells of the careful way in which girlhood is shielded in Western lands."

There is no instnmient of that new knowledge more typical and up-to-date than the cinema. Nor do such new inventions affect the great nations alone. French films are being brought over from Tahiti to the Cook Islands, while in Samoa the picture palace was closed because two boys committed " robbery with violence " under the inspiration of the pictures they had seen. In this and a score of other ways we are infecting the non- Christian nations. Can anyone watch the process without a sinking of the heart ? Who is there to encourage the traffic in good and put an embargo on evil ?

But the heart sinks once again as we ask what will be the effect on the life of the West. I have before me a circular sent to manufacturers by an Emplojonent Agency in the North of England, which offers to supply Chinese workmen, skilled and unskilled. That, too, is a symbol. At their own desire or imder the compulsion of the Labour unions, we may repatriate these varied races from the Western front, but their presence is a sign of the times, — ^like the footprint Robinson Crusoe found in the sand, a portent and a prediction. If they do not come to us, our sons and daughters will go to them, and in that way we shall receive back the varied infections of Africa and the East. C. T. Loram writes in reference to South Africa : —

" It is possible for a large group, weak in its standard of social life, to drag down a stronger group through its very weakness. The backwardness of the Southern States in the United States of America is partly attributable to the presence of masses of imeduoated Negroes, who are dragging down the Whites to a lower level socially, politically, and economically." ^

Since the war we are all in like case : from this time on we shall all live in the presence of the imeducated masses of lower civilizations. The solidarity of the human race is no theory, but a fact of which we now see the bearing in every sphere of life, and above all in relation to the soul of man. What of our own social morality ? What of the menace to our religion ? It has been said before, but the war has given it a burning

1 The Education of the South African Native, p. 12.

cogency : we must either Christianize heathenism, or it will heathenize us, and heathenism is a matter of social life just as much as of religion.

II

In face of such a peril the old artificial controversy between the social worker and the friend of foreign missions is out of date. Though he may feel the constant need to insist that what is out of sight may too easily drop out of mind, the typical worker for foreign missions is no longer a man of one idea. He is not now blinded by a complacent theology to the inconsistencies of Christian nations. In these days he has to speak in the gate with men of Africa and the East who defend their traditions by lifting the veil from the darker places of our own civilization. He sees the changes wrought by the Gospel in lands afar off, and he longs that the same power should be manifest amid the heathenism of his own beloved land. Above all, he loiows that the nations are members one of another, and that in its need and weakness all the world is kin.

On what used to be the other side of the fence, the approval of the real social worker is no longer difficult for the missionary to secure. I use the word " real " with intent. There are many social enthusiasts who are not workers. They are indignant in face of the wrongs of Western life, they hope to do something to remedy them, and perhaps they may even be in process of training. For them there is only one cause worth espousal, and they know exactly what ought to be done. It is such as these who sniff at foreign missions. But the fact remains that they have not put on their harness ; how little, then, can they know what battle means.

When, however, we are dealing with veterans, men and women who have lived among the poor, who have helped to put education within the reach of the working man, who have borne the friction and weariness of public administration, and have done these things in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, we are sure of a friendly hearing. They have been beaten too often to be cocksure, they know from the inside the limitations of their instrument, and they realize that economically and socially the world is one. They know that you cannot save Whitechapel, if you ignore Calcutta, and that any improvement in the conditions of Shanghai is, from every point of view, so much gain to Lancashire. Above all, they have learnt by grim experience that all progress depends on character — how often have their charges fallen back for want of it and their work come to disaster or decay ! — and they see no way of getting that character but in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Tell them that you are taking His (iospel to foreign lands, to recruit the crusaders who will make the world new in His name, and they are with you at once. They give their strength for the Kingdom on its intensive side, but they know that for others the call is extension. It is the same Kingdom, and both rejoice together.

But these sympathetic friends would be the first to tell you that they know little of the details of missionary work. Still less do they understand how far it reaches into the social life of many peoples. How should they ? Even the missionary has little time to grasp all the implications of his own work.

That is why it is worth whUe to try to state the case. Social worker and missionary alike will be more confident as they see their service in a larger setting, and through their imity they will both gain courage and perhaps more clearly recognize their way.

Ill

But why should we say, as we did earlier, that to produce our effect we must "Christianize heathenism ? " Why not look to other faiths ? Because Christianity is pre-eminently the religion which touches man as a social being. The fact that Christianity has not been tried in any completeness in the so-called Christian countries is no reason why we should ignore the results it has already produced. Wherever it has been given its fair chance, it has shown its power. to redeem the life of the community. It is worth while to consider this point rather carefully.

What do we imderstand by "the social problem " ? The phrase is hard-worked nowadays, indeed it is almost indispensable to much contemporary thought, and yet, as I attempt to analyse it, I find how loose my own thinking has been and I suspect that few of us have gone deep enough to fix its meaning. We use the phrase, I take it, when we are seeking for the way in which Society — ^the organization, or better the organism, of men and women as they depend on one another — ^may be delivered from its diseases and led forth into perfect health. We are asking that all the relations of human life may be brought to their highest and noblest development. The consideration of what Society is, we call sociology ; but the social problem means the discussion of what

Society ought to be. Matthew Arnold in "Rugby- Chapel " writes : —

" See ! In the roeks of the world Marches the host of mankind, A feeble, wavering line.

Where are they tending ? — A God MarshaU'd them, gave them their goal."

In spite of pessimistic phrasing Matthew Arnold has got to the kernel of the matter. Mankind is marching to an ideal goal. That march is the social problem.

Now I suppose there is no religion which is not closely bound up with a social order. In Hinduism, for instance, religious theory counts for so little compared with social observances that you may believe what you will, as long as you maintain the ordinary Hindu rules and customs in regard to eating, marriage, and the like. Islam, too, provides a social system of a well-marked type. But imless a religion gives its followers a sense of an ideal goal, and makes them conscious that they are marching towards it, it may order Society never so minutely, but it has no conception of the social problem. It is not too much to say that no religion but Christianity has got this conception in any effective form.

Animism plainly cannot provide it. How can there be any sense of an ideal social order when men are, so to speak, perpetually on the jump because a spirit is peeping at them out of the dark ravine or whispering spells of chancy evil in the rustling leaves of the great tree ? The essence of Society is order, and animism tells of nothing but caprice. The animistic peoples are not armies seeking a goal, but sheep without a shepherd — not even a flock, but irregular groups scattered before the wolves of terror.

Further, it cannot be too often insisted that within the great non-Christian religions the daily faith by which men live, and specially women, is really an animism which has been carried over into and sheltered imder the higher system. We are making a low estimate if we say that threequarters of the actual worship of those who are supposed to follow the theories of the great ethnic religions of India, China, and Japan, is concerned with buying the favour or averting the ill-will of spirits who act according to no moral principle, but simply on their own incalculable whims. Take the following : —

" Whenever it was proposed to make a cut through a mountain, the first question that arose was, ' Will it spoil the Feng Shui of the place ? ' . . . Dragons, it appears, inhabit the under regions, and to disturb them is highly inadvisable, not to say perilous. . . . There are certain localities where, if the Taoist priests or geomanoers should forbid the opening of a mine or the erecting of a derrick, a whole village or a score of villages would arise en masse and drive the intruding dragon-disturbers out of the country. The people of these villages are without either heat or light, except that furnished by the burning of weeds, grass, or corn-stalks, or a tallow dip, a dish of grease or oU, but that does not matter — their superstitions outweigh their comforts." '

Such instances, which could be paralleled a hundred times in popiJar Buddhism or Hinduism, will show how in the great race religions, as in savagery, animism clogs the steps of progress.^

Since Taoism, the most primitive of the three religions of China, is mainly animistic in its worship, we shall scarcely expect it to provide us with any solution of the social problem, Confucianism, the central Chinese faith, is not much better.

• Isaac Taylor Headland, Home Life in China, pp. 263-4. See also the typical story in Bitten, The liegeneraiion of New China, p. 48. 2 Even in Islam thereiare many traces of animistic ideas.

Its law contains a fine morality to which the Chinese owe a great debt, but, as it is based on the veneration of ancestors, dead and gone, most reforming Chinese would tell you that its influence was to be dreaded. Ancestor worship is one cause of the carelessness that never restores any public work ; if the steps of the " Bund " on the river front of Hankow are tmdermined by the current, it will occur to no one to put them into repair. Next season the damage will spread. Need we seek further for the reason than that China has been trained for so many centuries to look backward for her golden age, and not forward to the Kingdom of God ? Social advance in any land might adopt as its motto Elijah's cry, " Take away my life, for I am not better than my fathers." To the Confucianist such a prayer would be flat blasphemy. Who would dare to dream of improving on the past ? Buddhism is the third ingredient of Chinese worship. Can that save Chinese social life ? The question vitally affects Japan, Ceylon, Burma, and Tibet, as well as China. Of all the non- Christian beliefs, Buddhism is the most beautiful. It is difficult for us of the West to understand it completely, and we should not exaggerate its pecidiarities, but it seems clear, for the most part, that its ideal of salvation is self-regarding, and that its general trend is pessimistic. By grim and grinding struggle towards morality a man should seek his own redemption ; redemption consists in deliverance from desire, and therefore, from a life that must be full of pain. Above all, strict Buddhism has no God to be the centre of aspiration. Here is a goal indeed, but it is the negation of anj'^thing that can be called Society. Buddhism has not the essentials of a social faith.

The same desire for deliverance - from life because of its pain is characteristic of the higher Hinduism, that is, of all Hinduism which is not animism in disguise. A friend of mine, a woman missionary in Benares, told me a story which leads straight to the heart of Hindu philosophy. A father said to her, " No, I don't want my daughter to learn to write. She wUl marry and leave us for her mother-in-law's house, and then, if she can write, she will send letters and tell me how unhappy she is, and I couldn't bear it." It is exactly so. In the strictest and most typical Hindu thinking joy is forgotten, and beauty ; love is left out of account. All the emphasis is laid on the light affliction with which we pay for their possession. "Escape desire; escape from life activity ; go out into the jungle alone ; sleep on no bed ; cross no tilled land — that would bring back contact with the material, miserable world again ; meditate in solitude till you are lost in God; so will you find release from the suffering of man's existence."

Such principles go far to explain the fact that India is governed by others. On the practical side they insure that at an age when in Christian lands, upon City Cotincil or Trade Union or Housing Committee, their social influence would be at its zenith, Indian men of spiritual aspiration retire from the seeking, struggling, miguided multitude. That is to say, the government of town or village is left in the hands of those who, on the Hindu hypothesis, have made the great refusal to the spiritual call. On the theoretic side the result is the same. The man of ideals can have only one aspiration, to escape from life's contacts, its desires, and its pain. The attempt to serve Society is so much effort misapplied.

Again, the higher Hindtiism teaches of a God whom it is impossible to know. It insists that any positive attribute grasped by poor human thought must inevitably mislead. Men may only say, "He is not this," and "He is not that." To have a God no one knows is to have no God at all, and the result in daily life is the encouragement of idolatry, with all its degradations, because it offers just that touch with concrete fact, with something that can be seen and worshipped, for which human nature craves. Further, if God cannot be known, you have no standard by which to decide that one form of worship is higher and another is lower. To use a favourite Indian illustration, they may all be ways by which you come to the one goal. But if you do not know the centre, how can you be sure that the roads are leading to it ? The higher Hinduism can give neither chart nor compass. As a consequence, India has little of that protestantism, that revolt against untruth, which is necessary to cleanse worship and purify observance and morality. Then, too, she lies under the fatal incubus of caste, with which we shall deal later, the very antithesis of social progress. No, it is not to Hinduism that we shall look, beautiful as some of its elements may seem.

There remains Islam, the yoimgest and most polemic of the non-Christian religions. The condition of Moslem countries woiJd suggest that Islam is scarcely the religion for the social reformer. On examination it is easy to see the reasons. In the first place, to orthodox Moslem thought God is always the master, the oriental tyrant, seeking obedience, and giving blessing in return for obedience, but neither seeldng nor offering love. Thus the glory of a God so conceived is everything, irrespective of what happens to group or individual.

The second weakness is in the metalHc theory of the verbal inspiration of the Koran. The true Moslem will not even tolerate a translation, so important is it to keep every tittle of its Arabic wording. When Boutros Pasha, the Coptic Christian Premier of Egypt, was shot by el-Wardani, a Moslem fanatic, the British Government consulted the Sheikh-al- Islam, the greatest ecclesiastical lawyer, as to the legitimacy of the death sentence. After careful thought he replied that he could not give his approval. First, any demand for the blood of the murderer must come from the relatives of the victim. In this case it was presented by the Government. The second reason against approving the verdict was that killing with a bullet was not mentioned in the Koran. Third, Moslem law only pronounces in such a matter when the murdered man is a Moslem, that is to say, the murder of an infidel was a venial offence. Thus everjrthing turned on the legal system worked out by Mohammed for the Arabs of the seventh century. Into that system, hard as a cast-iron die, the social life of modem Moslem lands must be pressed, whatever be the consequences. If we take the attitude thus revealed, together with polygamy, the most reactionary of sex relations, we can understand why the peoples do not progress luider Moslem tutelage.

It is, then, especially in their influence on daily life — that is to say, in their social impact — that the non-Christian religions are most obviously defective. Any failure to find the Way, the Truth and the Life is heavily penalized in the common relations of every day. The more men really know of the non-Christian religions of the world, the more they are sure of their inadequacy. I do not refer to the controversialists of the old missionary school, but to men like D. B. Macdonald, J. N. Farquhar, and the late James Hope Moulton, who view the faiths they study with a certain affectionate sympathy. Yet these, and such as these, are the scholars who set out the failure of the non-Christian systems with a definiteness which is convincing and indeed final.

IV

But, if the other faiths of the world cannot face the social problem, it is within the truth to say that Christianity cannot help facing it. The Teacher who told the story of the good Samaritan, and bade His disciples give a cup of cold water in His name, who washed the disciples' feet, and summed up religion as love to God and love to man, would never let His followers get far away from the service of the common life around them. He healed the sick and cast out devils. He preached the Gospel to the needy, and, better still. He lived it in their presence. Indeed, when St Paul writes, " For our sakes he became poor," he is only stating the literal truth. And though many who bear His name have compromised, accepting happy lives with no thought of the corresponding call to remove the misery around them, His closer followers have always felt the point of honour. It is broadly true to say that, with all its failures, organized Christianity has always been more essentially interested in the body, mind, and soul of man (taking the three together) than the most enlightened society outside the Christian influence. Therein Christians are simply following Him whose name they bear. There is no sympathy in human history so broad or so refined as that of the Carpenter of Nazareth. The preached Gospel has always as its by-product the creation of a new social order.

I am not ignoring the crass imfaithfulness of the Church to her Master's example. No one can paint the selfishness of nominal Christians in colours as dark as it deserves. Often the Church has tacitly allied itself with the rich against the poor, wMle certain Churches at certain times have ranged themselves openly with the forces of general reaction. Yet again and again, as the Church has simk back, it has been renewed by some of those who loved their Lord. Jesus stands always at the centre recalling men to His standard. His story in the Gospels cuts clean across every social abuse. The lapses of Christians have never been so far-reaching as the revivals, and the life of Christian nations has risen steadily with the life of the Church. Christianity, in proportion as it is living, must be interested in all that concerns humanity.

But the statement that Christianity is concerned with the body, mind and soul, three in one, would lose half its meaning if we did not add that Christianity is also committed to progress. The summary criticism of the great religions already given is enough to show that they all fail here. Yet surely the gift of progress is something we must require of any God we -can worship. Faith must produce advance. You cannot prove with formal logic that progress is essential to true religion, but once it has grasped what progress means, the human spirit can never cease to use the idea as a touchstone. Once the mind really knows the meaning of " Grow old along with me 1 the best is yet to be," 1 or, " The earnest expectation of the creation waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God," ^ an instinct tells us that these things are true. Nor are they true by withdrawal from the surroundings in which we are set, but by a transfiguration in which these surroundings must also share.