Ad Astra * Index: Letters from a Chinese Official, New York, 1903
To grave and fundamental distinctions of national character and life commonly correspond similar distinctions in religious belief. For religion is, or should be, the soul of which the State is the body, the idea which informs and perpetuates institutions. It is not, I am aware, in this sense that the word is always understood, for religion is not seldom identified with superstition. I propose, however, in this place to distinguish the two, and to concern myself mainly with what I conceive to be properly termed religion. But I note, at the outset, that among the masses of China superstition is as widely spread as among those of any European country. Buddhism and Taoism lend themselves with us to practices and beliefs as regrettable and absurd as any that are fostered by Christianity among yourselves. Our people, like yours, hope by ritual and prayer to affect the course of the elements or to compass private and material benefits; they believe in spirits and goblins, as Roman Catholics do in saints; they worship idols, practice magic, and foster the impositions of priests. But all this I pass by as extraneous to true religion. I regard it merely as a manifestation of the weakness of human nature, a vent for the peccant humors of the individual soul. Different indeed is the creed and the cult on which our civilization is founded; and it is to this, which has been so much misunderstood by Europeans, that I propose to devote a few words of explanation.
Confucianism, it is sometimes said, is not a religion at all; and if by religion be meant a set of dogmatic propositions dealing with a supernatural world radically distinct from our own, the statement is, no doubt, strictly true. It was, in fact, one of the objects of Confucius to discourage preoccupation with the supernatural, and the true disciple endeavors in this respect to follow in his master's footsteps. "Beware of religion," a Mandarin says, meaning "beware of superstition"; and in this sense, but in this sense only, Confucianism is irreligious. Again, it is said that Confucianism is merely an ethical system; and this, too, is true, in so far as its whole aim and purport is to direct and inspire right conduct. But, on the other hand—and this is the point I wish to make—it is not merely a teaching, but a life. The principles it enjoins are those which are actually embodied in the structure of our society, so that they are inculcated not merely by written and spoken word, but by the whole habit of everyday experience. The unity of the family and the State, as expressed in the worship of ancestors, is the basis not merely of the professed creed, but of the actual practice of a Chinaman. To whatever other faith he may adhere—Buddhist, Taoist, Christian—this is the thing that really matters to him. To him the generations past and the generations to come form with those that are alive one single whole. All live eternally, though it is only some that happen at any moment to live upon earth. Ancestor-worship is thus the symbol of a social idea immense in its force to consolidate and bind. Its effects in China must be seen to be believed; but you have a further example in a civilization with which you are better acquainted—I mean, of course, the civilization of Rome.
This, then, is the first and most striking aspect of our national religion; but there is another hardly less important in its bearing on social life. Confucianism is the exponent of the ideal of work. Your eighteenth-century observers, who laid so much stress on the ritual of the Emperor's yearly ploughing, were nearer to the heart of our civilization than many later and less sympathetic inquirers. The duty of man to labor, and primarily to labor on the soil, is a fundamental postulate of our religion. Hence the worship of Mother Earth, the source of all increase; hence the worship of Heaven, the giver of light and rain; and hence also that social system whose aim is to secure a general access to the soil. The willing dedication of all, in brotherhood and peace, to labor blessed by the powers of heaven and earth, such is the simple, intelligible ideal we have set before our people, such is the conception we have embodied in our institutions. And if you seek more than this, a metaphysical system to justify and explain our homely creed, that too we have provided for our scholars. Humanity, they are taught, is a Being spiritual and eternal, manifesting itself in time in the series of generations. This Being is the mediator between heaven and earth, between the ultimate ideal and the existing fact. By labor, incessant and devout, to raise earth to heaven, to realize, in fact, the good that as yet exists only in idea—that is the end and purpose of human life; and in fulfilling it we achieve and maintain our unity each with every other, and all with the Divine. Here, surely, is a faith not unworthy to be called a religion. I do not say that it is consciously held by the mass of the people, for in no State does the mass of the people reflect. But I claim for us that the life of our masses is so ordered and disposed as to accord with the postulates of our creed; that they practise, if they do not profess, the tenets of our sages; and that the two cardinal ideas on which every society should rest, brotherhood and the dignity of labor, are brought home to them in direct and unmistakable form by the structure of our secular institutions.
Such, then, in a few words, is the essence of Confucianism, as it appears to an educated Chinaman. Far harder is it for me, though I have spent so long in Europe, to appreciate the significance of Christianity. But perhaps I may be pardoned if I endeavor to record my impressions, such as they are, gathered from some study of your sacred books, your history, and your contemporary life. In such observations as I have made I have had in view the question not so much of the truth of your religion—of that I do not feel competent to judge—as of its bearing upon your social institutions. And here, more than anywhere, I am struck by the wide discrepancy between your civilization and ours. I cannot see that your society is based upon religion at all; nor does that surprise me, if I have rightly apprehended the character of Christianity. For the ideal which I seem to find enshrined in your gospels and embodied in the discussions of your divines is one not of labor on earth, but of contemplation in heaven; not of the unity of the human race, but of the communion of saints. Whether this be a higher ideal than our own I do not venture to pronounce; but I cannot but hold it to be less practicable. It must be difficult, one would think, if not impossible to found any stable society on the conception that life upon earth is a mere episode in a drama whose centre of action lies elsewhere. An indifference to what, from a more mundane point of view, must appear to be fundamental considerations, a confusion of temporal distinctions in the white blaze of eternity, a haphazard organization of those details of corporate life the serious preoccupation with which would be hardly compatible with religion—such would appear to be the natural result of a genuine profession of Christianity. And such, if I understand it aright, was the character of your civilization in what you describe as the Ages of Faith. Asceticism, monastic vows, the domination of priests, the petty interests of life and death overshadowed and dwarfed by the tremendous issues of heaven and hell, beggary sanctified, wealth contemned, reason stunted, imagination hypertrophied, the spiritual and temporal powers at war, body at feud with soul, everywhere division, conflict, confusion, intellectual and moral insanity—such was the character of that extraordinary epoch in Western history when the Christian conception made a bid to embody itself in fact. It was the life-and-death struggle of a grandiose ideal against all the facts of the material and moral universe. And in that struggle the ideal was worsted. From the dust of battle the Western world emerged, as it had entered, secular: avowedly worldly, frankly curious, bent with a passionate zeal on the mastery of all the forces of nature, on beauty, wealth, intelligence, character, power. From that time on, although you still profess Christianity, no attempt has been made to christianize your institutions. On the contrary, it has been your object to sweep away every remnant of the old order, to dissociate Church from State, ritual and belief from action. You have abandoned your society frankly to economic and political forces, with results which I have endeavored in an earlier letter to characterize..
But while thus, on the one hand, your society has evolved on a purely material basis, on the other religion has not ceased to be recognized among you. Only, cut off from its natural root in social institutions, it has assumed forms which I cannot but think to be either otiose or dangerous. Those who profess Christianity—and there are few who, in one way or another, do not—either profess it only with their lips, and having in this way satisfied those claims of the ideal from which no human being is altogether free, turn back with an unencumbered mind and conscience to the pursuit of egotistic ends; or else, being seriously possessed by the teachings of Christ, they find themselves almost inevitably driven into the position of revolutionists. For those teachings, if they be fully accepted and fairly interpreted, must be seen to be incompatible with the whole structure of your society. Enunciated, centuries ago, by a mild Oriental enthusiast, unlettered, untravelled, inexperienced, they are remarkable not more for their tender and touching appeal to brotherly love than for their aversion or indifference to all other elements of human excellence. The subject of Augustus and Tiberius lived and died unaware of the history and destinies of imperial Rome; the contemporary of Virgil and of Livy could not read the language in which they wrote. Provincial by birth, mechanic by trade, by temperament a poet and a mystic, he enjoyed in the course of his brief life few opportunities, and he evinced little inclination, to become acquainted with the rudiments of the science whose end is the prosperity of the State. The production and distribution of wealth, the disposition of power, the laws that regulate labor, property, trade, these were matters as remote from his interests as they were beyond his comprehension.
Never was man better equipped to inspire a religious sect; never one worse to found or direct a commonwealth. Yet this man it is whose naive maxims of self-abnegation have been accepted as gospel by the nations of the West, the type of all that is predatory, violent, and aggressive. No wonder your history has been one long and lamentable tale of antagonism, tumult, carnage, and confusion! No wonder the spiritual and temporal powers have oscillated between open war and truces as discreditable to the one as to the other! No wonder that down to the present day every man among you who has been genuinely inspired with the spirit of your religion has shrunk in horror from the society which purports to have adopted its principles as its own! It is the Nemesis of an idealist creed that it cannot inform realities; it can but mass together outside and in opposition to the established order the forces that should have shaped and controlled it from within. The spirit remains un-inbodied, the body uninformed. So is has been and so it is with this polity of yours. It purports to represent a superhuman ideal; in reality, it does not represent even one that is human. It is of the earth, earthy; while from heaven far above cries, like a ghost's, the voice of the Nazarene, as pure, as clear, as ineffectual, as when first it flung from the shores of Galilee its challenge to the world-sustaining power of Rome.
The view which I have thus ventured to give, candidly, as I feel it, of the relation of your society to your religion, will, I am aware, be received by most of my readers with astonishment, if not with indignation. Permit me, then, to illustrate and confirm it by an example so patent and palpable that it cannot fail, I think, to make some appeal even to those who are most unwilling to face the truth.
If there is one feature more marked than another in the teaching of Christ it is his condemnation of every form of violence. No one can read the Gospels with an unprejudiced mind without being struck by the emphasis with which he reiterates this doctrine. "Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." These are his words, and they are spoken in sober earnestness, not in metaphor, nor yet as a counsel of perfection, something that should be but cannot be put into effect. No! they are the words of conviction and truth, backed by the whole character and practice of their author. The principle they embody may, of course, be disputed. It may be held—as in fact it always has been held by the majority of men in all ages—that force is essential to the preservation of society; that without it there could be no security, no order, no peace. But one who holds this view cannot be a Christian, in the proper sense of a follower of Christ. If, then, as is undoubtedly the case, this view lias been universally held throughout their whole history by the nations of the West, then, whatever they may call themselves, they cannot be truly Christian. Yet this consequence they have always refused to accept. They have interpreted the words of their founder to mean the reverse of what they say, and have conceived him, apparently without any sense of the solecism they were perpetrating, to be the defender and champion not only of their whole system of law, based as it is on the prison and the scaffold, but of all their wars, even of those which to the natural sense of mankind must appear to be the least defensible and the most iniquitous. In proof of what I say—if proof be required— I need not recur to historical examples. It will be enough to refer to the case which is naturally most present to my mind—the recent attack of the Western Powers on China. That there was grave provocation, I am not concerned to deny, though it was not with us that the provocation originated. But what fills me with amazement and even, if I must be frank, with horror, is the fact that the nations of Europe should attempt to justify their acts from the standpoint of the Gospel of Christ; and that there should be found among them a Christian potentate who, in sending forth his soldiers on an errand of revenge, should urge them, in the name of him who bade us turn the other cheek, not merely to attack, not merely to kill, but to kill without quarter! What further proof is needed of the truth of my general proposition that the religion you profess, whatever effect it may have on individual lives, has little or none on public policy ? It may inspire, here and there, some retired saint; it has never inspired those who control the State. What use is it, then, to profess that, in essence, it is a religion higher than ours? I care not to dispute on ground so barren. "By their fruits ye shall know them," said your own prophets; and to their fruits I am content to appeal. Confucianism may, as you affirm, be no religion at all; it may be an inferior ethical code; but it has made of the Chinese the one nation in all the history of the world who genuinely abhor violence and reverence reason and right. And here, lest you think that I am biased, let me call to my aid the testimony of the one among your countrymen who has known us intimately and long, and whose services to our State will never be forgotten by any patriotic Chinaman. In place of the ignorant diatribes of your special correspondents, listen for a moment to the voice of Sir Robert Hart:
"They are," he says of the Chinese, "well-behaved, law-abiding, intelligent, economical, and industrious; they can learn anything and do anything; they are punctiliously polite, they worship talent, and they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might; they delight in literature, and everywhere they have their literary clubs and coteries for learning and discussing each other's essays and verses; they possess and practice an admirable system of ethics, and they are generous, charitable, and fond of good works; they never forget a favor, they make rich return for any kindness, and, though they know money will buy service, a man must be more than wealthy to win public esteem and respect; they are practical, teachable, and wonderfully gifted with common-sense; they are excellent artisans, reliable workmen, and of a good faith that everyone acknowledges and admires in their commercial dealings; in no country that is or was, has the commandment 'Honor thy father and thy mother' been so religiously obeyed, or so fully and without exception given effect to, and it is in fact the keynote of their family, social, official, and national life, and because it is so 'their days are long in the land God has given them.' "
Thus Sir Robert Hart. I ask no better testimonial. Here are no superhuman virtues, no abnegation of self, no fanatic repudiation of ' I j . fundamental facts of human nature. But here is a life according to a rational ideal; and here
is a belief in that ideal so effective and profound that it has gone far to supersede the use of force. "They believe in right," says Sir Robert Hart— let me quote it once more—"they believe in right so firmly that they scorn to think it requires to be supported or enforced by might." Yes, it is we who do not accept it that practice the Gospel of peace; it is you who accept it that trample it underfoot. And—irony of ironies!—it is the nations of Christendom who have come to us to teach us by sword and fire that Right in this world is powerless unless it be supported by Might! Oh, do not doubt that we shall learn the lesson! And woe to Europe when we have acquired it! You are arming a nation of four hundred millions! a nation which, until you came, had no better wish than to live at peace
with themselves and all the world. In the name of Christ you have sounded the call to arms!
In the name of Confucius we respond!