10 THE GREAT AWAKENING

Chapter 10 THE GREAT AWAKENING The little one shall become a thousand, and the small one a strong nation ; I, the Lord, will hasten it in its time. -- ISAIAH. THE Manchurian Mission is just thirty years old this spring. The Church had been laboring for some years previous in other parts of China, it is true, but the work of our mission in the north dates from the arrival of Dr. John Ross, in 1872, in the treaty-port of Newchwang. The Irish Mission was established some three years earlier. Looking broadly at the history of those thirty years we may observe three well-defined periods:

1. The period of pioneering. From 1874 (when Dr. Ross may be said to have acquired the language, and fairly begun work in the capital of Moukden) to 1894 in short, from the start of the mission to the outbreak of the war with Japan. No one can ever know, except those veteran men and women who passed through the experience, the amount of patient toil and heroic self-sacrifice, that lies embedded in those twenty odd years when the foundations of the mission were being deeply and securely laid. To a large extent it was a time of quiet waiting and preparation ; but not without fruit. The opposition of the people to the messenger no less than to his message had to be lived down and gradually overcome. This of itself taxed to the full the wisdom and forbearance of the missionaries. As not infrequently happens in the beginnings of mission work, God greatly encouraged His servants by raising up almost at the first, a few choice converts of sterling character and apostolic zeal. Of such was old Wang, whose memory is enshrined in the heart of the native Church to this hour. Not less notable were blind Chang, Elder Hsu, Elder Chen, and Pastor Liu all of them fruits of the early pioneering days. At the close of those twenty years the membership of the Scotch Mission numbered 2341 souls. The Irish Mission had about an equal number, accordingly some 5000 souls at the close of 1894 represented the total Protestant community out of a population of 17,000,000. Then came the war with Japan. It was with much prayerful foreboding that the missionaries left their little flocks in the interior. It was a severe trial for the infant Church to be thus bereft of its leaders. But the converts stood the test well. When the missionaries were permitted to return a year later, to their great joy they found not a diminished Church, but one that had actually grown in their absence. The experience had revealed of what order it was, and it cheered the missionaries and nerved them for fresh efforts in the future. They had not labored in vain. The Church had divine life in itself. At the close of the war with Japan, the mission entered upon a new phase of its existence.

2. The period of pioneering was, in a manner, over. The period of popularity had begun. This lasted from 1895 to 1900 from the close of the Japanese War to the outbreak of " Boxerism " and is perhaps one of the brightest pages in the annals of missionary enterprise. This chapter is an attempt to describe the spiritual awakening of those five years, during which time the Church not only grew, but multiplied.

It is a great privilege to have lived through a movement like this. One can never think of it without mingled feelings of awe and thankfulness. It grew with such rapidity that it taxed the energies of the mission staff to the utmost. Statistics represent only the fruit gathered. They give no conception of the widespread character of the movement; that cannot be tabulated. Our difficulties arose out of the embarrassments occasioned by an overwhelming and sudden success. Instead of the old indifference to the gospel message, it seemed as though the people would take the Kingdom of Heaven by force. We found ourselves confronted by a mass of confessing humanity knocking for admittance at the door of the Christian Church. We examined candidates for baptism far into the night, yet crowds had to go away unseen. On circuit we would pass a village where last year there had been only a few inquirers, now we found hundreds awaiting our arrival, and these had traveled for long distances. The movement was not confined to any one class of society. It touched all, except perhaps the very highest, but even from this class also there were not wanting a few who came to us by night, and who in their hearts believed, but secretly, so to speak, " for fear of the Jews."

While yet in its beginnings, Mr. Inglis thus wrote of the new movement : " There is something to make the heart rise, when, after a day s journey, you come in sight of the crowd gathered to welcome you; when from point to point you find the same willing audiences; and when you meet men who say that Christ is in their hearts. The feeling must grow that here we are in the midst of a mighty stream, swelling from year to year and ever receiving new affluents. Checks and disappointments there are, but they are only the eddies at the bank, which must not take our attention from the onward rush of the main stream." A year later the same eye-witness wrote when the stream had swollen into full flood : " A river in flood carries away in its course whatever lies along its banks, both clean things and foul. So it is in the advance of Christianity the greater the stream, the larger the ad mixture of baser elements and the more turbid the current. It remains, then, for the Church and her ministers to do their part to keep the stream pure."

How to explain a phenomenon of this kind ? " Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions. To this inquiry an obvious but satisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its Great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favorable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose ; we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask not, indeed, what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian Church? " ! And first of all let us be clear as to what it was not. While it could obviously never have taken place without the previous labours of God s messengers, it was apparently not due to the direct instrumentality of any one man or group of men. Similar movements at home can frequently be traced to the commanding personality of some individual, who, by his sanctity of life or over-mastering eloquence, can powerfully influence large numbers of his fellowmen; but it was not so in Manchuria. The movement was not confined to any one locality. It sprang up almost simultaneously in widely- scattered and separated districts. In the quiet country hamlets and market-towns, no less than in the larger cities ; in the north as in the south, on the western plains and up into the remote Korean valleys in the east everywhere the new spirit spread, and men felt and owned its sway. But it was not a revival in the sense in which we understand the word. It did not originate in a deepened spiritual experience on the part of those already within the pale of the Church, and pass from them as the media of a quickened and contagious life to the heathen masses outside. No: it had its origin among the so-called heathen ; a power not understood of themselves seemed to be laying its sweet compulsion upon them, to which they readily yielded. It was an awakening as from the slumber of centuries. " The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, yet canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth." And yet with the fullest knowledge of the movement one shrinks from applying to it the term " Pentecostal." It was so in the matter of numbers, certainly, but except in rare instances men did not come to us " pricked in their hearts " and cry out to us in New Testament voices, " What must we do to be saved ? " Neither, on the other hand, was it an ignorant stampede of heathenism into the Church. The people themselves, many of them, did not understand why they came. They were caught up in the onward rush of the movement. Recollect that they had just passed through a great national crisis -- a crisis which had shaken their faith in old ideals. They turned in their helplessness, therefore, to the Christian Society for social and political salvation. God had " shaken " the nation; it remained for His ministers to point the suppliant people to that Kingdom of God, which cannot be shaken. To have repressed the whole movement by coldness or indifference, because of the mistaken motives inseparable from it, would have meant the shutting of our eyes to the opportunities of God s providence in the events of history. That the people should turn at all to the Church for enlightenment and guidance was due, in the first instance, to the long years of patient sowing and persistent preaching of the evangel of Jesus over the length and breadth of the land ; and to the broadcast distribution of Scriptures that found their way into the homes and hearts of the people. The lines of the mission had been laid from the first in prayerful expectation of just such a harvest, though when it came it surpassed the wildest dreams of the most sanguine, and touched with awe the spirit of every beholder.

Those silent years of ministry on the part of the missionary laid the train; in the providence of God it was the war with Japan that applied the igniting spark. The effects of that war, in Manchuria at least, were far - reaching. It wrought nothing short of a revolution in men’s minds. It altered for the time their whole attitude to the foreigner. It dealt a most salutary blow to their overweening conceit and insufferable pride. It opened their eyes to the rottenness of their own officials. It exposed the hollowness of the national pretensions; for here was a petty state, that but yesterday paid them " tribute," and to-day was their master. They knew that the secret of supremacy lay not so much in the character of the Japanese, as in the superior arts which they had borrowed from the nations of the West. The foreigner, therefore, was no longer a " thing " to be toyed with and despised. He possessed that which they lacked for the want of which they had suffered disgrace and defeat, but with which they might be able to save themselves and their nation from further disaster. Hence they began to look upon the foreigner with more kindly eyes, to " borrow his light," to cultivate friendly intercourse, and to invite his help.

Moreover, during the war with Japan the Christians suffered less, not more, than their heathen neighbors Outsiders did not fail to note that wherever the Japanese soldiers went they threw the aegis of their protection over the Christian converts and all Church property. Such clemency, while it popularized the Church, was not without its baneful influence upon individual members. Many who were poor before the war, were rich after it, and in some instances their riches grew up and choked the good seed of the kingdom. While there were many regrettable elements mixed up with the new movement which we now understand better than when we were in the midst of it still it is the unanimous testimony of those who witnessed it that the whole native Church during those five years of its popularity and success took an immense stride forward, and rose to an immeasurably higher level of spirituality than it had ever before attained.

Some of the characteristic features of this movement towards Christianity may here be noted :

1. Although most of the members were mere babes in Christ, there was everywhere manifest a keen appetite for biblical instruction. To meet this demand claimed all the time and energies of the missionaries. Bible-classes were in operation in all large centers, and a uniform scheme of lessons was printed at our own press in Moukden and distributed all over the Church. Examinations on these lessons were held at the end of the year, and the results revealed were extremely gratifying. At our annual Conference held in May 1900, it was stated by Mr. Bonfield, the agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society, who then paid us a visit, that of the total sales of their Society in China one-third had gone to Manchuria. Evidence surely that the movement was grounded on the word of God.

2. There was manifest, too, in our larger centers an increasing desire for higher education on Western lines for the children of the members. A number of native teachers, trained in Dr. Mateer’s College at Tung-chow- Fu, were secured for this work, and gave good promise that, with time and effective supervision, excellent educational results would accrue. Many of the officials showed a keen interest in the growth of these institutions, and were prepared to make them the model of national schools, on a large scale all over the country, when the opportunity for advance in that direction might offer itself.

3. A native monthly magazine was published at Moukden, which was much appreciated, not only by Church members, but by many of the more enlightened and progressive officials. It gave them information of events happening in Europe, which they could not otherwise obtain, and by means of articles on scientific, educational, and religious subjects was in every way fitted to lift the cloud of superstition and ignorance from the intellectual life of the people.

4. It was gratifying to notice the development of a spirit of independence amongst the various congregations of the native Church. The members, in most cases, voluntarily provided their own places of worship. They managed their own elementary schools. They made handsome donations to the good work of the hospitals. They took prominent part in the deliberations of Church courts, and they were prepared to call and to support their own native pastors as quickly as the Theological College could provide them.

It is impossible to review these five years without having one’s own faith strengthened. The advance made during that short time by the native Church inspires one with hope for the evangelisation of China. But while grateful for all the advance of these years, the missionaries could not shut their eyes to the fact that in spite of their best efforts they had not kept the stream pure. They recognized all too plainly that there were many elements in the Church’s life that marred its usefulness, weakened its witness, and hindered its advance. But what the missionaries could not do, God has Himself done. He who gave the years of popularity, now called the native Church to pass through a period of persecution. In that fiery furnace of affliction much of the dross has disappeared, bringing out into stronger relief the pure gold of the Church’s life and faith.