. But
in conversation with others I heard similar opinions more forcibly
put. They point out that the various exponents of Christianity insist
that each alone expounds the right version, which is puzzling to the
Chinese, and that the missionaries actually have not agreed as to the
name of their God, as they use five different characters.

Within the radius of an eighteen-penny cab fare from where I write, I
think there is plenty of spiritually productive work for all the
missionaries in China; work for all the sincere, self-sacrificing
missionaries--and there are still many of them in China--men animated
by the spirit of the Twelve Fishermen, who have not adopted their
profession as a means of livelihood, in addition to a secure income
getting an extra L30 for every baby born in their families. And
within the radius I speak of, they would not first have the task of
weaning the people away from the doctrines of Confucius or
Buddha--"Him all wisest, best, most pitiful, whose lips comfort the
world," which doctrines are the very breathing--the life--of their
social as well as spiritual being. When the Chinese see the German
Emperor using missionaries as live-bait to catch a province, and the
French insisting upon being given another as the price of a few
members of one of those religious orders they have expelled from
France, it is no wonder that from that stricken, bullied, cheated
people the cry goes up to the empty heavens--

"To my own Gods I go.
It may be they shall give me greater ease
Than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities."

X

EX ORIENTE LUX

What is a barbarian? In many of the Chinese edicts we see the term
perpetually applied to those people outside the Celestial Kingdom, and
to all those who are not Chinese. The Japanese are far too polite to
use such a word. Yet I have spoken to Japanese artists who, in
referring to European taste in Art, used a word equivalent to
barbarous. The average free-born Briton travelling round the world
carries with him, or is supposed to carry with him, his Bible, and a
taste for Bass's beer and beefsteak. According as a country does or
does not possess these essentials, and according as its own attributes
of civilisation are removed from his own standards of perfection, so
does he regard its inhabitants as more or less barbarians. (I was
rather amused watching a play in Tokio once, where the villain of the
piece was a red-whiskered Englishman, in a lo