Much slower, of course, are the more costly and difficult works of the great trans-continental railway. The story of Mr. Rhodes's correspondence, up to the year 1899, with our Colonial Office on this most ambitious engineering proposal, is related in Mr. Hensman's newly published HISTORY OF RHODESIA. Among the arguments adduced by Mr. Rhodes in favour of so truly an Imperial undertaking are the noble uses to be made of it in putting down the slave-trade. It would enable much more effectual means to be employed to this humane end than the present inadequate and expensive blockades of river mouths by gun-boats. Then there are the substantial benefits to British trade accruing from the supply of railwaymaterial and rolling-stock, and other home-manufactures, to the value of many millions of pounds sterling. Fortunately there are capitalists who are supplying all the funds necessary for the Rhodesian extensions from Bulawayo and Salisbury of this great trunk railway. Its ultimate connection with Cairo, by way of the Central African lakes and Khartoum, may now be regarded as well within the range of practical politics and finance.

In estimating the future payableness of this work, it is to be borne in mind that there are regions of much fertility awaiting development throughout the course of the proposed railway. In many places much preparatory colonisation has been effected, and useful works executed, some of which date back to more than a generation ago. There is the Stevenson road,

for instance, a monument of successful missionary enterprise. It connects the great water-ways of Lakes Nyassa and Tanganyika, and is two hundred and twenty miles in length. The trade-route, of which this road forms a part, between Nyassaland and the Congo River, has long been a frequented highway. Nyassaland was once densely populated, but has suf fered in bygone times from the terrible devastations of the slave-raiders. Under happier conditions it is now proving a most valuable country. It is becoming so industrially settled, and there is so much traffic through it, that in the year 1895 no less than three hundred and fifty thousand letters and parcels were dealt with by its postal officials.

One of the results of the pacification of the Soudan, and the consequent security of Upper Egypt, is that by the expenditure of English capital, under the direction of English engineers, a lake of two hundred miles in length at Assuan is now being formed. Trans-continental telegraphs and railways, bridges, roads, a new lake of two hundred miles long, irrigation-works, industrial colonies, out-posts for repressing the slavetrade, honest and progressive government for myriads of helpless wretches, and, as a mercenary make-weight, an ever widening market for our home manufactures, such are the fruits of our rescue-work in these distant regions of the earth.

S. C. NORRIS, J.P. (Late Mining-Commissioner in Rhodesia.)

DURING the last few months, since the attention of Europe has been so emphatically drawn to China, the searchlight of the Press has been turned full on that bewildering country; and as a factor in the strangest convulsion of modern times, the work of the missionary societies has not been overlooked. Many people regard the missionary at ordinary times merely as an inconvenient and superfluous by-product of Christianity. Their earliest impressions of him were perhaps derived from the picture on the cover of a missionary publication specially intended for the edification of youth, which depicted him as a stiffly conventional person in a black coat, standing under a palm-tree holding up a small volume to the respectful gaze of a man and two boys dark in complexion and very scantily clad. Years have altered the cover of the missionary publication but not the impression it made; and as they saw the missionary then they see him still, a rigid awkward figure amazingly incongruous among the palms and temples of the immemorial East. times of peace this rigid incongruity provokes a smile; in times of difficulty and danger it incurs rebuke as well as contempt.

In

Fault is found less often with the missionary than with his methods. His critics as a rule give him credit for good intentions, earnestness, devotion to his work, and for considerable self-sacrifice; and they would generally be willing to tolerate him if he did not insist upon making himself intolerable. If he were a little more amenable to advice, more flexible,

more ready to adapt himself to his surroundings, a use might be found for him; he too might have his niche in the great political and commercial scheme of the world. Some indeed would prefer, with Mr. Thorold Dickson, for example, in a recent number of this magazine, to abolish him altogether, or at least to confine him to the Near East, to such fields of labour as Whitechapel and Bethnal Green. But even they recognise that the abolishing of the missionary in the present state of public opinion is a counsel of perfection on which it is useless to insist, and all that can be done in the circumstances is to try and prevail on him to take a reasonable view of his position.

The man who sets out with the hope of evangelising China is invited in the first place to realise that the great majority of the Chinese are already on the way to heaven, while too many of our own countrymen, for lack of guides, are pursuing a very different path. Should the missionary plead that though his countrymen may complain of a lack of guidance they cannot justly be said to suffer from any conspicuous lack of guides, and still persist in carrying his merchandise to the land of his choice, he is urged at least to be governed there by one or two plain rules. In the first place he should carefully refrain from teaching any specific Christian dogma. "The mysteries and metaphysical inconsistencies of Christianity" (which would have been so useful in Whitechapel) are, it seems, wholly unintelligible to the Chinese masses; partly because the Chinese language

is ill-adapted to convey ideas so foreign to the Chinese mind, and partly because the average Chinaman. is already stuffed so full of philosophy and religion that he can hold no more. The faith which found its way to the heart and conscience of Greek and Syrian and Scythian, of Celt and Goth, has no message for China. A still greater hindrance is presented in the fact that Christianity is inseparably associated in the Chinese mind with the political projects which in the past it has frequently heralded.

The first of these obstacles is not so insurmountable as it seems at first sight. The difficulty of acquiring a complete mastery of the Chinese language is no doubt immense, and yet Europeans do contrive to learn it for diplomatic and commercial purposes. The religious teacher treads on more delicate ground than the trader and the diplomatist, but even this difficulty may be exaggerated. It would not be correct to say that Buddhism is the religion of China; but the whole of China is penetrated by its teachings, and every Buddhist is familiar with the idea of sin, repentance, expiation, the efficacy of prayer, hell, and heaven. It is not easy to believe that the tongue in which millions have learned of the miraculous birth of Gautama and of his awakening after death, can find no words in which to relate the Christian story of the Incarnation and the Resurrection. There are Chinese scholars who hold that the Chinese version of the New Testament reflects the original more faithfully than our own. From the influence of Buddhism in China, the missionary may derive still further encouragement. The Chinese, we are told, have such an abhorrence of the foreigner that we can never hope to overcome the prejudices of that exclusive race. But every one knows

that Buddhism itself is a foreign religion in China, and the greater part of Chinese Buddhist literature has been imported from abroad. Its victory might have been still more complete had it not been for its monastic basis which the Chinese, for whom ancestor-worship is the keystone of the social fabric, regard with a certain contempt.

Since the Founder of Christianity was condemned to death as a political agitator, there has rarely been any religious persecution which was not inspired or explained by reasons of state; and to this rule the recent massacres in China have been no exception. The gravest disadvantage with which modern Christianity in China has to contend is undoubtedly the fact that it was presented to that country at the bayonet's point, and is closely connected in consequence with past humiliations and acute apprehensions for the future; and it is impossible to deny that this suspicion has some justification, though for this the British Protestant societies are not to blame. The cause which the missionary has at heart would be better advanced if his Government could agree to ignore him altogether, but this could hardly be done without seriously affecting the position of his countrymen in China; since the Chinese would find it difficult to discriminate with any degree of certainty between the European who might be murdered with impunity and the European whose death would be reckoned an international outrage. It should not be forgotten, however, that Christian enterprise in China does not date from the Treaty of Tientsin. The city of Si-gnan-fu, whose name has grown familiar to Englishmen since it became the refuge of the Manchu dynasty, was once an outpost of Christianity; and a tablet.

still exists in that remote city which records that in the seventh century "the illustrious religion had spread itself in every direction and Christian temples were in a hundred cities." There is no need to conclude too hastily that the tide which overwhelmed those early pioneers can never ebb again.

But if the Christian missionary is to preach no distinctive Christian dogma, what is he to do? He is to occupy himself with ethics. The sacred books of the Chinese inculcate honesty, charity, and an upright life, and "to see Christians practising these virtues in a higher degree than themselves will influence the Chinese." But will it make Christians of them? That, after all, is the question which concerns the missionary most closely. The Englishman living a life somewhat more honest, more upright and more charitable than his own, may strike the Chinaman as an admirable and elevating spectacle, but in order to do this is it necessary to call oneself a Christian missionary? Would not a Christian merchant or a Christian consul answer the purpose just as well?

mis

A French statesman with a dislike to vague generalities once de clared that there are social questions but no social question. We We may reverse the saying and say that, broadly speaking, there are no missionary questions but only a missionary question. The point at issue, that is to say, is not whether the missionary is a benefit in this locality or in that, but whether he is wanted anywhere. As we complain of him to-day in China, we complained of him yesterday in Uganda, and the day before yesterday in India. His chief characteristics have been the same everywhere and in all ages, and first among them is his faculty for

disturbing the traditional repose of the lands he visits; and what is the lament to which we are now listening but an echo of that ancient cry of dismay, These that have turned the world upside down are come hither also? It is this which makes it impossible for many people, advocates of order, respecters of authority, to contemplate the missionary with any patience. Whatever our neighbours may say of our untamable ferocity, we are still for peace at almost any price, and so high is the value which we set upon a quiet life that we find much to commend in the Voltairean conception of God as a great permanent Chief of Police whom, had He not existed, we must have invented in the interests of decency and good government. It follows that no religion which makes a man feel tolerably secure and comfortable is to be lightly despised, much less up-rooted, whatever name it bears. "Some time ago," says Dr. Eitel in his Lectures on Buddhism, "a Chinese gentleman, a Confucianist to the backbone, expressed in a conversation with me his contempt for Buddhism, but at the same time, when I showed him a Chinese translation of a Buddhist Sutra, he owned he had learned it by heart. When I asked him how he came to study a Buddhist book, he assured me with the greatest seriousness that it was universally known, and proved also by his own experience, that the reading of this Sutra was a never-failing panacea for stomach-ache." Who does not sympathise with the Confucianist? What more satisfactory test of the value of a religion could one ask for? If the Christian Church could have accommodated herself to this view, if she could have decided that her first aim was to make man comfortable, her highest inspiration to let well alone, what

infinite suffering the world might have been spared! She refused from the first to adopt this tranquil policy, and with that refusal her character and destiny are bound up.

We are all familiar with the arguments of the Little-England party in politics (it is difficult to find a more polite and equally intelligible term) as opposed to the advocates of Imperialism. Are there no Hooligans in Southwark, they say, that we must needs undertake to police the Afghan frontier? Why labour to improve the irrigation of Egypt while dwellers in Shadwell are short of water every summer? And the cost of these distant enterprises ! The millions spent in righting the wrongs of a handful of Outlanders in South Africa might have settled the question of housing the poor of London once for all. The nation has chosen, for better or worse, between these two policies; the Christian Church had no choice. The Imperial ideal is for her the only ideal. She has followed it down the centuries often by miry and doubtful ways, with garments torn and soiled: she follows it now, we hope, with cleaner feet; but when she turns her back upon it, it will be time for the eagles to gather together. It is not easy to find a name for the LittleEnglander of Christianity, but he exists and has probably always existed. When "the apostles which were at Jerusalem sent Peter and John to Samaria," when Gregory dispatched his evangelists to Britain, how warmly he must have protested in the name of patriotism and common sense against such reckless waste of means and men while Jerusalem was still unconverted and Rome a sink of sink of corruption. He may even have urged that Samaria had already been for many centuries in possession of a highly civilised form of religion, and that the tongue of the Ancient Briton

was ill-adapted for the exposition of the subtle mysteries of an oriental creed. Had his counsels prevailed we should be living to-day in a pagan Europe, with Christianity existing perhaps as an interesting survival side by side with Judaism behind some Ghetto wall. It is open to anyone to affirm that the Church's victory was the world's misfortune, that pagan Europe would have been a better place to live in than Christian Europe; it is not open to anyone to ignore the fact that the Gospel which proclaims the Divine message of reconciliation, holds also that mournful saying,-Not peace but a sword. No one will maintain that the individual missionary is invariably all that a religious teacher ought to be. He is sometimes narrow and ignorant, sometimes wanting in tact, sometimes, even, in charity. In this respect he is not altogether unlike religious teachers and others who stay at home. It is true that what is a drawback at home may be a disaster abroad, and that the Church should choose her ablest men for foreign service especially in the East; and since missionwork can only be effectively and permanently injured from within, any criticism which drives home to the advocates of missions the sense of their responsibility in this matter is of the greatest value. The evangelist whose equipment consists chiefly of good intentions is perhaps less wanted in China than anywhere else. But it is not to the shortcomings of individuals that our attention has been so frequently drawn of late, but rather to the mission itself; and it cannot be said too plainly that in rejecting the missionary principle we are in danger, according to the German proverb, of throwing out the child with the bathwater. In arraigning that principle we are arraigning Christianity itself; and before the missionary can be