The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1925, Page 67

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THE LUTHERAN PIONEER.

67

If the Chinese people were to file one by one past
a given point, the procession would never come to
anend. Before the last man of those living to-day

James Gilmour, Pioneer Missionary in Mongolia.

had gone by, another and a new generation would
have grown up, and so on forever. E

As a people the Chinese are strong, energetic,
enduring, and long-lived. Love of peace, absence
of caste, respect for superiors, great docility, and
frugality are outstanding characteristics; likewise,
in a greater degree than in any other race, a high
reverence for the past and a remarkable talent for
organization. These natural traits, united with a
great susceptibility on the part of the Chinese to
the influence of a strong personality, when hal-
lowed by the Holy Spirit through the workings of
the Gospel, go far to make China probably the
most promising mission-field of to-day.

The Chinese Language.

Much has been said in an unflattering manner
of the Chinese language, and it surely offers great
difficulties to one who desires to learn it. But it
also has certain advantages, since it lacks the draw-
backs of declension, conjugation, and grammar.

The written language is divided into three

classes, the ku wén of the classics, the wén li, or
literary style, and the Mandarin, which is spoken
by officials. The printed form of the Mandarin is
intelligible to 250,000,000 people. ‘There is no
other language in the whole world which is spoken
by so large a number of people. Christian litera-
ture is largely printed in wén li and can be under-
stood by scholars in every corner of China, while
a single version of the Mandarin Bible can be
understood by five-eighths of China’s teeming mil-
lions. In passing, it may be stated that a new
Chinese script has been invented which will greatly
simplify the written language and make its ac-
quirement much easier.

Religious Condition of the Field.

Three religions are recognized by the Chinese
masses. Confucianism, formerly the state religion,
is practically no religion at all, but a code of morals
and a system of government. Buddhism has about
80,000,000 Chinese followers; it came to China
from India. ‘Taoism, an older form of religion
than Confucianism, is to-day a religion of evil
spirits, with 120 sects; an outstanding character-
istic of Taoism is that it demands no belief in a
personal God. In fact, a remarkable peculiarity of
the religions named is that they are all three prac-
tically atheistic, thus making the Chinese, in a way,
a race of atheists. But above these forms of re-

Abbot of a Buddhist Monastery in China.

ligion, and in connection with them, stands an-
cestor worship as the dominating spiritual and
religious influence of the people and the chief
obstacle to Christianity. In India the Church has