women, be they in their own or in a strange country, men of culture and learning, who do their best to carry out in their daily lives the precepts which they know to be good, will be able slowly to raise the moral standard of those among whom they live, and give those who are more ignorant a higher conception of the Deity and of the relation of man to the Deity. They will be able to disabuse the untutored of the gross ideas of God which are so often formed—of such ideas, for instance, as that of an inhuman monster who is prepared to consign to eternal torture of the most barbarous description those whose faults are so trivial as not to meet with special punishment even here on earth ; and by the daily example of well-lived lives they will be able to afford an ideal which cannot but be helpful to those who would wish to practise the precepts which they know so well are true, but only so difficult to carry out in daily life.
This is what the best missionaries really are doing in China, and have been doing for years and years. Little effect
may have been produced in so short a time as a couple of centuries upon over three hundred millions of the most
stationary and unimpressionable race in the world. But that was to be expected. In the first two centuries after Christ only the most infinitesimal effect had been produced upon Europe, and it would have been perfectly marvellous if in so short a time any great effect had been produced upon so vast and hard a mass as China ; but that some effect is being produced I can vouch for from personal experience. I can testify to the fact that, living quietly and unostentatiously in the interior of China, there are men who, by their lives of noble self-sacrifice and sterling good, are slowly influencing those about them ; men who have so influenced not only a few, but many thousands of these unenthusiastic Chinese, as to cause them to risk life itself for their religion. And if this good work is going on, if Christians are willing to give up
2 C
IIIFカラー高解像度
