WILL AMERICA REMAIN CHRISTIAN ?

Otago Witness, Issue 1892, 15 May 1890, Page 38

WILL AMERICA REMAIN CHRISTIAN ?

Strange as the proposition may seem, there are some strong probabilities that the American nation will, before 1990, have become very much less Christian than it is, if not positively heathenised. We use these terms carelessly in popular discussion, and they stand in need of some definition. Heathenish does not, of course, imply anything at all brutish or barbarous, for to us a gentle Buddhist and a learned Parsee are as truly heathen as the natives of Borneo. The Japanese Mikada is a heathen, and so is the exceedingly able statesman who now rules the Chinese Empire as Prime Minister. Equally are we heathen to them. My excellent friend Rabbi H. is bound to consider me a Gentile, which is a softened term for the same thing. Bo it must be understood that in asking the question, "Will we become heathen ? " I am not suggesting the. possibility of our lapsing into fetichism, or into the worship of a white elephant. What I do mean is this, that the forces operating inside our social and political organisation, and upon it from without, are of such a nature as to make it very doubtful whether we can sustain a dominant belief in the elements of Christianity and the practice of its ritual.

Christianity, in adapting itself to modern science, has lost its most distinctive character, and is in danger of failing to be able to widen out and readjust itself much farther without being lost altogether. I return to the point from which I diverged — can Christianity, modifying itself so largely at the centre, continue to fit itself to the idiosyncrasies of the diverse peoples pouring into America, and remain practically a national faith ? One thing is as good as settled, Christianity does not make a perceptible dent into the hereditary belief of the Turanian mind. The Chinese come and go without apparently being conscious of the existence of Christianity. Occasionally a float is brought into the churches ; but no intelligent investigation fails of seeing that we fail of making any progress worth estimating. Canon Taylor says : " China is a most disheartening case. The population is reckoned at 382,000,000. The annual in-

oreaee, by an excess of births over deaths, would be about 4,582,000. Last year the Church Missionary Society baptised IG7 adults. At this rate it would take this society 27,000 years to overtake the gain to heathenism in a single year. And many converts are paid. In Hongkong there are 94 communicants and 35 paid nalive agents."

But our relation to the Chinese on their own ground is a secondary matter. It is the influence that China is likely to have on us that we must consider. I quote from the Rev. Mr Gibson on " The Chinese in America." He says : " What was lately the First Baptist Church of San Francisco is now a crowded Chinese tenement house, full of all manner of shame, filth, and sin. Where but lately was the altar of the living God now smokes the incense of idolatry. Instead of standing firm against the incoming hosts of idolatry and sin the Church of Christ has beaten an ignominious retreat. Commenting on a crowd of such facts a writer in Popular Science Monthly says : " The children of Chinese parents, born in San Francisco, so far as distinctly Chinese, in race, habits, superstitions, vices, and costumes, as were their parents before them. As in every other country where they have colonised the same results have followed, why should we look for different results here ? ' " Mr Gibson adds that out of 140,090 Chinese in California but 271 had, up to the time of his writing, been converted to Christianity. Many, if not most of them, relapsed. The Chinaman is absolutely a creature of Confucianism, which is nothing but absolute materialism. " Lucre is the sole object on which their eyes are constantly affixed. They pursue nothing with ardour but riches. God, the soul, a future life, they neither believe in, nor even think about." And now that these Chinese are believers in something else, that is quite as antagonistic to Christianity, that is the soullessness of women, and the innocence of infanticide, and feticide, and so add one more element to that which renders commonschool education dangerous to our children, and you see how the problem grows. While Christianity is shaken with the throes of internal evolution, or possibly revolution, it is compelled to meet this terribly aggressive force of heathenism from abroad. It is pure folly to say the Chinese are to be excluded from our shores. They are not excluded ; nor can they be. The Turanian races are waking up to enormously expansive life. They are proving themselves in India and Australia, and the East generally, more than a match for Aryans as commercial dealers.

But I have selected the factor in American life, which is, I believe, least inimical to the persistence of Christianity. We have become so accustomed to the presence of the negro in American life that we are liable to consider it purely a political and social affair. I am aware that no one is more religious than a negro ; and that the intelligent negro is as true a Christian as can be found. But a recent writer affirms, and apparently proves his assertion, that in the more rural districts of the Southern States superstition is deepening, and voodooism on the increase. Mr Cable tells us that this practice in Louisiana has taken the form of a sect, with a queen, who is ."priestess. On the eve of St. John they hold meetings in secluded places. Allowing for a great deal of exaggeration, it is certain that the masses of the ignorant blacks believe in conjuring, and are slaves of very vulgar fetichism. C. C. Jones, in •' Negro Myths," says that all along the coast region of Georgia and the Carolinas " the potency of charms and philters is freely admitted ; and it is necessary to restrain the practice of fetichism by positive inhibition.

I have not yet touched upon the influence and power most of all dangerous to Christianity, the vast influx of foreigners from Europe It is not a purely State question whether we can assimilate half a million of foreigners yearly ; but can the religious sentiment meet the influx with predominating force, so that the negation and agnosticism of the educated shall be fully over- balanced, as well as the brutishness of the ignorant herd 1 This question may be asked with great breadth of toleration ; indeed, it must be so. There is no longer the least doubt that Puritanism is done for ; and that it is hopeless to expect that any form of Christianity which was at any former time nearly definitive of American sentiment can be sustained. Between the two oceans there is no fellowship and unity of creed, or of practice. No single sect has in its folds, in actual, reliable membership, one-twelfth of the population. In eed not enter into the unpleasant statistics that show that, of an average Sunday, our most Christian cities do not gather for worship one-twentieth of the whole people.

I have tried to state in as simple a manner as possible, and as succinctly, the outline facts that lead me tc propound the question, Will America remain Christian ? Christianity is engaged in a double struggle : (1) to slough out its own errors and readjust itself, with firm front, to the twentieth century after Christ, and (2) to overcome the countertendencies, which are heathenish. Will it succeed, or will some other system of, faith substantially supplant that which has historically been recognised as Christian ? Ferhaps, if we reduce the question to another form, the reply will be less difficult : Will the Golden Rule be supplanted and the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son be abrogated 1 But that form of the question we may promptly answer in the negative. — M. Mauiucs, M.D., in St. Louis Globe-Demo-crat.

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