China and Our Women. TO THE EDITOR.

Otago Witness, Issue 2325, 22 September 1898, Page 30

China and Our Women. TO THE EDITOR.

Sir,— With a good deal of satisfaction a great tnany people will read your leader last week on the subject of "Mission Work in China." The question you have raised is one of much importance, and deserves special attention. It is a juestion that the thinking men and women of the colony have long ago made up their mindson. The evangelisation of China is not a question that comes within the practical range of the duties of the Christian Church. To convert China to Christianity at the rate that conversion has gone on during the last 100 years is the wildest kind of mania. The Chinese people are not the kind of folk to run wild after every new enthusiasm, nor are they at all likely to follow every ranting priest or sentimental female who tries to make a lazy living at their expense. We know something of the indifferent nature of Chinamen by those we see in the colony; but the Chinese we have here are tank out-and-out radicals compared with the Chinaman in his native land. The filth and vice, the degrading customs that oenturies of habit have engendered, are well known to travellers in the East. The filth and vice of a Chinese street are past description. It is a moot point whether the would-be teachers who go .to China do not themselves become degraded, and vice-enslaved. At any rate it is well known that young men and women who go to China for the purpose of evangelising the heathen soon come under the appalling customs of the country. The mawkish Christian sentiment that leads men and women to rush blindly off to foreign lands to seek converts for Christ, while heathens of their own kind romp around their family tree, cannot be a very healthy sentiment. It is all too common among the unhealthy minded. You strike a right note in your leader when you say: "Even a bishop might find it no ignoble self-sacrifice to brave the consequences of a single outspoken utterance of the truth concerning these hideous sacrifices." It seems to me that if others were to speak out ;n; n the same straight manner that you have done, the ignorant women who are anxious t~ follow ifchis calling would think twice ere they degraded themselves by loafing for the rest of their lives on a poor over-burdened people. These missionaries are, in plain language, nothing more nor less than religious loafers, who sponge on ignorant folk for their bread and butter. It would be a good thing for the misguided young women who want to go to China if their friends were to have them put into Seacliff for a time, and thus save them for usefulness. Thanking you in advance, — I am, &c, H. P. September 19.