[Illustration: COLOSSAL GILDED BUDDHA. _By Mrs. Archibald Little._]
If my opinion, however, be anything worth, and on this matter I am not the least sure it is, it is not money so much our missionaries want in the East as sympathetic upholding. Let them feel that their countrymen, not missionaries in name, are wishing them more power, and not taking account of their failures, and they will be upborne to do greater deeds than those of old. Would, however, that missionaries may also believe that those not nominally of their band may notwithstanding be animated by quite as living a Christian zeal!
As it is, the way in which missionaries and merchants eye each other askance is often very painful. As to the differences between the sects, I think these are as much and as needlessly exaggerated as those between different kinds of Chinese. Chinese converts must be further advanced in Christianity than is often the case now to be able to appreciate the difference even between Roman Catholicism and Congregationalism. They see there is a difference in ceremonial. But to that Chinese are much too wise to attach much importance. They fancy all are "good talkees" of different kinds. And are they far wrong? The sincerer the Christian the less importance he always seems to attach to differences of belief and form.
It is sad to reflect that had there not been such fierce rivalries between the cardinals in the thirteenth century, and a consequent Papal interregnum of three years, Kublai Khan's request to the two brothers Polo would have probably been acceded to, and the Chinese become Christians then _en masse_, after the fashion of the kindred Russian race. Kublai Khan had "begged the Pope would send as many as one hundred persons of our Christian faith; intelligent men, acquainted with the Seven Arts, well qualified to enter into controversy, and able clearly to prove by force of argument to idolaters and other kinds of folk, that the law of Christ was best, and that all other religions were false and naught, and that if they would prove this, he and all under him would become Christians and the Church's liegemen. Finally, he charged his envoys to bring back to him some of the oil of the Lamp which burns on the sepulchre of our Lord at Jerusalem." There is a miniature of the fourteenth century of the great Khan delivering a golden tablet to the brothers. They started for Rome on this mission with a Tartar Baron, but he fell sick and went back. They were three years upon the journey, then delayed, waiting till a Pope, Gregory of Piacenza, was at last appointed. He sent two learned Dominicans with them--two instead of a hundred--and these two friars were terrified by a Saracen outbreak, and turned back in their turn. Again, in the eighteenth century the Chinese would, it seems, have become Christians, but that the Dominicans then came and opposed the Jesuits, who had effected an entrance in 1580, and had gained great influence over the Emperor and the nation. The Dominicans and Franciscans condemned the Jesuit toleration of ancestral worship, and for the second time China was thrown back. The Emperor and his advisers were considering whether Christianity should not be proclaimed the religion of the country, when the _coup d'état_ came. Those of the reformers who have survived, and the Emperor Kwang-shü through them, have thus for the third time been holding out asking hands to Christendom.