172 Through the Yang-tse Gorges 



and the buildings were in course of being Europeanized 

 into a suitable dwelling for the learned missionary, his'wife, 

 and three daughters, who have spread their tent in this 

 charming though remote site. This missionary work is 

 the greatest of the many problems propounded to the 

 Chinese by the presence of the barbarian in the Central 

 Flowery Land. From their point of view, it goes without 

 saying that all foreigners are enormously rich, and that 

 there are no poor in our favoured lands, or we should not 

 have money to spend in maintaining corps of missionaries 

 nearly as numerous as our merchants, and in subsidizing 

 outcast Chinese to forsake the family altars to " feng chiao," 

 or be "sealed" to a doctrine strange and incredible. 



Chung-king possesses several Christian missions : the 

 American Methodist, the China Inland, the London 

 Mission, that of the Society of Friends, the Scotch and 

 American Bible Societies, and the Roman Catholic. The 

 latter is the oldest and most important, and its converts 

 in Chung-king alone number over three thousand. The 

 Catholic system, with its unconscious imitation of Bud- 

 dhistic forms, and its wise toleration of ancestral worship, 

 so called, appeals more forcibly than the others to the 

 ignorant and consequently superstitious Chinese ; yet even 

 Catholicism is stationary, and exists mainly through the 

 prestige of its age and its extensive possessions. The 

 entrance of Protestantism into China, with its inquiring 

 and disputatious spirit, is proving fatal to the ingathering 

 of the harvest anticipated by devout Catholics as the result 

 of two centuries of toil in this ungrateful land. As in the 

 West, the door once opened to doubt, dogmatic Christianity 

 seems doomed. And it must not ,be supposed that, to 

 quote one of the many false impressions derived from 

 missionary reports, the Chinese are so steeped in materialism 



