Religion: Little Men & Women

Foreign missions and missionaries have come in for much sharp criticism during the past month, in the week-by-week reports of the laymen’s Appraisal Commission which surveyed the field for seven U. S. Protestant churches (TIME, Oct. 31). Last week came more criticism, in a Manhattan speech by Pearl Sydenstricker Buck, author of The Good Earth and Sons, daughter of missionaries, wife and faculty associate of Professor John Lossing Buck whose non-missionary agricultural college at Nanking University is considered a model of its kind. Said Mrs Buck: “I suppose, next to the Chinese among whom I have lived, there is no group of people whom I know better than I do the missionary. . . . I have heard him criticized in the bitterest terms and I have sometimes agreed with that criticism. I have seen the missionary narrow, uncharitable, unappreciative, ignorant . . . I can never have done with my apologies to the Chinese people that in the name of a gentle Christ we have sent such people to them. . . . “Icame to see what you American Christians were.* . . . I found . . . that most of the missionaries were just like you. . . . You had sent us a fair average. On the whole you felt, however, that the very best ought to stay at home . . . when there was someone whom you rather questioned, if at the same time he seemed earnest and sincere, and consecrated—that miserable word that has been used to cover so many deficiencies and so much sloppy thinking—you rather thought he would do. Preachers who would have bored you beyond endurance you sent cheerfully to the foreign field; young men and women just out of college who knew nothing and did not even know they knew nothing, you sent to a people centuries old. . . .

”How dared you send us so many of these little men and women? How dared you set them up to stand for your God, for Jesus Christ, before the world? . . .

“I am wearied unto death with this preaching. It deadens all thought, it confuses all issues, it is producing in China a horde of hypocrites. . . . Let us cease our talk for a time and cut off our talkers, and let us try to express our religion in terms of life. . . .

“As a Chinese I say to you what many Chinese have said to me: ‘Come to us no more in arrogance of spirit. Come to us as brothers and fellowmen. . . . Preach to us no more, but share with us that better and more abundant life which your Christ lives. Give us your best, or nothing.’ ”

*Mrs. Buck was born in Hillsboro, W. Va.. in 1890, while her parents were briefly vacationing from China.