Uchimura Kanzo

“ Had it not been our dream to have a real church, not a toy church, as soon as we went out to the world? Before we thought of having homes or making money, we thought of building a church. Let us, as our John said in his sermon, "disperse heathens as we do street-dogs," and conquer men, devils, and all, with our united force and courage. ”

“ A mountain in its true proportion can be viewed only from a distance.
So with one s own country. As long as he lives in it, he really knows it not. That he may under stand its true situation as a part of the great whole, its goodness and badness, its strength and weakness, he must stand away from it. Who is more ignorant of the city of New York than some of its domiciled denizens, to whom the Central Park is the only "wild" in the universe, and the City Museum the hole through which they can peep into the wide world! ”

“ If there were no Gospel stories to calm down my childish passion's rage, that excitement and rush of the so-called Christendom which whirls men and women into premature graves was unknown to me. If heathenism is the reign of darkness, it is the reign of moon and stars, of obscure lights no doubt, but withal of repose and comparative innocence. ”

“ Read John Howard s Life with tears. Gave me great joy and consolation.
Failure in putting off my old Adamic skin at once drove me to find a consolation in the works of my own hand. And why not? Sentimental Christianity, like all other pleasures of senses, soon becomes insipid, and something more real and substantial is needed to keep a hungering soul at rest. "Is not practical charity the essence of Christianity," I began to ask myself. Certainly the immortal Buddha taught it as the very first of the four conditions for a man to enter the bliss of Nirvana. ”

“ My father was decidedly blasphemous toward heathen gods of all sorts. He once dropped a base coin into the money-chest of a Buddhist temple, and scornfully addressed the idols there that they would have another such coin if they would in any way help him to win a law-case in which he was then engaged; a feat wholly beyond my power at any period of my religious experience. But always thank my God that I never have tasted human flesh, or prostrated myself before the wheels of Juggernaut, or witnessed infants fed to gavials. ”

“ It is a work no bler than which cannot be met with anywhere else in this wide universe. Some say mission work to the heathen is nobler. Perhaps so, since as the body is more than garments, so the soul is more than its garment, the body. ”

“ Often a deed of such kind, though small it is, touches a human heart more than gifts of hundreds of dollars. How I felt comforted throughout the whole day, knowing that there are some unknown souls who think of me, and take interest in me! I bowed down, and of fered a prayer of thanks with tears of grati tude. ”

“ What they failed to revive within them by spending themselves upon themselves, they now see returning to them by spending themselves upon other than themselves. You converted heathens, and heathens now re convert you. Such is humanity, so intimately are you connected with the whole race. Pity the heathen? Do you pity your own brother in wretchedness? Are you not ashamed of him, and blame yourself for his wretched state? I believe this is the true philosophy of Christian mission ”

“ Said David Living stone: "The spirit of missions is the spirit of our Master; the very genius of His religion. A diffu sive philanthropy is Christianity itself. It re quires perpetual propagation to attest its genuine ness." Once it ceases to propagate, it ceases to live. Have you ever thought why it is that God leaves so large a part of the human race still in the darkness of heathenism? I think it is that your Christianity may live and grow by your ef forts to diminish the darkness. ”

“ He came into this world un conscious of struggles, a ready-made Christian. Like as a millionaire s son cannot comprehend the miseries and strifes of a self-made man, so this professor and many like him in Christendom can not comprehend what we heathens have to fight out in our souls before we get settled in peace in that monosyllable. I advise such as he to stay at home as professors, and not come to us as mis sionaries, for our complexities and sinuosities may confound them, as their simplicities and straight-cuttedness confound us. ”

“ You know this world is a unit, and the human race is one great family. This is what I read in my Christian Bible, though Patriotisms, Christian and otherwise, seem to deny this. You cannot make yourself perfect without making others per fect. An idea of a perfect Christendom in the midst of encircling heathenism is impossible. In Christianizing other peoples, you Christianize yourself. This is a philosophy abundantly illus trated by actual experiences. ”

“ To us Orientals, who depend more upon our sight than upon logic for the establishment of Truth, the Philosophy as I was taught in my New Eng land college is of comparatively little use in clear ing up our doubts and spiritual phantasmagorias. I believe no body made a greater mistake than those Unitarian and other intellectually-minded missionaries, who thought that we Orientals are intellectual peoples, and hence we must be in tellectually converted to Christianity. We are poets and not scientists, and the labyrinth of syllogism is not the path by which we arrive at the Truth. ”

“ Christianity is more and higher than Heathen ism in that it makes us keep the law. It is Hea thenism plus Life. By it alone the law-keeping becomes a possibility. It is the Spirit of the Law. It of all religions works from inside. It is what Heathenism has been searching and groping after with much weeping. It not only shows us the Good, but it makes us good by taking us right at once to the Eternal Goodness Himself. It pro vides us not only with the Way, but with the Life as well ”

“ Those familiar faces and hills and fields, which we now miss, but cannot erase from our mental vision, seek for dominancy in our souls; and in our very efforts to conform our selves to the new environments, the home with its jealous love binds us more to its sweet recollec tions. ”

“ Multiplicity of gods often involved the contradiction of the requirements of one god with those of another, and sad was the plight of a conscientious soul when he had to satisfy more than one god. With so many gods to satisfy and appease, I was naturally a fretful timid child. I framed a general prayer to be offered to every one of them, adding of course special requests appropriate to each, as I happened to pass before each temple. ”

“ She forgets all the pains and sorrows of life in her work. She is one of those who "can't afford" to be gloomy because life is hard. Her little home is her kingdom, and she rules it, washes it, feeds it, as no queen has ever done. ”

“ It is perhaps hardly necessary for me to say that I am not a Chinaman myself. Though I am never ashamed of my racial relationship to that most ancient of nations, that nation that gave Mencius and Confucius to the world, and in vented the mariner s compass and printing ma chines centuries before the Europeans even dreamed of them, yet to receive in my person all the indignities and asperities with which the poor coolies from Canton are goaded by the American populace, required nothing less than Christian forbearance to keep my head and heart in right order. ”

“ If the existence of sects is "a real blessing," why not increase the number of sects, and get more benefit out of them! But if it is a curse, as we poor converts imagine it to be, why not attempt to annihilate it, and make Methodism, Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Quakerism, and all other harmless and harmful isms into one great united whole. ”

“ Observe, too, how scrupulous these people are about the moral perfection of the men whom they choose as their Presidents. The men must not merely be able men, but moral men as well. No Richelieus or Mazarins can be their Presidents. Woe to that poor candidate, who in other respects is the fittest to rule; but a stain or two that mar his character has made him a failure. Morality does not usually count with statesmanship in Heathendom. ”

“ How these souls, charily keeping themselves from the view of the public, are striving to make this world any bit better by their efforts and prayers; how they often shed tears for the wretchedness of the state of the people of whom they read only in newspapers; how they lay upon their hearts the welfare of the whole mankind ”

“ We used to give something solid and substantial to wayside beggars when we paid our monthly pilgrimage to our family-idols; but now that we are converted to Christianity, we give nothing but empty words to them. Such should not be, my soul! As well a man catch a bream by bait ing his hook with a lobster, as a Christian enter his heaven by dealing out winds of doctrines to others. So I bought a little volume of the life of John Howard written in English, and read and re-read it with intense applications. ”

“ If spirit is real, as rice and potatoes are real, why despise Theology and praise Agriculture? If it is n-oble to grow corn, and feed myself and my hungering fellowmen with the fruits of God s Earth, why ignoble to learn of His Laws to appropriate His Spirit to our hungering souls, and be made nobler and manlier thereby? Agriculture that raises only husks and straw, and gives them out to the public as real wheat and rice, we despise and hoot at. That indeed is no Agriculture, but it is Rock-Culture and Sand-Culture, which really feed nobody. So Theology I have been reviling at is No-Theology. ”

“ Here let it be said in honor of Christian America, that a heathen convert who proposes to become a minister of the Gospel among his countrymen, usually has no difficulty about his bodily necessities, yea comforts, in that land. But here hypocrisy creeps in, and some Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Hindoos, Brazilians, Chinese, Japanese, who really love their bellies more than their God, feign themselves tamed rhi noceroses, and craftily indulge in the kindheart- edness of the American Christians in that way. ”

“ Then observe this optic phenomenon of the greatest darkness with the greatest light. The shadow is the deeper, the brighter the light that casts it. One characteristic of Truth is that it makes the bad worse and the good better. ”

“ Never have I entertained any wish what ever of becoming an American or an Englishman; but I rather reckoned my heathen relationship a special privilege of my own, and thanked God once and again for having brought me out into this world as a "heathen," and not as a Christian. For there are several advantages to be born a heathen. Heathenism I consider as an undevel oped stage of humanity, developable into a higher and perfecter stage than that attained by any form of Christianity. There are perennial hopes in heathen nations still untouched by Christian ity ”

“ Thus I was made to live nobly and honorably, not only for my religion and country, but for my alma mater as well. The "college-spirit," outside of baseball grounds, is a noble and Christian sentiment, which if loyally stuck to, should alone be sufficient to keep her sons from demagogism, cloth-worship, man-face-fear- ing, and meannesses and unmanlinesses of very many kinds in this world. ”

“ So I came to see that the undefinability of Christianity is not an evidence of its non-exist ence, much less of its humbugness. The very fact that it grows more to me the more I conform my self to its teachings, shows its close relationship with the Infinite Truth itself. ”

“ We believe that all who sincerely repent and by faith in the Son of God obtain the forgiveness of their sins, will be graciously guided through this life by the Holy Spirit and protected by the watchful providence of the Heavenly Father, and so at length prepared for the enjoyments and pursuits of the redeemed and holy ones; but that all who refuse to accept the invitation of the Gospel must perish in their sins, and be forever punished from the presence of the Lord. ”

“ No true man can get along without it, and Peace cannot be his without it.
Webster defines Christendom as "that portion \J of the world in which Christianity prevails, or which is governed under Christian institutions, in distinction from heathen or Mohammedan lands." He does not say it is a land of perfected angels. It is where Christianity prevails, or is looked up to by the majority of the people as the guide of their lives. Two elements, Belief and Believers, determine the practical morality of any nation. ”

“ Will the reader receive them as the unadorned expressions of a human heart, and judge with leniency the language in which they are written, as it is not the tongue that I learned from my mother's lips, and the ornate literature is not the trade by which I live in this world. ”

“ Now that we set sail on the boisterous sea of the practical life, we found the human existence to be a more real and serious affair than we had imagined in our class rooms. Things did not move as we willed and planned. Not every one of us was in red-hot earn estness about the church, and some flaggings of interest were recognizable in certain quarters. We had already run into a debt of four hundred dollars, and the general expense of the church was not small, though we paid nothing to our preachers. ”

“ Some of the alcoholic liquors that can satisfy the appetite of these people are strong enough to upset the heads of our drunkards, if taken in any considerable quantity. Scenes in those back streets of some of the largest cities of Christendom, which no decent men dare even to look into, can be de scribed with no milder words than the vilest in any language. Shameless gamblings, open-day piracies, cool-blooded sacrifice of fellowmen for one s own aggrandizement, are being conducted there on gigantic, business-like scales. ”