This audience can help the Chinese in a better way than giving them money. That Chinaman was asked in my house the other day how many hours he slept, and he said, “Two or three.” “Are you ever troubled by hoodlums?” “Yes, every day. They break the windows. Last week they broke into my laundry and stole five bundles of clothes, for which I had to pay customers $20.” “Do you get no protection from the police?” I asked him. He shook his head—yes, sometimes, but they were no good. The Chinese have the same right to life and liberty that we have, and if we get them that, they’ll get the money fast enough themselves. We owe it to the Chinese that they get protection.
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ADDRESS OF REV. E.P. GOODWIN, D.D.
I rejoice that I can lift my voice at least in a word of commendation, if such a word seem in any sense to be needed, in the furtherance of this particular kind of work. I remind myself sometimes that this very tone of apology is a tone that ought to set some of us, as ministers and as brethren, to reconsidering our conception of the gospel. Why, beloved, suppose it were an admitted fact that for the next hundred years not a solitary Chinaman would be converted. What then? Do you imagine that that fact would absolve us from allegiance to the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ? You will remind yourselves—I am sure I remind myself often—that in respect to our Christian work, the breadth of it and the particular departments of it, we have absolutely no option whatsoever: that when our Master said to his disciples, “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature,” he made no exception of those that might have almond eyes and yellow faces, nor of those that might have black skins and woolly hair; that he took in, in that wide sweep of his omniscient vision, every nation and kindred under the whole sky, and that should exist until the kingdom itself should come.
If it could be demonstrated that it required ten times as much work and ten times as much money to convert the Chinaman as anybody else, then all the more because of degradation and superstition and idolatry and hardness of heart—all the more must I storm the Gibraltar of that paganism. The Master’s principle seemed to be, “Give ye them to eat.” The fact of hunger is what lays the law upon the hearts