to deadness. Now the same thing goes on in man; in intellect and morals we note a like process. Man, yielding to doubt or selfishness, does not advance in knowledge or morals. He does not reach a consciousness of God. He has left the pathway that leads to him. He has started for the far country, there to waste his substance as he goes down intellectually and morally. When he comes to the human hell his vision must be that of the prodigal, the explanation of his position that of Paul: "When they knew God, they worshiped him not [were not toward him] as God." What there is of vice, of crime, of evil in the world is the action of those diseased souls.

We may seem to have described a process without assigning the cause for it. One asks, Whence the source or the motive that led to this departure from the field of growth? It has been explained as a temptation by the evil one, but such explanation only moves the problem back a step further. It leaves untouched the problem, for we would yet ask, Why did man follow the suggestion presented? There must be some reason found in the man himself. This motive for disobedience must lie in the nature of freedom. When we come to the idea of freedom we can see the possibility of abuse, yet the risk was involved in what God wanted to share with us. The free spirit might itself desire to be as God. This is what it did. Childhood desiring to be as the parent is our living commentary on this fact. But we hear ourselves saying, Why this desire in the healthy spirit? What motive produced this disobedience? The method of creation is by race. We are not units, but members. There is race unity. There is race unity. This is a very different thing from heredity. Philosophy has caught up with experience. We have given up this notion as a factor in our thinking, as we have long ago as a factor in our living. The new creation is not united to the past by being the receptacle of its life. The child is not the organized virtues and vices of the parents. It is inded true that God gives us the children, but they are sons and daughters, not boys and girls. The categories of the emotional are as real and as valid as the categories of the intellectual. This calls for action within bonds of relationship

to other beings. Our acts are such as parts of the whole. Each act is in itself not right and wrong after some abstract standard of rights and wrongs, but in relationship to the good of the organism of humanity, of which we are members. In physical organisms the member has its normal action as part of the whole. Sever it from the whole, it has a short abnormal action; it dies. So with man. Disjoint him from the whole, his action becomes abnormal; he dies. All the vices, the immoral actions, the ethical wrongs that we know are the abnormal actions of the man as a unit, which if brought up to the normal action of the man as part of the whole would be corrected and would serve the highest good of all. Action in due relation as part of the whole is virtue, and brings health to the organ and life to all outside; action as an unrelated unit is vice and brings death to all. Motherhood means all that is good and happy; white slavery, cover the being as you may with culture or finery, means all that is bad, sad, sorrowful. In the one, the highest virtues and loftiest sentiments are developed; in the other the lowest vices and most degraded sentiments. But this action within the whole seems at times to retard the unit. He might go forward faster if he did not have the duty of relationship. Selfishness seems profitable. The unit takes itself from the whole in order to get more; but, acting as a unit, it destroys itself. So Jesus taught. That prodigal boy in the home as son, with his sentiments and his possessions divided among all, a member of the family, thinking he would get more of life alone said, "Father, give me what is mine; let me go and act alone." He wasted his money and himself in unrelated living. The work of Jesus was to bring us back to God; to reestablish the broken relationship; to make us sons of God and brothers to one another. He set up the kingdom not by teaching ethics, but by producing conviction of sin that leads to the New Birth. Our action within the kingdom is to be the expression of the law of love.

Henrys. Now

ART. IX.-PROGRESS IN CHINA

THE elements of progress in the national life of China have been so variously estimated that it is by no means an easy matter to decide where progress can be truly found. The Marquis Tseng, when minister to England, wrote twenty years ago about "The Awakening of China," and those who supposed that the Marquis was standing near enough to the bedside to be able to detect the symptoms were surprised to find that, instead of awakening, the old giant, China, was only turning over in bed to take another slumber and to be convulsed with the nightmare of Boxerism. Lord Charles Beresford wrote of the "Breaking up of China" ten years ago and his warnings of partition seemed to be timely, but since then China has passed through a war against the world without losing her identity. On the contrary, one great nation has announced a policy of preserving her integrity and another has gone to war with the expressed purpose of restoring her lost provinces. Awakening or dreaming? to be divided or preserved? -these questions have been so variously answered that an estimate of true progress is most difficult. The fundamental cause of wrong or inadequate estimates is the immensity of the problem. It has become trite to speak of the hundreds of millions of the Chinese people, of the extent of their territory, of their long historical record and of their cumulative conservatism, and yet in these very common facts lies the explanation of the whole situation. What is true in one part of the empire is false in another, what may be said of one class of the people may be denied of another, what may be asserted to-day should be retracted tomorrow. As a nation they are homogeneous in some lines and heterogeneous in others; ultra-conservative at some times and overprogressive at others; materialistic in some matters and sentimental in others; quick in some movements and slow to stopping in others; liberal in some lines of thought and extremely narrow in others. Rome was not built in a day, even by her sparse population under sunny skies. Shall China be repaired and furnished

up to the standard of modern civilization in a generation? Her immensity and age must be considered as main factors in determining her problems, and no sporadic or ephemeral conditions can be used as criteria. While there may be discussion as to the present stage at which progress has arrived in China, and as to its future prospects, there can be none as to the basal principles upon which such progress is to rest if it is to be considered true. These have been so well established by the rise and fall of the various nations of the world, and their application has been so pointed in the rise and fall of various dynasties in the history of China, that their truth and universality cannot be called in question. It is also true that out of the various discussions of the Chinese people it has come to be recognized that there are certain strong elements in their character-such as contentment, willingness to labor, fondness for family life, attachment to the high ideals of the past. True progress must conserve all these good principles and must turn them into such channels as will ensure the greatest good to the empire.

To take a concrete example, what shall be said of progress in the conception of the form of government needed by China? At the time of the opening up of China to the commerce of the world it was taken for granted by officials and scholars that the form of government as then found was the very best possible. In its balance of powers between the metropolitan and provincial authorities, in the democratic freedom of speech allowed to the censors, in the division of responsibility between viceroys and governors, in the provisions for the humblest scholar to come to the front rank by success in the examinations, in the levying of the lightest possible taxes, in the free interchange of commodities between all parts of the empire, in all these pardonable pride was taken by thoughtful men. As late as fifteen years ago the inestimable value of any of the above governmental arrangements had scarcely been questioned. Now it is all different. The government is seeking to centralize its power around the metropolitan administration and to reduce the authority of the provincial officials. This has been made necessary by the imperative need of

uniformity in the administration of army, navy and foreign affairs. The freedom of speech on the part of censors is ceasing to be anomalous and has been assumed to themselves by nearly all the high officials of the whole empire, so that the time does not seem far distant when the censorate shall have ceased to exist, and for the reason that it is no longer required as a medium for the free expression of thought. The division of authority between viceroys and governors has grown to be a source of weakness, and as a consequence several governorships have been abolished. Examinations without schools of training have come to be recognized as inadequate tests for real merit, and they are now to be gradually supplanted by the certificates of schools. The burden of likin and of interprovincial barriers for the collection of taxes on goods in transit has become so heavy, since new modes of transportation by steam have come into use, that there has been a general outery for their suppression. More wonderful than all the above, it is being more and more recognized that the former rates of taxation are proving insufficient sources of income for the increasing requirements of a more modern government, and that one of the most urgent problems of the present is to increase taxation without unduly oppressing the people. It is simply astounding that such far-reaching and radical changes have been brought about, but it must be confessed that they are all on the line of progress. Above all other causes which have brought about these changes, China's humiliation at her defeat by Japan ten years ago, and by all civilized powers four years ago, must be considered preeminent. As pride was her former weakness, so humiliation has come to be her chief source of strength. But has this progress been such that we can call it true? and-if so-what are its basal elements? I have no hesitation in expressing the opinion that it has been true, and in giving as my reason for it the increased feeling of responsibility among the governing classes, along with an increased interest in government affairs by the governed. If we try to judge of this progress by our Anglo-Saxon standards we shall quite fail to understand or appreciate China's changes, for we have quite come to the conclusion that our present form of democratic representative