In China Now. China’s Need and the Christian Contribution

Written as a manual for missionaries arriving to begin work in China, it has sections intended for those serving as evangelists, teachers and those in the medical professions. Numerous editions were published: for the Baptist Missionary Society; China Inland Mission; Church of England Zenana Missionary Society; Church Missionary Society; Christian Endeavour Union; London Missiionary Society; Primitive Methodist Christian Endeavour Society; Society for the Propagation of the Gospel; Student Christian Movement, Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society; Youth Committee of the United Free Church of Scotland, and the United Council for Missionary Education. This is the London Missionary Society edition.

My thanks to the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide for providing a copy of this public domain title for digitisation.

John Charles Keyte [1875-1942], In China Now. China’s Need and the Christian Contribution. London: The Livingstone Press, 1923. Pbk. pp.160. [Click to visit the download page for this title]

Contents

• Editorial Note
• Author’s Preface

1. The Old-World Outlook
2. The New Framework (Part I)
3. The New Framework (Part II)
4. The Work of the Evangelist
5. The Work of the Teacher
6. The Work of the Healer
7. “The Home of all Good Men”

• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index

Chapter 1: The Old-World Outlook

In order to gain any idea of the task which confronts the Church of Christ in China, it is necessary to have some conception of the Chinese world in which that work has to be done, and of the outlook to-day of the Chinese themselves. The few pictures which follow, unrelated at first sight though they may be, are an attempt to indicate this.

One bright morning in August 1913 two Englishmen, the writer and an old friend, were travelling down the upper reaches of the great Yangtze-kiang in a small native boat used for carrying postal mails. They had been fired upon early that morning by brigands; but by dint of keeping the boat well in the middle of the broad stream and rowing vigorously, the crew, seven men in all, had got past the danger. At eleven o’clock however another shot rang out, and an examination of the river showed that they were in a narrow stretch easily com-manded from the banks. The crew rowed on pluckily until two boats carrying armed brigands put out further down the river. in order to cut them off.

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