Pastor Hsi. By Mrs. Howard Taylor. (Morgan and Scott. 3s.
6d. net.)—Hsi was "a man of position and influence, a cultured Confucianist." We can easily believe, then, that it caused no little astonishment in his native village when he became a Christian. And this becoming a Christian meant a great deal, not only in his public capacity, but in his private life. It meant the giving up of the opium habit, the habitual control of a violent temper, and, what many of us would find the hardest thing of all, the surrender of private rights and the forgiveness of injuries. The Chinese Christian, when he is genuine, has much to teach his Western brethren. If he can teach them forgiveness, the one thing in which Christian ethics may be said to have absolutely failed, he will have indeed achieved a marvel. Mrs. Howard Taylor tells a highly interesting story ; the one criticism that we have to make concerns the frequent interposi- tion of the miraculous. We do not deny the truth of these stories ; we only affirm that the narrative would have been more generally effective without them.
Previous page
