A Pragmatist Replies

Margaret Hospital in Wuhan

Writing back to the Southern Churchman, where all this voluminous correspondence was published, Mr Graves wrote from Geneva in September 1883 with a historical parallel, and with a functional justification for the teaching of English that is peculiarly modern in its tone:

When Christianity came into the Roman Empire she found that education was founded on the great classics of antiquity. So far from rejecting these, she taught her children in them, thankfully acknowledging their value, and not forgetting to correct what was wrong in them by Christian teaching. And when Julian forbade Christians to study those books be was considered as having done a, grievous wrong to them, and his prohibition is cited as an act of persecution. 

In China all education for 2,000 years has been founded on the Confucian and Mencian classics. They lie at the root of all the civilization and culture which China possesses, and to call them "impotent," with the results before one's eyes in a mighty empire and an extensive literature, convicts whoever says it of entire ignorance of these great books and of their influence.

These classics are not books to be banished or prohibited. They are full of moral teaching; they are free from immorality, which cannot be said of the Latin and Greek classics; more than this, they are the books which are absolutely required for any entrance to the examinations of the scholars of the empire, so that not to know the classics is to cut oneself off from any chance of public life either as a teacher or as an officer of the government. 

English is studied because it is the language which is everywhere spoken in the East, and because there is a demand for it in China. It is the mercantile tongue and the medium of communication between all nations as they meet in the Chinese ports, and it throws open to the learner all Western knowledge at first hands, and not through the bald translations (few enough, too) which are accessible.

The Southern Churchman in their next editorial were by and large supportive of this view, stating that, realistically:

Christians take the sects of Protestant Christianity to the heathen, and with them their way of looking at things; but it is not likely that our way is going to be their way. They will work out for themselves their own forms. We must remember that theology is only our way of looking at the Bible. Theology, therefore, is not inspired; the Bible is inspired, but not our way of looking at it.--Each Christian nation has its own theology; and the Chinese will have their way, when once they begin to think for themselves and read the Bible with their own eyes. Our Western modes of thought are not going to be their methods; but both will be true, so far as both teach Christ as the only Saviour, to be received by the soul by faith and to be exhibited in a holy life.

By the standards of the time, these seem to have been liberal views indeed.