It was hard to classify the Catholic priests in any simple way, but it was impossible to pigeonhole the Protestant missionaries. They were a far more varied lot in background, in education and, above all, in the way they approached both their Christian faith and the business of living. As I came to see when I discussed this subject with others, one's assessment of them tended to be greatly influenced by one's feelings for missionary work itself, for its value and its legitimacy.

If a person does not believe in whatever it is the missionary is devoted to spreading, he is not inclined to like either him or what he does. Then the role of the missionary seems arrogant, fanatical, imperialistic, and futile; and the missionary himself hypocritical and foolish. People then say, "What right do they have to jam their religion down others' throats, to import Western faiths to China?"

When, on the other hand, men are primarily dedicated to spreading ideas in whose worth one does believe—such as modern medicine, democracy, modern methods and views of education, technology, and the like—one tends to overlook their particular faults as humans and, above all, to approve the changes in another society that their work brings about.

The Christian religion has had a considerable impact on the cultures of the Far East. But probably its influence has not been nearly so destructive of the patterns of life in these ancient cultures as has the introduction of industrialism, the natural and social sciences, universal and modern education, democratic and socialist concepts, and medicine. The purveyors of these latter commodities are as truly "missionaries" of the West as were the evangelists. The fact that we neither scorn nor castigate them as arrogant imperialists (although many Orientals may well do so) only shows that we consider these ideas necessary to a rich, full life, in much the way that an earlier Christian culture considered Christianity a necessary foundation for human fulfillment.

My first impression of mission work on arriving in China had been most favorable. The university where I taught—Yenching University in Peking—had been founded by mission organizations and was still in part supported by them. During the period of the Japanese rule, it was the only free university in North China. The many mission stations that I visited also seemed to be the transmitters of much of what I thought valuable in civilized life. Mission schools provided an introduction to the physical and social sciences and to history. Mission hospitals provided the only modern medical care available in many regions, and their clear humanitarian, idealistic, and democratic ideology planted the seeds of social progress in that as yet unreconstructed Oriental culture.

The value of these contributions seemed to me obvious. It appeared to me arguable that most of the democratic humanitarianism on which Chinese reform movements were then based owed its rise largely to the influences of the Christian religion brought by the missionaries. Above all, it was evident that among all the Westerners of many nations who had left their massive imprint on China, the missionary was the only one who had had a sincere wish to help the Chinese rather than either to dominate or to milk them.

The Chinese had to buy their tobacco, their oil and coal, and many other items at prices set by Western interests; if they went to Tientsin or the other treaty ports, they had to obey the law enforced by British police and in British courts. But no one ever had to go to a mission school, hospital, or church. However confused and deplorable the West's relations with the Orient may have been, it has been fortunate for all concerned that when the Westerner first entered the Far Eastern scene, a missionary stood beside the gunboat captain and the commercial trader.

I found, moreover, that the missionaries who represented the major churches of Britain and America (I had little contact with Scandinavian or German missions) were on the whole a rather remarkable group of people. Endowed with both humor and talent, they had had to provide their own entertainments in the course of their normal life in the Far East. It was natural, then, that they were the ones who took the lead in our intellectual, dramatic, and musical enterprises.

When over one hundred American missionaries departed in the first evacuation, many laymen in our Peking kitchen maintained that our kitchen community had lost not only its brains but its zest as well.

As one Britisher admitted ruefully, "All we're left with now are the business folk and we British. My word, old chap, they can't either cook or laugh, what?" It had surprised many like him to find that these liberal missionaries were not only interesting and capable people very much aware of the modern world, but fun to be with.

There was no denying, however, that most of the Westerners in China detested the missionary and never were able to speak of him except in scorn or ridicule. It simply never occurred to any of the non missionary personnel (with the possible exception of a few Episcopalians) to attend church. The Sunday services were for professionals only, and when I went I saw very few amateurs there!

There had developed in the Far East a chasm of distrust and contempt between merchant and missionary that was incredible to anyone brought up in a society where the layman often attends church and where the clergy, while not necessarily admired, are at least tolerated and accepted. Certainly this chasm negates the present Communist Chinese picture of the merchant and the missionary as a cooperative team of imperialist aggressors. Curious as to the sources of this gulf, I talked with everyone I could about it. Gradually I began to see the picture each of these communities had of the other, and why their mutual antipathy was so great. Both pictures were exaggerations of an essential truth, and so by their very extremity revealed the causes of the trouble.

The picture which the missionary had of the Western lay businessman was not unlike that which the Communist regime in China has of him. Both groups see him as hard, immoral, addicted to drink, interested only in mulcting wealth from the poor Chinese while arrogantly excluding them from his cities, clubs, and vacation spots, and remaining indifferent to both the values and the needs of their indigenous culture. There were certain elements of truth here, although the picture was wildly exaggerated.

The businessman in the Far East was apt to be a less responsible member of his total community than he would have been at home. It seemed never to have crossed his mind that he might become part of the wider Chinese culture around him; he built his own world, which he never left. His life was circumscribed by the narrow confines of the business office, the club porch, and the social life among the treaty-port elite. Outside that small circle of foreign equals, there were for him only the Chinese subordinates in his office whom he did not understand and so tended to distrust and beyond them the great sea of Chinese "natives" in whom he had little interest except as a market. In his environment—"a little bit of Surrey in North China, old boy"—there was no wider community within which he might, as he would at home, adopt a responsible role commensurate with his wealth and advantages.

The merchants' picture of the missionary is more familiar to us all. To them the missionary was a loveless, sexless, viceless, disapproving, and hypocritical fanatic. He was repressed and repressive, trying to force others into the narrow straightjacket of his own list of rigid "do's and don'ts," and thus squeezing out of his own life and out of theirs all its natural and redeeming joys. At first, in Peking, I found this picture incredible; it seemed so clearly not to fit the liberal group I knew. But acquaintance in camp with a much wider circle of missionaries showed that it did contain some truth. It revealed, therefore, in exaggerated but striking terms what I came to consider the greatest single spiritual problem confronting the Protestant faith,

In any case, with these two pictures vividly in mind, I could understand as never before the genesis of the gulf between the two communities. As I sometimes humorously imagined, it probably started when the first fundamentalist missionary confronted the first tobacco merchant over the prostrate form of a Chinese—each of them seeking to purvey to this hapless Oriental precisely what the other most abhorred!

The first missionary who fitted in some form this stereotyped picture was a "faith" missionary in our dorm. His name was Baker, and he was a cheerful, hard-working, friendly man from the American Midwest. He was rather handsome in a rough, homespun way, with curly brown hair and an open face. On the whole, his simple, unaffected cheerfulness and good will made him well liked by his fellows, both at work and in the dorm. As one of them remarked to him one night, to his infinite shock and horror, "The only thing wrong with you, Baker, is all that stuff you believe!"

Baker's religion was rigidly fundamentalist and conservative, and his moral standards equally strict. Any deviation from his own doctrinal beliefs or any hint of a personal vice spelled for him certain damnation. From his bed in the corner, as we "bulled" together around the stove, he would cheerfully assure us that anyone who smoked, cussed, or told off-color jokes was certain to go to hell.

Near him in the row of beds were two American ex-marines named Coolidge—and so called "Cal"—and Knowles, and a Scottish atheist named Bruce who, despite his name, assured us he was not of Celtic origin: "Goddamn it, I'm a Jew, I'm a Jew," he said to Baker one day when the latter tried to convert him. None of these three—neither the large humorous Coolidge with his white goatee, nor the short Knowles with his tough Brooklyn accent, nor the rotund bright-eyed Bruce—by the wildest stretch of the imagination fitted Baker's concept of the "moral man." They all smoked, drank (though opportunities in camp were very rare), swore, and laughed heartily in the nonstop ribaldry of male dormitory life. The rest of us were delighted that they were there. To Baker, however, they were a continual affront and frustration. They actually seemed not only to enjoy their vices but to rejoice in them, despite the missionary's clear warnings of the fate in store for them.

Blinded as Baker was by his own code of trivia, it never dawned on him that each of these three men in his own way was intensely moral. Each believed in fair play; each knew the importance of honesty; none of them would have stooped to anything that was shady or mean. They understood the significance of justice and of creative government in our community and, with much profanity, would always support both. Above all, when given the opportunity through the parcels to share their meager rations with others, they were quicker than Baker to do so—with a great deal of cynical comment and much embarrassment. To Baker they were simply damned souls—and that's all there was to it.

One night matters came to a head in a discussion six of us were having about how we should treat the Japanese when victory was won. This was a somewhat academic issue for us as their prisoners but still one fraught with intense feeling. Coolidge, Knowles, Bruce, and I found ourselves in general agreement: the Japanese were hardly lovable at that point. They appeared to us cruel and aggressive. We felt that the militaristic and imperial elements of their culture would certainly have to be dealt with severely if we won.

But, as Bruce said, "After all, they are human beings, and we are by no means perfect. Really the only thing to do is to try to forget this whole business and to bring them back again into the world of civilized and peaceable nations as quickly as possible."

I was impressed. But Baker violently disagreed with this view.

"Why," he said, "they're all pagans there, and filled with all kinds of immorality. In fact, they're hardly human at all—look at the way they behave! No, I don't feel any responsibility to them as brothers. If our world is to be ruled by righteousness, we must rid it of these unrighteous groups as best we can. There's no question but what we should crush them completely in order to weaken them permanently as a nation. If necessary, I'd even say we ought seriously to consider depopulating the island."

The rest of us stared wide-eyed, frankly horrified at this outburst. Bruce remarked sarcastically: "Well, brother Baker, if that is what your God has said to you, I'm glad for the sake of my ruddy soul that He has never spoken to me!"

This bizarre view of Baker's was by no means typical of even conservative missionaries. What was typical of much conservative religion, however, was the radical separation in Baker's mind of what he thought of as moral concerns and what were, in fact, the real moral issues of our camp life. For him holiness had so thoroughly displaced love as the goal of Christian living that he could voice such a prejudiced and inhuman policy with no realization that he was in any way compromising the character of his Christian faith or his own moral qualities. As Cal put it with a laugh, "Thank the Lord he's only a harmless missionary."

"Providence" was a word often on Baker's lips, and I must admit he had about as strange a view of it as I had ever heard. Baker believed that since every good thing came directly to the saints from the hand of God, it showed little Christian faith for churches to finance missionary work by the usual means of raising money, investing it, and paying salaries. If God wills that the work continue, Providence will directly provide the means thereto, said Baker.

He also argued that it would be disobedient to God's will to agree to go home if the government so ordered; Providence might intend him to stay. For this reason he consistently refused to make this promise. Providence was to him a direct divine guidance bureau for his own life, thrusting him through the enemy territory of an alien world on the heavenly mission of evangelism, and paying his expenses on the trip.

Because of his refusal to go home when so ordered, Baker was given no comfort money by the United States government. In consequence he was unable to buy any of the essentials available only at the camp canteen, such as toilet paper and soap. These items were, to be sure, not very exciting; but it was hard to do without them, and no one wanted to encourage any near bunkmate to try! Some few internees, such as the Greeks and the Palestinians, whose governments were not able to send funds, failed to receive comfort money through no fault of their own. Each month, therefore, the camp collected a small percentage or "tax" of the comfort money given to the rest of us in order to provide some money for these less fortunate internees. Without much argument, Baker was allowed to collect an allowance along with them. His reiterated opinion that it showed an absence of faith for other missionaries to accept their comfort money naturally caused some comment in the dorm.

The crowning touch occurred one day when he came in with his rations purchased from the canteen. Having dumped them with a satisfied sigh on his bed, he looked around earnestly and remarked to all and sundry, "As I have said so many times to all of you, God's Providence will always provide for those who have faith in Him."

Considering that it was our comfort money that had bought these goods for him, we took it somewhat amiss that these same contributions were used by him as the final proof that as good Christians we should never have accepted comfort money in the first place—for the Lord will provide. As Bruce, the Jewish atheist, remarked in his Scottish brogue, "At any rate, this is the first time that my wee wallet has been the direct instrument of Almighty Providence!"

Like every great idea, providence has had its perverted forms. The special providence that provides toilet paper and soap to the saints through the kindnesses of the damned, but leaves all other men than the favored few alone, is a pathetic parody on the magnificent concept of God's sovereignty in the whole of history.

Legalism was, however, the most prevalent failing of the conservative missionary, and its distressing effects were felt by most of the community. By legalism, I mean the practice, exemplified by Baker, of judging one's own actions and those of everyone else, by a rigid set of prescribed and usually trivial "do's and don'ts." The saddest example had to do with our monthly cigarette ration.

Each internee was permitted to buy at the canteen a certain rationed number of cigarettes, enough for the light smoker but woefully inadequate for the pack-a-day man. Consequently, many of the heavier smokers were always trying to get non-smokers td let them purchase an extra lot of cigarettes with their ration cards. Since most of the missionaries did not use tobacco, they seemed fair game. Probably over half of them offered their cards good-humoredly and made no issue of it. But a significant number of the conservative ones refused, saying, "I would never allow cigarettes to be registered on my canteen card." Apparently they feared that this would act as a "demerit" to be held against them at some later balancing of the celestial books. Most laymen naturally felt that this was pretty narrow and, as they put it, . . . no more than we might expect from the ruddy missionaries." But on the whole not much comment was made.

When, however, sixteen packs of American cigarettes arrived in each of the Red Cross parcels, a complex moral problem was presented to the pious. What were they to do with them? Certainly their rigid law against smoking demanded that they should destroy these cigarettes—especially when they had refused to lend out their ration cards because smoking was sinful.

On the other hand, it was very tempting not to destroy their cigarettes. Lucrative deals were now possible, since heavy smokers offered tins of milk, butter, and meat in exchange for a pack or two. Was a man not justified in trading them so that his children might have more to eat? Apparently the missionaries decided that he was. Almost all who had refused to lend out their ration cards before now exchanged their sixteen packs for the immense wealth of tins of milk or meat. To the cynical observer it almost seemed that to these pious associating themselves with smoking was not a sin if a profit was involved!

On our cooking shift was a most pleasant, open, kind fundamentalist named Smithfield. He was a red-haired fellow, hard working, cheerful, and an excellent ballplayer. One day a fellow on our shift pressed him about how he dealt with the seemingly clear contradiction involved in the selling of cigarettes.

"Look, Smithfield, if smoking is sinful, then how can you encourage it by trading cigarettes? And if fags aren't really so bad—which you seem certainly to believe by trading them—then why don't you guys admit it, and let others use your cards to get an extra ration? You can't have your milk and your virtue both, you know!

"You know what I think? I think you don't feel they're really wrong at all. Would you be a 'pusher' of opium for milk as you now are of cigarettes? Of course you wouldn't! No, you guys just talk a lot about cigarettes and those other vices because, by avoiding them, you've found a fairly painless way of being pious. You don't really take your moral talk seriously at all, Smithfield!"

Smithfield, though an intelligent man, never saw any contradiction at all in what he did.

"I don't want them on my card because to use tobacco is sinful," he stated confidently, "and I'm not going to touch sin if I can help it. And as for the trading—I sold them for milk because my kids need milk. Isn't that reason enough?"

I couldn't help thinking that Smithfield's sharp questioner had been on the right tack. It boiled down to how seriously the missionaries took their own moral code. Filled with all manner of relatively petty "do's and don'ts," that code seemed too trivial to bear the weight of righteousness which they sought to pump into it. What had happened, I decided, was that somehow in the development of the Protestant ethic, the magnificent goal of serving God within the world had been perverted or lost in the shuffle.

Instead of bringing love and service into the world through his calling and his family life, the Protestant began to try to keep himself "holy" in spite of the world. As he began to accept more and more of the world's fundamental values of property, security, and prestige, inevitably the "holiness" he sought in the world became more and more trivial. He ended by concentrating only on avoiding the vices which might prevent him from being respectable.

After all, to love your neighbor within the everyday world is a risky and explosive thing to do. It might upset firm property rights, the barriers of class and race, and cast doubt on the sanctity and righteousness of war and violence! No class moving upward in society can easily afford love as their goal! But in "holiness" they can combine moral fervor with social expediency. The "holy man," properly defined by prudent churchmen, could be propertied and prestigious as well as being a pious pillar of the church.

Through some such development, I thought, Protestantism has produced a degenerate moralism, a kind of legalism of life's petty vices that would be boring and pathetic did it not have such a terrible hold on so many hundreds of otherwise good-hearted people. For many of them being a good Christian appeared to mean almost exclusively keeping one's life free from such vices as smoking, gambling, drinking, swearing, card playing, dancing, and movies.

So much are these legal requirements of purity the working criteria by which they judge themselves and their neighbors ("He can't be a Christian, he cusses") that multitudes of Christians feel they can, amid all the ambiguities of life, exactly determine the status of a man's immortal soul by his attitude to these vices. In this way, those of the legalist mentality would sooner attend the White Citizens' Council than be seen in a bar; they would think it better to be involved in an aggressive war than in a game of cards; they would rather be caught underpaying their help than be heard to swear. To hear the clergy of this persuasion preach, one would gather that, in a segregated, militaristic and, in many respects, economically unjust American society, they have come close to bringing in Utopia when they have succeeded in barring the legal sale of liquor!

I learned from this experience that the fault in this Protestant ethic was not that these legalistic missionaries were too moral. Rather, it was that many of them were not free of their law to be moral enough. Their legalism prevented them from being as creative as the sincerity of their faith should have made them. Everyone in camp—missionary and layman, Catholic and Protestant—failed in some way or another to live up to his own ideals and did things he did not wish to do and felt he ought not to do. It was not of this common human predicament that I was thinking. What I felt especially weak in these Protestants was their false standard of religious and ethical judgment that frustrated their own desire to function morally within the community, for this standard judged the self and others by criteria which were both arbitrary and irrelevant. In the end, it left the self feeling righteous and smug when the real and deadly moral issues of camp life had not yet even been raised, much less resolved.

It had long been evident that our community was faced with moral problems deep enough to threaten its very existence. And yet a significantly large group of Christian leaders was concerned exclusively with moral issues and vices not connected with these deeper problems of our life. For this reason their very moral intensity tended to make both themselves and the serious morality which they represented seem to be a socially irrelevant segment of life rather than the creative force they might have been. The constructive moral forces in our life were only weakened and the cynical forces strengthened when missionaries judged honest, hard-working, and generally self-sacrificing men as "weak"—and even went so far as to warn their young people not to associate with them!—because they smoked or swore.

"If that is morality, then I want none of it," said a man on our shift disgusted with this narrowness. Serious religion in this way became separated from serious morality, with the result that both religion and morality—and the community in which both existed—were immeasurably debilitated.

The most pathetic outcome of this legalism, however, was the barrier it created between the self-consciously pious and the other human beings around them. Almost inevitably the conservative Protestant would find himself disapproving, rejecting, and so withdrawing from those who did not heed his own fairly rigid rules of personal behavior.

Once I watched with fascinated horror this process of rejection and withdrawal take place when a nice young British fundamentalist named Taylor joined our cooking shift. Taylor wanted with all his heart to get along with the men there, to be warm and friendly to them, as he knew a Christian should be. All went well for the first few hours or so; no one told a dirty joke or otherwise made life difficult for Taylor. But then when we were ladling out the stew for lunch, a few drops of the thick, hot liquid fell on Neal's hand. Tom Neal was an ex-sailor of great physical strength and brassbound integrity. Naturally this British tar made the air blue with his curses as he tried to get the burning stew off his hand. When the pain was over, as it was in a minute or so, he relaxed and returned to his usual bantering, cheerful ways.

But something was now different. Taylor hadn't said a word, nor had he moved a muscle. But he looked as if he had frozen inside, as if he had felt an uprush of uncontrollable disapproval. That feeling, like all deep feelings, projected itself outward, communicating itself silently to everyone around. An intangible gulf had appeared from nowhere, as real as the stew both were ladling out of the cauldron. Of course Neal felt it, and looked up closely and searchingly into Taylor's withdrawn and unhappy eyes. With surprising insight he said, "Hey, boy, them words of mine can't hurt you! Come and help me get this stew to the service line."

Taylor tried to smile; he hated himself for his reaction. But he felt immensely uncomfortable and spent the rest of his time with us on the shift spiritually isolated and alone. He was happy, so he told me one day, only when he was with the other "Christian folk."

Not a few missionaries seemed to exult in their code, using it, one was tempted to believe, as an instrument of pride against their neighbors, as a means of disapproving of the other person and so of elevating themselves spiritually in their own eyes—and, they were sure, in the eyes of God as well. But others were victims of their own law, in "bondage" to it, as St. Paul says. Though they wanted to accept their fellow men, their whole legal understanding of religion prevented this, forcing on them willy-nilly this sense of disapproval, this unwilled rejection, and this hated, inevitable barrier. Such men were not hypocrites—as others often felt who found themselves judged by these unknown laws. They didn't want to judge others—they couldn't help it.

It was ironic that these Protestants here described seemed to incarnate even more than their monastic brothers the very view of Christianity they repeatedly deplored, namely, a Christianity which removed itself from men to seek salvation away from the actual life of real people. In their frantic effort to escape the fleshly vices and so to be "holy," many fell unwittingly into the far more crippling sins of the spirit, such as pride, rejection, and lovelessness. This, I continue to feel, has been the greatest tragedy of Protestant life.

Among the missionaries were indeed many who seemed free of the proud and petty legalism characteristic of numerous others. When this was the case, they contributed a great deal to our life: not only rugged honesty and willingness to work, but also the rarer cooperative and helpful spirit of persons dedicated to a wider welfare than their own.

Those missionaries were most creative; it seemed to me, whose religion had been graced by liberalism in some form. By this I do not mean to include people with any particular brand of theology. Rather it seemed apparent that people with all sorts of theological opinions, liberal or orthodox, could be immensely impressive as people so long as they never identified their own beliefs either with the absolute truth or with the necessary conditions for salvation. These people were able to meet cooperatively and warmly with others, even with those who had no relation to Christianity at all. Whatever their code of personal morals might be, they knew that love and service of the neighbor and self-forgetfulness even of one's own holiness, were what a true Christian life was supposed to be. Unlike the pious legalist, they attempted to apply no homemade plumb lines to their neighbors' lives, but sought only to help them whenever their help was really needed.

It was always an amazement to me that the Salvation Army group, of whom there were perhaps ten families in camp, with their own strong orthodoxy of belief and strict personal code, were perhaps the "charter" members of this creative group. Possibly it was the influence of their ministry to the down-and-out in every society; more probably it was because they were able to accept and even to admire persons whose beliefs and habits differed from their own. Whatever it was, they won the affection and esteem of the camp as did no other Protestant group. Whenever a layman would express his distaste for the missionaries, he would always carefully exclude the Salvation Army workers. When the camp elected a seven-man committee to distribute the Red Cross clothing—a job calling for the highest integrity—two of the four missionaries selected were from the Salvation Army.

Perhaps the unique contribution of what I have called this creative group of missionaries—which included persons from almost all denominations—was their willingness to help others when there was special need. Most internees would help their families and friends over a difficult spot. But it rarely occurred to them to take the time and energy to put themselves out for someone they did not know.

There were, of course, innumerable such cases, varying greatly with the need involved. In the dorms there were always older or otherwise enfeebled people who for a period could not fetch their food or stand in line for hot water. In some cases, such a person needed constant attention and help. In other cases, mothers got sick and had to go to the hospital or at least to stay in bed. Someone would have to care for the children, clean up the room, and do the family laundry.

The folk around these incapacitated people in the dorm or on the block would, to be sure, do these chores for a day or so. But almost always, after an initial burst of energetic good will, their enthusiasm would wear out. Soon some missionary, perhaps unacquainted with the weakened one, would be seen taking this responsibility, and after a while getting another one to relieve him.

The most dramatic case concerned a White Russian couple who separated with some bitterness, the man moving into a dorm across the compound from his wife and child. A powerful fellow with a marvelously developed physique, he was quiet, introverted, and moody. No one felt he knew him—who he really was or what he might do.

As time wore on, he regretted his move into the frustrations of the dorm and, understandably, wished to return to his family. But his wife was having none of this, for whatever reasons, and refused to allow him in. Furious and distraught, he even attempted suicide. Everyone who knew the situation agreed that someone had to move in with his wife to prevent his breaking down the door and either molesting his reluctant spouse or disposing of her. But who would enter that emotional maelstrom as "an act of kindness"?

A firm and capable British missionary woman agreed to sleep there, and for the rest of camp remained in this, at best, difficult post. In time she and the Russian wife became the best of friends; and all agreed that "no one but a missionary would have taken on that job!"

Aside from their readiness to clean up the latrines at the start of the camp, the most generally useful case of this willingness to tackle jobs no one else would undertake was the missionaries' work with the teen-agers.

We had in Weihsien a fairly tough bunch of "drugstore cowboys." Many factors encouraged their development. Camp life is, on the surface, intensely dreary and boring. There is nothing new, unusual, or really fun to do; the day is filled with unpleasant chores. Consequently, teen-agers found themselves continually bored, looking around for something, anything, exciting. Since all of them had at one time or another played around with the black market, none of them had much respect for law or conventional moral codes.

There was, moreover, little room for family life. A couple who arrived with a boy of twelve or thirteen were given one room for the family. The parents realized that there were neither taverns nor bawdyhouses, no drinking or drag racing to lead a boy into trouble. In the hopes of having their tiny room to themselves once in a while, they usually encouraged the kids to "go out into the compound and play with the other children." Because all lights were shut off at 10 P.M., and the curfew enforced, they did not pay much attention to the hour when the child came back.

After two years had passed, this crowd of kids, still wandering the compound after dark, were from fourteen to sixteen. They were much more experienced with each other and with the camp, and fully aware that nothing exciting could be found in that compound on a warm evening that they did not invent for themselves. Trouble was unavoidable.

About a year before the end of the war, it began to dawn on the parents that something explosive was going on among their teen-agers. As always, rumors filled the air, but then investigation by the Discipline Committee uncovered a lush situation. In the unused basement of one of the buildings, and in a small dugout air raid shelter in another part of the compound, youngsters were gathering regularly for what we could only term sexttal orgies. In the room of Mrs. Johnson, the poor Eurasian woman with three children, they were meeting early in the evening for intercourse on the small room's three beds while Mrs. Johnson kept watch at the door, her own children, aged eleven to fourteen, apparently taking leading roles in the affair. When the parents had said irritably, "Run along outside and find something to do," the kids had done exactly that.

The ages of those involved staggered that worldly camp the most. When the facts were brought to light, parents who had taken no interest in what their children were doing so long as they were out of the room, were horrified and furious. The parents held a mass meeting to deal with this crisis. Many an irate parent declared that "they" must be remiss in some way, and "they" should jolly well do something about it, and pronto! But it was interesting that not one parent came up with any concrete suggestions, and certainly no one volunteered to do anything constructive himself. The meeting ended on a note of unmitigated gloom. Short of an unworkable sundown curfew, what could anybody really do?

To no one's real surprise, the crisis was finally dealt with by the missionary teachers, none of whom had children of that age. They met together and devised a program of evening entertainment: dancing, square dancing, games, science study, language lessons, and so on ad infinitum.

To the anxious parents, none of this sounded nearly exciting enough to draw the minds of the kids away from their newfound diversions. As a result, there was initially a great deal of criticism of this missionary effort: "Typical, isn't it? Too little and too late!"

Fortunately, the teachers knew young people better, and so they kept persistently at it, organizing a game room and assigning evenings among themselves, Monday through Friday, for supervision. There were chess and checker tournaments, craft shows, dart contests, one-act plays and homemade puppet shows —everything that ingenuity could devise. Five or six good souls kept the operation going, spending two long evenings each week supervising these kids. The program worked, and from then on, despite regular and careful investigation, no more signs of our former troubles were discovered. As many parents, looking up in sad and worried anger from their bridge games, agreed, "It was about time they did something!"

The man who more than anyone brought about the solution of the teen-age problem was Eric Ridley. It is rare indeed when a person has the good fortune to meet a saint, but he came as close to it as anyone I have ever known. Often in an evening of that last year I (headed for some pleasant rendezvous with my girl friend) would pass the game room and peer in to see what the missionaries had cooking for the teen-agers. As often as not Eric Ridley would be bent over a chessboard or a model boat, or directing some sort of square dance—absorbed, warm, and interested, pouring all of himself into this effort to capture the minds and imaginations of those penned-up youths.

If anyone could have done it, he could. A track man, he had won the 440 in the Olympics for England in the twenties, and then had come to China as a missionary. In camp he was in his middle forties, lithe and springy of step and, above all, overflowing with good humor and love of life. He was aided by others, to be sure. But it was Eric's enthusiasm and charm that carried the day with the whole effort. Shortly before the camp ended, he was stricken suddenly with a brain tumor and died the same day. The entire camp, especially its youth, was stunned for days, so great was the vacuum that Eric's death had left.

There was a quality seemingly unique to the missionary group, namely, naturally and without pretense to respond to a need which everyone else recognized only to turn aside. Much of this went unnoticed, but our camp could scarcely have survived as well as it did without it. If there were any evidences of the grace of God observable on the surface of our camp existence, they were to be found here.

As I looked at those of us who represented the Christian world in Weihsien, with all our pride, our failings, and yet the graces that appeared now and again, I was continually reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr's remark that religion is not the place where the problem of man's egotism is automatically solved. Rather, it is there that the ultimate battle between human pride and God's grace takes place. Insofar as human pride may win that battle, religion can and does become one of the instruments of human sin. But insofar as there the self does meet God and so can surrender to something beyond its own self-interest, religion may provide the one possibility for a much needed and very rare release from our common self-concern.

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