Book manuscript- (c) 2009 by William Sims Bainbridge

Although there is much to recommend economic metaphors like "the religious market," we might better borrow our models from biology. Providence possessed a religious ecology, in which high-tension and low-tension churches had co-evolved, much as flowers and honey bees had evolved in the New England countryside, to depend upon each other. Well adapted to each other, the denominations simultaneously competed and cooperated, and together they filled all the significant religious niches in the social environment. Thus, we do not see any non-Christian religious movement rise to prominence during this period, and Catholicism gains only through immigration. This is not the place to consider the ecological model of religion in all its theoretical and even mathematical detail, but the ecological approach has a long history in sociology, and Talcott Parsons showed years ago that an evolutionary perspective could increase our understanding of religious systems.²⁶⁷ For present purposes, it is enough to realize that there are many ways to think about the religious system, and that individual humans have potentially many kinds of relationships to the denominations and movements that exist in their environment.

Chapter 5:

Westward to the Far East
Lucy, William, Willie and Helen headed westward from New York by train. The passengers included a group of orphans and foundlings, collected by the Home for Little Wanderers, in the care of a kindly superintendent who would distribute them among willing families of the western states. At Cleveland, they watched sleighs race along Euclid Avenue and took a short pilgrimage to Woodland Cemetery, to gaze upon the snow-covered mounds that marked the Seaman graves.

They deposited Nellie with her grandmother, Mary Folwell Bainbridge Seaman, who lived with her daughter, Mary Eliza, and her son-in-law, Samuel Cowell, on Olive Street.²⁶⁸ Nellie’s uncle, Charles Seaman (who now ran Seaman and Smith Shoes) lived at 974 Kennard Street with his wife, Carrie, son Charles, and Carrie’s mother.²⁶⁹ Lucy's other brother, Harry, had sold out his part of the Erie business, went west, went broke, and returned to Erie. After his father’s death he was an insurance agent in Cleveland, then settled down as a bookkeeper for Standard Oil. This growing monopoly had been founded by John D. Rockefeller, a trustee and the Sunday school superintendent of Cleveland’s Second Baptist Church, where Henry taught Sunday school.²⁷⁰ In an apartment at 923 Streator Avenue he lived with his wife and their three children, Laura, Augusta and Walter.²⁷¹ Of all her Seaman relatives, Lucy would keep closest contact throughout the rest of her life with “Gussie” and Walter, who carried the names of her dead sister and brother.

In Chicago, they transferred to a fancy hotel car.²⁷² The era of Pullmans had begun, plush coaches designed for comfort and elegance, and railroad advertisements called them palaces.²⁷³ West of Omaha they encountered prarie fires by night: “Like two mighty serpents, miles in length, fire was meeting fire.”²⁷⁴ In Wyoming territory, where women had the vote, Lucy interviewed a sullen woman about her political rights, and in Ogden, Utah, she interrogated the proprietor of Zion’s Coöperative Mercantile Institution about Mormon polygyny.²⁷⁵

Finally, twenty-five hundred miles out of Chicago, they reached San Francisco. William collected letters of recommendation from the Japanese consul, and Lucy scoured the city for seasickness remedies: a bottle of hyoscyamus and another of nux vomica, brown paper to soak in vinegar, strips of cloth to wind tightly around the torso, and lemons. One gentleman advised, “Keep drinking raw whiskey when first you embark, until — well, until you are drunk; and when you come out of it you will be all right for the rest of the trip.”²⁷⁶ Lucy decided this cure was worse than the disease itself, so she did not purchase whiskey. The day after Willie’s ninth birthday, they embarked with eight hundred other souls, on the steamer Gaelic, bound for Japan, across five thousand miles of sea.

While Lucy was taking excursions with Captain Kidley to inspect the sides of beef on ice for their elegant dinners, and interrogating him about the silver and quicksilver in the cargo, William was reading missionary reports, debating missionary work with other passengers, and trying a little of it out on some of the six hundred Chinese men travelling home in steerage. With the Chinese he had no success, and one of them explained to him, “Christians all cheat and oppress Chinamen. They think Chinamen no better than pigs; with no rights in society or business, or government. Our gods teach us better. In our classics we read good morals. Christians better go to our joss-houses.”²⁷⁷ William’s mind drifted to the etymology of the word joss, derived via Pidgin English and Portuguese from the Latin deus, God. Half a dozen of the Chinamen died during the weeks the ship ploughed westward, but even in death, they longed to return home. By paying the ship’s doctor forty dollars for his work and a bottle of carbolic acid, each arranged to be pickled so his body could be buried in China.

At daybreak on March 11, the Gaelic reached Yokohama, the port just south of Tokyo that was open to foreign ships. Bracing against the cold, piercing wind, Lucy spied “Fuji in all his dazzling glory, his snowy crown encircled by light fleecy clouds.” After what seemed an eternity of open sea, Willie was stunned by the image of “the mountains in the distance, land obscured by the mists of the morning, then the sun arising in the east and glistening on the snow capped mountains, surely the land of the rising sun.” When they disembarked, he was delighted by the clatter of wooden shoes along the road.

At first, they stayed with Baptist missionaries named Brown who lived on the fine bluff overlooking Yokohama, in the “consession” reserved for foreigners.²⁷⁸ Riding in two-coolie rickshas, they went fifteen miles out and fifteen back, to see the immense idol of Daibootz near Kamakura, which did not enchant Lucy. “Travellers write of the sweet and wonderful expression of this idol’s face. It expresses to me simply that Buddhist idea ‘nigban’ — absorbed into annihilation; a stupid, sleepy stare.”²⁷⁹ The family climbed onto the idol's hands and discovered they would all fit on the fingernails.

Although Japan had been open to the world for two decades, outsiders could not travel farther than twenty miles around each treaty port without special permission. William sought a native substitute who would stand in for him if he broke the law and accept punishment in his stread, even being executed in his place if necessary. A Japanese Christian named Mr. Watanabe volunteered for this Christ-like mission.²⁸⁰

William reckoned that there were 123 Protestant missionaries in Japan, and 53 of them were accompanied by their wives, yet less than three thousand Japanese were communicants of Christian churches. Despite a minor Buddhist revival that seemed to be in progress, the chief opponent to Christianity was not the indigenous Asian religions, but Western science. Japan's technological progress was so rapid the Bainbridges could see it happening before their very eyes. But with this secular advance came disdain of faith in the supernatural.

At Tokyo Imperial University, “The American professor, with most courteous manner and language, yet with spirit most bitter against Christianity and painful to the heart of belief, declared that science denies the existence of God, resolves everything to matter and its necessary laws, and that Christianity was a vast humbug.”²⁸¹ He invited them to dinner and proved to be an hospitable host.²⁸²

Another evening, they were invited to a lavish multi-course dinner by the Secretary of the Home Department, featuring Japanese cuisine. “A lobster made to represent a ship with a square sail of green plantain leaf, and decorated with the emblem of Japan — the rising sun — cut out of orange peel, was placed in the centre of the table, to serve as an ornament until it should be eaten.”²⁸³ Lucy’s toured a school for girls funded by the empress, where she was treated to a koto and singing recital that she found painfully dischordant.²⁸⁴ She was more impressed by the Nichi Nichi Shinbun newspaper when shown around by the editor, Mr. Fukutsi.

One morning, with a young Japanese lady named Oginsan, Lucy and Willie rode rickshas through the winding streets to inspect the funeral procession of a man favored by the Mikado. Led by a servant with folded arms, this solemn parade included scores of soldiers, priests, officials, and relatives of the deceased. Lucy pondered the symbolisms. “A man bearing a green bush ornamented with long strips of white paper in fancy shapes. Men carrying long bamboo poles flying red and white strips of Japanese silk. Men in white tunics, with boughs covered with real blossoms and artificial flowers. A box of unpainted wood carried on the shoulders of several servants, which contained the food to be set before the dead man at the funeral ceremony. The corpse in an unpainted house, a few feet each way in size, with closed bamboo curtain and ornamented with gilt and rice straw tassels and rope, and bunches of white paper, borne on two immense beams by forty men in white tunics.”²⁸⁵

She watched the high priest perform the graveside ceremony. “When all had gone out except a few priests and the eldest son, a crowd of coolies rushed in. Flowers and branches were pushed aside, chairs piled up, and the curtain-side of the room behind the corpse torn down, revealing the grave. The house of the dead man was soon taken to pieces, and the simple box in which the body had been placed in kneeling position was pushed and jostled by the coolies, who talked and laughed and screamed directions to every other coolie who was within sight. The eldest son consoled himself with cigarettes and looked on. After the grave had been sprinkled with charcoal, the box was lowered by the noisy workmen. A pair of shoes and stockings, banners and streamers were laid upon the coffin, and, as we left the cemetery, the priests were chattering over the food they were packing to take home with them. The dead man had taken the spiritual essence, and what was left they would dispose of literally.”²⁸⁶

After five weeks near Tokyo, the Bainbridges set out by stage coach along the grand thoroughfare called the Tokaido that runs three hundred miles westward to Kyoto. At Odawara, they exchanged the stage for kangoes, chairs slung from poles, and allowed themselves to be carried up into the Hakone mountains.²⁸⁷ The next day, Lucy chose to walk the eleven miles to the jinrikishas in Mishima rather than bear another kango ride. Curiosity seekers in every village swarmed around Lucy’s man-drawn chariot to see this strange woman with flaming red hair, her lanky husband, and their peculiar child.²⁸⁸

A letter of introduction from the Secretary of the Home Department to the Assistant Governor gave them a grand tour of ancient Kyoto. They stayed in the home of missionary Joseph Neesima.²⁸⁹ Born Neesima Shimeta in a samurai family, he was ten years old when Commodore Perry anchored his fleet in Tokyo Bay and opened Japan to the world. In 1864, having learned a little English, he stowed away on a ship bound for Shanghai. There he begged captain Horace Taylor of the Wild Rover to take him to America.²⁹⁰ At Hong Kong he sold his sword to purchase a Chinese Bible; the captain renamed him Joseph; his transformation had begun.

In Boston, the ship’s owner, Alphaeus Hardy, exclaimed “God has sent you to be a savior to your people!”²⁹¹ Neesima studied with great diligence at Phillips Academy, Amherst College, and Andover Theological Seminary. A decade after leaving Japan, he was ordained and sent back to Japan with $5,000 in donations to establish a school in his native Kyoto that would eventually evolve into Doshisha University. When the Bainbridges arrived Neesima was developing an ambitious philosophy of education. Christianity, he thought, would succeed best in Japan if the evangelists were native Japanese, and they would need thorough university educations that would make them intellectual leaders of their nation.

Nine-year-old Willie sang “What a friend we have in Jesus” with Mrs. Neesima, he in English and she in Japanese.²⁹² He played “tag” with the neighbor boys, just as at home.²⁹³ One day he inspired a group of twenty Japanese lads to drill like American soldiers, with broomsticks for rifles, and they marched down to the mission school singing “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know” in Japanese.²⁹⁴

After taking in the sights of Osaka, they were guests with the family of Luther Halsey Gulick in Kobe, a lineage of missionaries who had labored for fifty years in Hawaii.²⁹⁵ The steamship Nagoya Maru took them through the inland sea and on to Nagasaki, where Lucy knew “thousands of Christians were cruelly put to death.”²⁹⁶ Although impressed by Japan’s dynamism, they did not fully appreciate the first Asian land they visited until they saw their second. Japan was clean, but China was a cesspool.²⁹⁷

China
Their guide in Shanghai was Matthew T. Yates, an American missionary who had come to the city in 1847 with his wife.²⁹⁸ Because they were Southern Baptists, they had been forced to support themselves during the Civil War, and for many years they had worked alone in the small city mission to which he led Lucy. “The leprous, blind, sick; the pitted and small-pox convalescent are all jostled along with the rest of the unwashed crowd. The pavement is uneven and slippery with filth... A sluggish little creek coated with green slime, its banks well lined with decaying vegetables and indescribable filth, slowly winds its way through the city to the river outside... We stumble on a pile of garbage, and the air — what there is — has the additional flavor of hot goose-oil and frying pork-balls. There are many opium dens on the route; there at that curtain door is one of the victims. His weird expression and pinched cheek show that the demon has a firm grip on him... Conversation lags as we press our lips together in the effort not to breathe. But we have reached one of the three chapels right in the heart of this slimy, noisome place. It is a pleasant relief to dodge into the small yard, and enter the cool, more quiet room where the Gospel of the pure and living God is preached many times each week.”²⁹⁹

Former President Ulysses S. Grant and his entourage arrived. In her memoirs, Mrs. Grant pretended not to notice the filth but concentrated instead upon the firework display: “It was simply grand!”³⁰⁰ Lucy had pinned a tiny American flag to her son’s chest for the occasion. Grant laid his hand on the boy’s head and said, “You are an American, I see, and love the American flag. What are you going to be when you are a man?”

Willie answered, “It would be great to be a general.”

Grant smiled and said, “But remember that you have a good many rungs of the ladder to climb; yes, and when you get there it isn't worth much at all.”³⁰¹

William set out on a two-thousand-mile inventory of the Christian missions in Ningpo, Zao-hying, Hangchow, Suchow, Ching-kiang, Nankin, Wuhu, Nganking, Kiukiang, Hankow Hanyan, and Wuchang. Lucy and Willie took steamer to Chefoo, where William’s cousin, John Nevius, and his wife Helen had been operating a mission for nearly twenty years.³⁰² Little Willie would remember John Nevius “for his genial spirit and his hearty laugh,” and it was said he accomplished as much for Christianity with his optimism as with his preaching.³⁰³

John Nevius was an innovator, having improved the fruit of the Chinese pear by grafting,³⁰⁴ and he had redesigned the passenger-carrying Chinese wheelbarrow for use on his frequent missionary tours of the countryside. The one huge wheel is surrounded by a box with removable seats that can serve as a bed. A coolie in the back stears by means of ropes leading to the mule at the front, cracking his whip past the passenger. Nevius had contrived a system of brakes to slow the vehicle when the donkey decided to run down hill, but he had not yet solved the problem of stability. He and Lucy went riding together, and the greater weight on his side necessitated running the thing at a tilt, until a sharp turn precipitated them both on the ground, Lucy on top of the inventor.

While William surveyed the mission outposts, Lucy investigated the conditions of women in China. The most dreadful sign of their degradation was the cruel custom of footbinding, in which a girl’s feet would be so tightly wrapped that they would crush themselves in growing. The ideal was a tiny “lotus petal” not more than three inches long. Born in obscurity in the late Sung or early Ming dynasties, this practice spread to many strata of Chinese society, hindered the economy by removing many women from productive physical work, and caused suffering on a scale previously unknown in the history of the world.³⁰⁵

Lucy convinced a servant-nurse to reveal her naked foot. “It was a little bag of dried and seemingly lifeless skin, filled with a pulpy mass of bones and muscles. One of the toes had rotted off during the binding process, and the others, except the large one, had been twisted under and were embedded in the sole. The instep bones had been crowded up and pushed together, while the heel had been drawn forward, making an indentation nearly an inch deep in the under part of the foot. The limb, to the knee, because of lack of circulation, was only skin and bone, and the ankle, which is usually kept carefully covered with silk wrappings or an embroidered pantalet, was a bulging deformity.”³⁰⁶

Usually, the woman explained, girl’s feet were bound at the age of five or six, but because she was a weak child, her parents had waited until she was ten. For a long time, the pain prevented her from sleeping, but she could doze a little bit if she hung her feet over the hard edge of her bed, and that winter she put no blanket over her feet, because the cold numbed the agony.

“Once when the pain was very severe I loosened the bandage, but my mother told me what a dreadful thing it would be not to become a lady. That same day when a large footed woman came to carry away all the slops and sewerage to the rice fields, mother asked me if I never wanted to wear silk dresses, and if I should like to be a servant.”³⁰⁷ As an adult, she converted to Christianity, but it was too late to unbind her feet. For the remainder of her life, she would hobble on the stumps, and she could not even stand without her bandages.

When sitting on her verandah, Lucy could hear the wailing of an eight-year old girl enduring the torture of her foot-binding. By paying a little money, Lucy was able to watch a woman change the bindings, rubbing alum into the cracked skin, working quickly to adjust the bindings before the flesh could swell. She asked how long the girl would suffer such pain, and she was told it usually took a foot two years to die.

Even poor families, Lucy was told, might set aside one daughter to become a lady, binding her feet in hopes she would ascend into a higher social class. A true lady possesses “golden lily feet,” wears shoes only two and a half inches long, and must be carried everywhere by a servant. Sometimes gangrene sets in, and the girl dies. One of the missionaries told Lucy of encountering a young woman lying on a country road, her feet nearly rotted off, death creeping up her diseased legs. For Lucy, the ghastly custom of foot-binding was proof of the superiority of Christianity, and Christian Chinese seldom practiced it, instead providing their daughters handsome shoes of a proper size.

Chinese Religion and Medicine
When John Nevius had first arrived in 1854, he became fascinated by stories about Chinese who supposedly had been possessed by spirits, and he studied similar tales in the Bible.³⁰⁸ The laws of the ancient Hebrews forbad them to consort with dark powers: “A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them.”³⁰⁹ Lucy was thoroughly acquainted with the story of Saul and the witch of Endor, who successfully evoked the ghost of Samuel,³¹⁰ and in her tour of the Holy Land a dozen years earlier she had rushed past that cursed spot. The New Testament reports that Jesus frequently cast out devils, testimony to their existence as well as to his healing powers.³¹¹

Nevius had been collecting stories of spirit possessions, and just three months earlier he had interviewed Mr. Kwo, a victim of demon-possession in the village of Twin-Mountain Stream. Mr. Kwo said his troubles had begun soon after he bought a picture of the goddess Wang Mu-niang and displayed it in the most honorable position in his house. An evil spirit came to him in his dreams, then he fell into uncontrolable restlessness. When possessed by the demon, Mr. Kwo acquired marvelous healing powers, and people came from far and wide to be cured. Then Mr. Kwo met a Chinese Christian missionary who convinced him Jesus would drive out the evil spirit, and they tore down the shrine they had made for it. A few days later, Mr. Kwo’s child died. His wife blamed this terrible loss on the demon’s anger and urged him to resume his worship of it. But he refused, saying he was now dedicated to Jesus. Vanquished, the spirit departed with these words: “Jesus Christ is the great Lord over all.”³¹²

When William rejoined Lucy and heard tales like this from his cousin, he suggested that Nevius approach spirit possession more systematically. Inspired by his conversations with William and Lucy, Nevius sent a thirteen-item questionnaire to all the Protestant clergy in China, collecting cases of possession and determining how Christianity could best cure them. Aided by science, they imagined, Christian religion would conquer native superstitions, and in so doing liberate the women and men of China.

Leaving Willie in the care of their cousins, Lucy and William set out on a five-week excursion to Peking, invited by Henry Blodget, an American missionary who like Nevius had begun his China work back in 1854. Blodget had entered Tientsin with the British and French army in 1860 during the second opium war, had helped translate the New Testament into the Mandarin language a dozen years later, and co-authored a Chinese hymnal.³¹³ Other hosts would be the American consul, George H. Seward, and the president of the Imperial University, Dr. Martin.³¹⁴ At Tientsin, Lucy and William transferred from a steamboat to a native junk, sculled against the current on a windless day past the scene of the terrible massacre.³¹⁵

In 1870 wild rumors had whipped up rage against an innocent Catholic orphanage. The sisters supposedly were buying Chinese children to make magical charms out of their hearts and eyes. The fact that some of the orphans died in an epidemic, and other children were baptized when they were about to die, implicated Christianity. A few Chinese were executed for selling children to the nuns, but an official investigation exonerated the orphanage. The citizens of Tientsin would not be calmed, however, and a shooting incident involving the French Consul triggered a mob attack. Ten nuns, two priests, various other foreigners, and some of the children were murdered, many of them horribly mutilated.³¹⁶