T[ Although in his public life the Viceroy was of stern and unrelenting character and apparently indifferent to human life, the diary reveals in many places a tender heart and sympathetic nature. His devotion to his mother was most touching. Her last illness and death occurred in a distant province while he was immersed in important affairs of state at Tientsin. He memorialized the Dowager Empresses for a leave of absence to go to her bedside, in which he said : " She is eighty-three years old, and her constitution is breaking up ; and the thought of her absent son continually recurs to her and makes her illness more dangerous. When memorialist heard this his heart burned with anxiety, and his sleep and his food were worthless. Since he bade her farewell thirteen years ago, he has never seen his mother's face."
A leave of absence for one month was granted him, but
1 J. H. Jowett, in The Christian World, Sept. 3, 1914.
JEREMIAH ii. 13 7
before he could start on his journey news came of her death, and he petitioned for the usual retirement of three years for mourning, but the Dowager Empresses answered that the state of public affairs would only allow of one hundred days. But this did not satisfy his grief at the failure to reach his mother before her death, and he sent another lengthy memorial, saying : "Eemorse will haunt memorialist all his life, and there is a wound in his heart that prevents him privately from enjoying a moment's respite from pain, and publicly from being of any service to the state. . . . Even if he, separated beyond hope from meeting his mother, the living from the dead, were to spend three years in lamentations at her tomb, it would not avail to relieve his soul from the poignant and inexpressible regret he feels for his lack of filial duty." We find that years after, when absorbed in his official duties, he records that fourteen years had passed that day since his mother died, and that he secluded himself from all callers. "With all the incidents of my life, its trials and lamentations, its moments of joy and pride, with all and every affair of life, I cannot forget my celestial mother, and all she was and is to me."
The unique correspondence with the Dowager Empresses brings out one of the most distinguished traits of Chinese character — veneration for parents, which has become sanctified into religious worship, and also has exercised a marked influence on the political relations of the people, the Emperor being the parental head of the nation. If the fifth commandment of the Mosaic code were as faithfully observed by Christian nations as the central doctrine of the Confucian philosophy is practised by the Celestials, the social order of the Western world would be greatly improved.1
3. When the Fountain is forsaken, and reverence is thereby impaired, the national chivalry also begins to decay. When we lose the sense of the sacredness of the family it is difficult to retain our sense of the sacredness of man. Take the history of any nation you please. Take the history of the English people. In those seasons when God has been forsaken, it has inevitably happened that man has not been revered. Oppression may have ridden rampant in the earth, but nobody has cared. Chivalry has flown away with reverence, and the sacredness of humanity has been lost.
The English people have felt most deeply the oppressions of 1 Memoirs of the Viceroy, Li Hung Chang, p. xvii.
8 THE FOUNTAIN OF LIVING WATERS
other people when they themselves have lived nearest to God. Does anybody imagine for a moment that if our communion with the Almighty had been keen and undimmed, and we had consequently possessed a quick and vital sense of the sacredness of man, we should have quietly tolerated for so many years the barbarous iniquities of the Congo ? One of the greatest and noblest boasts of the Apostle Paul was given in these words: " Who is made to stumble and I burn not ? " And that was the flame of chivalry, kindled and kept alive in the Apostle's ceaseless communion with his God. Let that holy zeal begin to smoulder and the burning chivalry will soon die out. When God is forsaken chivalry is smitten at the heart. Let reverence die, and chivalry cannot hold her place.
T| " As he lay," said Dean Stanley in his funeral sermon at Westminster Abbey, " the other day, cold in death, like the stone effigy of an ancient warrior, the ' fitful fever ' of life gone, the strength of immortality left, resting as if after the toil of a hundred battles, this was himself idealized. From those mute lips there seemed to issue once more the living words with which he spoke, ten years ago, before one who honoured him with an unswerving faithfulness to the end. ' Some say ' — thus he spoke in the Chapel of Windsor Castle — 'some say that the age of chivalry is past, that the spirit of romance is dead. The age of chivalry is never past, so long as there is a wrong left unredressed on earth, or a man or a woman left to say, I will redress that wrong, or spend my life in the attempt. The age of chivalry is never past so long as we have faith enough to say, God will help me to redress that wrong, or if not me, He will help those that come after me, for His eternal will is to overcome evil with good.'"1