(Excerpt from The Christian Equivalent of War
This book i...)
Excerpt from The Christian Equivalent of War
This book is meant to aid the fair-minded student in his study of the problems involved in war. But war will serve only as an illustration - tangible and vivid of much that lies deeper. By seeking out the elemental factors involved in the use of force, whether they mani fest themselves ia international, civic, or social relations, or in personal conduct, and by comparing them with the principles of Jesus, we shall ever be discovering new and far-reaching applications of these principles, and thus new demonstrations of their validity and power.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
David Willard Lyon was an American Presbyterian missionary. He served as general secretary and then associate secretary of National Committee of Chinese YMCA from 1901 to 1930.
Background
David Willard Lyon was born on May 13, 1870 on a houseboat in Ningpo, China, where his parents had recently begun their service as Presbyterian missionaries that was to last for nearly four decades. He was the oldest of their seven children. His father, Reverend David Nelson Lyon, was a native of Salisbury, New York; his mother, Mandana Eliza (Doolittle) Lyon, of Townshend, Vermont. Both had attended Vermillion Institute in Hayesville, Ohio and David Nelson had graduated from Western Theological Seminary in 1869.
Education
As was customary in missionary families, young Lyon returned from China to the United States for his education and received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the College of Wooster in Ohio in 1891 and the degree of Master of Arts in 1894. Expecting to become a preacher of the gospel, he spent two years at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago. He was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1895 and never abandoned his deep religious enthusiasm.
Career
About 1890s, the new Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), enthusiastically abetted by the college branches of the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), was encouraging young men and women to go abroad as missionaries. Lyon served there for a year from 1894 to 1895 as educational secretary for the SVM, editing the Student Volunteer. Because of his Chinese experience and administrative ability, the YMCA urged him to return to China to pioneer a student movement there. Although his father wanted him to become a preacher, Lyon finally decided to become a YMCA worker instead and spent the rest of his active professional life as an administrator in the nondenominational YMCA.
When Lyon arrived in China at the end of 1895, the country seemed ready to make some fundamental changes in its institutions because of its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War. He decided to go to Tientsin, where students largely trained in mission schools were eager to learn modern skills and were curious about Western institutions. In a few months Lyon founded a student YMCA, solicited local funds to buy a lot, persuaded an American donor Mrs. J. Livingstone Taylor to finance a building, and organized a board of directors that soon included Chinese. He began to give classes and started a bulletin in English and Chinese, the first of several published over the years by the YMCA. During 1896 he helped organize student YMCAs throughout the country. He also began to press for a school where he could train Chinese to become YMCA secretaries. Thus Lyon set a model for the later large national organization, shaping it as a movement that was self-governing and where possible self-supporting, where young men could meet together, improve themselves, and prepare to serve as modernizers of Chinese society. In these hectic months he also studied Mandarin several hours a day by setting his face "like a flint" against other demands on his time. His fluency in the vernacular enabled him to start language training schools for American missionaries. He was buoyed in the work by a conviction that the young men of America had a special responsibility toward the young men of China because of American laws against Chinese immigration.
During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, Lyon sought refuge in Korea and started the Korean YMCA. In China the work briefly came to a standstill, but with the humiliating Boxer defeat, Chinese businessmen and officials soon became attracted to the innovative and sympathetic work of the YMCA, and its influence began to spread. In 1901 Lyon became general secretary and then associate secretary of the new National Committee of the Chinese YMCA and served in that capacity until his retirement. In the ensuing years he was involved in many areas of countrywide planning and administration. He was keenly aware of important new movements affecting China. On a trip to Japan in 1906, for example, he saw the explosive potential lodged in Chinese students living in Tokyo. Though hardly a radical reformer himself, he helped develop in Japan a Chinese YMCA that gained the confidence of these students and enhanced the YMCA reputation in China after the 1911 revolution.
In the area of written language reform, he encouraged the use of the vernacular in journals and pamphlets. Far in advance of denominational church groups, he set up training schools and institutes for Chinese secretaries. His faith in Chinese leadership was acknowledged by an invitation to be the only foreign secretary to speak at the 1920 Chinese YMCA National Convention, held when nationalist feelings were emerging strongly. In 1915 Lyon published The Christian Equivalent of War, and in 1927, Confucianism Today, and along with these produced a stream of training pamphlets, institutional memoirs, and articles for the American Oriental Society, the Institute for Pacific Relations, and the Chinese Recorder.
Plagued by delicate health, Lyon retired in 1930, although he remained in the Far East until 1934 recruiting workers for the YMCA. On his return to America he turned his interests to translating T'ang poetry. A book of his translations, Inside the Moon Gate, was published posthumously in 1951.
Achievements
David Willard Lyon played a key role in molding the early Young Men's Christian Association into China's first modern youth organization. He was an organizer of YMCA in Korea and of Chinese YMCA in Japan. He also founded several publications, established language schools, and published The Christian Equivalent of War in 1915.
