THE FIELD AND ITS PIONEERS - Burns, William Chalmers

Chapter xiii

1847

China proper is a compact territory. You would only need to cut off a few projections and fill up a few indentations in order to bring it into either a circle or a square; for its length and breadth are nearly equal. It includes more than a million square miles; and lying between the twentieth and forty-second parallels of northern latitude, it enjoys on the whole an excellent climate. Two noble rivers (the hwang-ho and yang- tse-kiang, the “yellow river” and the “son of the ocean. “) flow down its center, and fertilize the most populous regions in the world. The ocean, sprinkled with islands, washes its eastern and southern coasts. The mountains of Tibet are its western barrier; and on the north it is still guarded by a wall thirteen hundred miles in length, which it cost the united labors of the nation to erect two thousand years ago. Over this wall or over these mountains, you instantly land on bleak deserts and barren wastes; and it is no wonder that in contrast with the encircling solitude, the Chinese should have called their teeming soil, ‘the flowery land. ‘

Wide as the surface is, the swarming inhabitants require it all. From the safest calculations, as the imperial census, the present population cannot be less than three hundred and sixty millions, or a third of the world’s inhabitants. To stow away such a multitude needs the utmost economy of room; and in its expedients for squeezing existence into the smallest possible compass, the Chinese continent resembles the cabin of a ship. Crops are grown in places where you would think none but the birds could have planted them; and in their anxiety to leave every inch available for culture, they contrive to put past themselves and their families in all inconceivable corners. They cannot double their area, but their genial sky allows them to double their harvests by sowing two crops in the year; and as land is so precious, many of this evenly-minded and compressible people are content to live on the water. Most of their rivers are strewed with these floating cottages.

But in truth the crowded life of the Chinese people is due not so much to the narrowness of the land, as to the variety of its surface. The sterile and inhospitable character of a large part of the empire compresses a population which on the average is not more dense than that of England into a comparatively limited space. To the west are vast mountain ranges, with giant peaks, frowning gorges, and forests of cedar and of pine; in the center is a hilly region, gradually softening down into those gentle breezy slopes on which the tea plantations flourish; while to the east and seaward there stretch out wide and fertile plains, studded with towns and villages, and cultivated every inch like one vast garden. It is this last region that constitutes that teeming hive of human life with which we are familiar and of which alone till recently we could be said to possess any authentic knowledge. The people are quiet, industrious, orderly, mechanically civil, and artificially refined, deeply sunk indeed, like all heathen nations, in ungodliness and sin, but addicted rather to the quieter than the ruder vices. They are intensely sensual, but not fierce or cruel; though the very apathy and shallowness of their nature renders them on occasions singularly reckless of the shedding of blood. They love their children, and have more than any other heathen people of the sentiment of home and family life; and yet the inconvenience of an overcrowded country induces them to expose by myriads their female offspring.

Their religion is a strange medley of diverse creeds, dwelling together in peace, and blending more or less together in the ideas and life of the people. “the first of these was founded by Confucius in the sixth century. It is the religion of the literati, and of the present emperor; but there is no reason why it should be called a religion, except that its votaries believe in nothing besides. It consists of a few moral and practical maxims, and evades the existence of god and the immortality of the soul. The Confucians are the atheists and the philosophic utilitarians of china. Next comes the tao sect, whose founder, laou-tsze, lived in the days of Confucius. Unlike the Confucians, who believe in nothing supernatural, the followers of laou-tsze have peopled earth and air with all sorts of spirits and demons. They deal in magic, and are constantly consulting maniacs and others whom they deem possessed; and it used to be their great problem to discover the elixir of immortality. They are the fanatics of china. And then we have a sect not of Chinese but Indian origin, and far more popular than the other two, the Buddhists. The object of their ambition is to lose all personal identity, and be absorbed into Buddha. Contemplation and abstraction of mind are their highest enjoyments, and to lose all contact with earthly things to live ‘without looking, speaking, hearing, or smelling, ‘ is the nearest approach to perfection. They are the mystics and ascetics of china. ” such as it is, the religion of this strange and singular people obtrudes itself everywhere. The land teems with images. “their temples, houses, streets, roads, hills, rivers, carriages, and ships, are full of idols; every room, niche, corner, door, and window, is plastered with charms, amulets, and emblems of idolatry.

Add to these particulars one or two characteristic features more, their singular reverence for the tombs and for the memories of their ancestors, their ancestral tablets and ancestral religious rites; their one written, and their many spoken, languages; their universal system of education and of literary examination and degrees, upon which, by a remarkable anticipation of our recent civil service reforms, the appointment to all public offices of trust and profit depends; their strange and whimsical, but often rich and showy costume the tails and silk robes of the men, and the cramped feet of the women; their eager curiosity, especially in the inland districts, about the persons and the movements of strangers, making the hapless traveler often ten minutes after his arrival the centre of an excited crowd, which fills doors and windows, and almost stops the traffic of the streets; their fortune-tellers, their story-tellers, their jugglers, and their rude but vastly popular stage-plays, held in the open air, at the expense usually of some rich citizen, and open to all comers; their pleasant life in canals and rivers, in boats which serve often for weeks together both for locomotion and lodging, and which, moored close to the gate of some populous town or city, make the stranger at once at home in the place of his sojourning; their multitudinous and meaningless religious ceremonies, in which there is scarcely anything of religion or religious belief; and in fine, their measurement of time not by weeks but by the periodical recurrence of market-days, evermore painfully reminding the missionary that he dwells in a sabbath less land; and we shall be able to form a tolerably distinct idea of the circumstances and scenes in the midst of which we have now to place ourselves, and with which, in the course of our narrative, we shall become more and more familiar. Towards this vast and interesting field the missionary spirit of the christian church was at a very early period directed. So early as the 7 th or 8 th century, missionaries from the nestorian churches in Persia found their way to china. And from the 14 th century, onward, to the present time, the romish church has scarcely ever been without its missionary representatives; some of them men of devoted zeal and rare ability Francis xavier per-eminent above them all; to whom, however we may estimate the character of their work or the quality of its results, belongs the undoubted honour of having been first in the field, and of having held forth a bright example of enterprise and heroism, which the reformed churches were but too slow to follow. At the time at which our narrative begins, there were in china 170 roman catholic missionaries, and upwards of 200,000 converts. In the year 1806 Robert Morrison, the first protestant missionary to china, was set apart to the work in swallow street scotch church, London, under the auspices of the London missionary society, and arrived at Macao on September 4 th , 1807.

There, in a warehouse which he rented, he plodded on in his secret labours at the language, hardly venturing out among the suspicious inhabitants, and hiding the lamp by which he studied behind a volume of henry’s commentary, after ten years of toil he completed a herculean task, and printed in six quartos a . Dictionary of Chinese; and after being joined by a like-minded laborer, Dr. Milne, had the happiness to translate into chines the entire word, which, by the amazing ingenuity and industry of a brother missionary, was printed in a new and beautiful style. ” he was a man indeed singularly fitted by the gifts alike of nature and of grace for the work which he had undertaken, and specially at the particular stage which that work had then reached, with “talents rather of the solid than of the showy kind; fitted more for continued labour than for sudden bursts of genius, ” and with a shrewd caution which was of great price in “a station where one false step at the beginning might have delayed the  work for years. ” for eighteen long years he laboured on unobtrusively and unwearied, himself but little seen, but his eye ever fixed on the master and the master’s business.

He died in 1834, having been preceded twelve years by his beloved brother and true yoke-fellow Dr. Milne. Though the time of fruit was not yet, they were honored to gather some precious first fruits of china unto Christ, conspicuous amongst whom were leang afah and keuh agang, who long survived them as consistent disciples and zealous and successful preachers of the gospel. But their work was that of pioneers rather than of cultivators of the land; gathering little fruit themselves, but preparing the seed for many harvests yet to come. Their true monument is the Chinese bible and the Chinese college, (the anglo-chinese college founded at Malacca, in 1818, for the cultivation of English and Chinese literature, and thereby promoting the propagation of Christianity in the far east. Dr. Morrison himself made the munificent offering of 1500 sterling pounds towards the carrying out of this object, in which we must recognize the true precursor of the educational missionary institutes originated by dr. Duff in Hindustan twenty years later. ) and the enduring memory of that “work of faith and labor of love and patience of hope” in the midst of all discouragements and difficulties, by which, though dead, they yet speak to all that follow after them, and which shall be remembered to their honor in that day “when they that sowed and they that reaped shall rejoice together. ” they will be ever recognized and honored as the true fathers of the Chinese protestant missions and of the Chinese protestant church. With the opening of the five ports to foreign residents and foreign traffic in 1842, just eight years after Morrison had closed his work on earth, a great impulse was naturally given to the cause of Chinese missions, and representatives of all the great societies in Britain and in america speedily hastened to the field. Within four years there were already in china, or on the way to it, fifty protestant missionaries. The field so long jealously guarded and hedged around was suddenly thrown open and lay white unto the harvest, and eager reapers were hastening from every side to cut it down. Such were the main incidents in the past history of the work on which the subject of this memoir now entered, with the ardent zeal of a xavier, with the patient constancy of a Morrison, and with a consecration of heart and an abnegation of self equal to any of those who had ever trod that distant shore.