The call, p.21
The Call, page 21
What we must note for the future about this experience of David’s is not simply that it stirred up once again his romantic daydreams of itinerations and street preaching, of playing his own dashing role in the evangelization of the world in his generation; but rather that his awe of James B. Todd was almost too much for him. He felt somewhat as he had as a freshman at the foot of the hill at Syracuse on the day of the salt rush—“really small.” He wrote in his diary: “He made me into a cipher sitting there at the back of the Martyrs’ Hall.” There was some deeply puzzling ingredient in the great Todd’s magnetism. We will see, a few years later, some unraveling of the puzzle when David goes on tour through China as a fellow lecturer with Todd and a remarkable shift takes place in the balance of power between these two vigorous creatures.
* * *
—
IN THE DAYS of waiting for the Centenary Conference to begin, David was given the task of following up with some of the “Todd Seventy” who were known to speak English. The very first man he called on, to enroll him in an Association Bible class, lived in a fine house deep in the Chinese city. A strange confession in David’s diary: “Even though I knew I was on a sacred mission, I must admit I felt like one of those house-to-house ‘canvassers’ Mother used to hate so much. Sellers of pans brooms mousetraps ect.” The young man was a student at St. John’s College.
He had a long face. “My family is nobody Christians,” says Chen, “I have no friends in Christian church. I want so much Jesus Christ, but my mother…” He stopped short there and wouldn’t say another word more, he had lost face, but it wasn’t hard to finish the sentence. I am praying hard for him.
In the agonizing of “Search” David recalls this Todd evening and his own rather discouraging follow-ups as having hung in his mind back then, contributing to a later skepticism about the old ways of evangelizing:
Only seventy declarers for the mighty Todd out of an audience of twelve hundred—a motheaten six tenths of one per cent! Motheaten because how many of them had parents who refused permission—or wriggled out for other “practical” reasons? I myself could not say I had confirmed for future cultivation a single declarer among the famous “Todd Seventy.”
* * *
—
THE TREADUPS were staying in a third-floor room in the Keystone house. On the ship down from Tientsin, Emily had developed a sore throat, and now, in damp March, as David had to go off for a few days at a time, first to Soochow for a get-together of Association secretaries, then north with the Todd party, she felt worse and worse. A Dr. Marshall came to see her during one of David’s absences, and he off-handedly said she had a quinsy. Her diary: “It was as if he had stabbed me with an icicle.” For David had told Emily about the travails of old Dr. Elting, about how, for one thing, his wife had died of a quinsy. Her fear—and perhaps her sense of dependency on powerful David, and her helplessness without him (though he might have said that he was already hopelessly dependent on her)—seemed to hone the pain. She refused food because she could not swallow without the most cutting anguish; and she began to imagine that she would starve to death. Finally one day Dr. Marshall lanced the abscess. The next day David was back in Shanghai, and she suddenly was able to sit up and to eat some custard. Within a week she was herself. This was the first of many, many times when the silently arching Milky-Way calm of Emily’s married life would be torn out of her sky by one of David’s sudden departures.
THE CENTENARY CONFERENCE
IN MID-APRIL the scattered herd began to assemble. One could see striding in the streets of Shanghai, their heels crashing on the pavements as if with strokes of the hammers of history, all the famous missionary stalwarts of the late nineteenth century. Arthur H. Smith, Timothy Richard, Joshua Bagnall, C. W. Mateer, W. A. P. Martin, Young J. Allen, the brothers Moule—legends were walking around. They had terrifying faces, these giants, ravaged by a fixated, unyielding love of humanity. The huge frosty bushes hanging from the chinbones of most of them proclaimed their fierce seniority. If the Christians had gone in for idolatry, these figures must surely have vied for the honor of modeling for the One and Only Godhead.
Under the watchful eyes of men like these, this conference to celebrate one hundred years of mission work in China had been well prepared. For a decade committees had been sitting to grind and sift the grist of resolutions on which there might be the astounding possibility that all the sects of Protestantism and all their eccentric devotees and mystics and down-to-earthers might agree. The Chinese church and ministry, methods of educational and evangelistic and medical work, women’s work, translation of the Bible and the preparation of tracts, the dream of comity and federation of the sects for united work in the field, and the difficult question of what part missionaries should play in public questions in China—these and other subjects had been endlessly thrashed over, and resolutions had been prepared to be presented to the conference for discussion and, it was hoped, passage.
* * *
—
HUGE DAVID TREADUP was an usher. He was wearing a stiff wing collar with a gray foulard tie, and a blue serge suit newly cut for him by the tailor on Nanking Road who had made his fur-lined coat. Emily (who was to sit in the balcony with most other wives) had said on the way to the hall that he was the handsomest creature on earth, but as he walked down the center aisle of the Municipal Council’s Town Hall on that first evening, April 26, now and then by the side of one of the fierce old male giants of the spirit, he felt shrunken, misfitted, and awkward. He realized he was lucky to be there at all. Here were to be assembled some seven hundred of the more prominent of the thirty-five hundred Protestant missionaries then in the China field. The conference would set the tone of life for missionaries in China for at least the next decade. But David felt raw, new. He knew only five hundred Chinese characters; he had experienced only enough of China so far to have recognized that the mission romance he had swallowed at Syracuse had been a delusion. He was, besides, distracted. He burned with something very much like lust for Emily. He was ambitious, and it cut him to have good Dr. Mateer look right through him as he directed the old man to a front-row seat. Perhaps hoping to be heard if not seen, he had offered to the arrangements committee to play the cornet at some meeting, but they had brushed him off. The point of David’s rather boyish discomfort and distraction was that he was in no position to take in the real meaning of what was going on around him from moment to moment. He just lolled by the door to the hall and listened to the words.
* * *
—
THE OPENING ADDRESS, that evening, was a review of the first century of Protestant China missions in China by the redoubtable Arthur H. Smith, author of quirky and opinionated but generally quite fair books, Village Life in China and Chinese Characteristics, among others. He had been in the field for almost half the century. Men like Dr. Smith had grown up listening to, and later delivering, sermons two hours long, and his speech this night did not stint the teeming past.
The brethren were gathered, Mr. Smith roared out in his pulpit voice, to celebrate the arrival in Canton, one hundred years ago, of the first Protestant missionary in the China field, a young Scot named Robert Morrison.
Why had he come to Canton? Ah, Mr. Smith could sniffingly tell that part, and with a somewhat malicious relish—for it had to do, as he saw it, with a blunder and failure on the part of “our esteemed Catholic friends.” The Ch’ing Dynasty of Manchus had come to power in the seventeenth century. Already by that early time Arabs, then Portuguese, then Dutch and British traders had been sailing to China to buy her famous silks; and in that century came an incursion of Jesuit missionaries, with their astrolabes and cross-staffs and spring-wound clocks. Mr. Smith could grant that the Chinese—particularly the so-called literati, the scholar-gentry class, who regarded their country, the Central Kingdom, as the hub of all civilization—tolerated Jesuits decked out in Chinese clothing and graced with Chinese manners. But they were contemptuous of the crude and uncultivated Western traders with their grayish skin and their body odor of sheep fat. How well the present brethren knew that the Chinese had come to call all pale-skinned interlopers, over the centuries, “foreign devils” (yang kwei-tzu), “hairy men” (mao-tzu), “big-noses” (ta-pi-tzu), and other worse names. But the too clever Jesuits let themselves be divided over the so-called Rites Controversy—the slippery issue of how far to accommodate to Christianity the Chinese practice of ancestor worship—and the Chinese court became increasingly hostile to the foreign religion and indeed to all foreigners, and in the eighteenth century imperial edicts forbade Christian worship and restricted foreign trade to the one southern port of Canton.
So that was where Morrison had come. He worked there for twenty-seven years and managed in that time to translate the Bible into Chinese (rather poorly) and to convert exactly ten Chinese. He was early joined by others, including one William Milne, whose study of the Chinese language led him to assert that mastering that tongue was a task for persons “with bodies of brass, lungs of steel, heads of oak, hands of spring-steel, eyes of eagles, memories of angels, and lives of Methuselah.” The first American Protestants to arrive, in 1830, were Elijah C. Bridgman and David Abeel of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, who were followed by the first medical missionary to open a hospital in China, Dr. Peter Parker.
What prodigies of courage and prickliness, Mr. Smith said, some of those pioneers had been! There was Karl Friedrich Gutzlaff, a Pomeranian, who had “an intolerable assumption of omniscience,” and who got around the restriction to Canton by working as an interpreter on Jardine Matheson opium ships, toting his tracts and Bibles with him; he also invented the practice, much imitated later, of hiring Chinese to act as colporteurs to sell Bibles and preach where foreigners could not go. (Some of them, then and later, it was said, sold the Bibles for their paper, which was made into clothbound soles of Chinese shoes.) Another early hero was Dr. James Legge, who arrived in Canton in 1843 and who spent his life translating the Chinese classics into English, to the extent of sixty-six volumes, in order to “open the door to the mind of the Chinese.”
For the bearers of the Word, as for the bearers of mercantile goods, Smith said, Canton was not enough of a market. Guns opened up the rest of China to the message of the Prince of Peace. During the Tientsin negotiations after the British-French campaign of 1858, Rev. Samuel Wells Williams, author ten years earlier of The Middle Kingdom, an explanation of China to Westerners, remarked that “nothing short of the Society for the Diffusion of Cannon Balls” could be understood by the Chinese. “They are the most craven of people, cruel and selfish as heathenism can make men, so we must be backed by force if we wish them to listen to reason.” Williams managed insertion into the treaty of clauses on religious toleration. These were elaborated in the Treaty of Peking two years later, Article 29 of which provided that
the principles of the Christian religion as professed by the Protestant and Roman Catholic churches are recognized as teaching men to do good and do to others as they would have others do to them. Hereafter, those who quietly teach and profess these doctrines shall not be harassed on account of their faith.
These provisions opened China’s interior to missionaries, as other provisions did to traders and diplomats. The treaties gave missionaries the shield of “extraterritoriality.” They were exempt from Chinese laws and taxes; they were subject to the legal jurisdictions of their own governments only. What was more, they now had a social status most of them had never dreamed of at home, for they were to enjoy most of the perquisites of Chinese officialdom; they were a protected elite, like the learned gentry.
As it turned out, foreign merchants managed their business adequately, by and large, in the coastal ports, and it was the missionaries, Mr. Smith said, who made the most of the right to penetrate to the very heart of China.
Mr. Smith’s lungs were tireless. The speech went on and on. Before long David’s restless mind ran off like a dog on its rounds in the dark.
* * *
—
BETWEEN SESSIONS he was with Emily, and there was much socializing—formal calls, tiffins, chafing-dish suppers. David enjoyed getting together with the younger men, who tended to be, unlike him, thinnish, with taut neck muscles and often with pince-nez spectacles. With them he could recapture some of the Northfield elation of being among the chosen. “Have met Goudy Beach of Wesleyan,” David noted, “Huntington of Yale, Nichols of Trinity, Clements of Chicago, Young of New York, Marshman—all Psi U.” But in the presence of the China veterans, who seemed like so many direful prophets, Elijahs, Amoses, Ezras, Isaiahs, the shrunken sense of callowness would hit him again. It came to him, during a morning session, that his state of confusion was a product of his ignorance. He desperately wanted to be clear about what was being transacted.
* * *
—
ACUTELY CONSCIOUS of Emily sitting above him in the balcony, David perked up on the day devoted to the topic of Woman’s Work. The speakers that morning were of two sorts, who looked interchangeable to David: elderly spinsters and wives of the giants. They had eyes of angels; their mouths could chew nails.
The first to speak was a Miss Benham of the London Missionary Society, who started out by pointedly saying, “We are met today on behalf of the women of China. For two short hours this conference”—which was to last two weeks—“will consider their special needs, and how to meet them.” Miss Benham presented some resolutions. Based on the aim of “the development of the whole woman, physical, mental, and spiritual,” they were largely devoted to the Chinese woman’s right to, and need for, education—an idea outlandish to the Confucians. Elsewhere in its documents, the conference would deplore the debased condition, indeed the utter worthlessness, of Chinese women in the eyes of traditional Confucians: “One man has, besides his wife, several concubines…. Husbands are wicked enough to sell their wives, and other people are wicked enough to buy them. Mothers drown their daughters or sell them to be slaves or prostitutes….”
During the debate, Mrs. Arthur H. Smith, speaking on the evangelization of women with a brevity her husband could well have aped, struck at ways in which missionaries had perpetuated that worthlessness: “Let us use our influence against building any more chapels which place [the Chinese woman] in a separate room, or behind a high screen. Try it yourself one Sunday and see how much less you get if sitting out of sight of the speaker. Make the most of these neglected mothers if you wish to make sure of the children….”
Later in the morning the delegates reached Resolution VI:
That the influence of Christian schools should be against the adoption of foreign dress and customs, and especially that a stand be taken against masculine dress and manners; that the ideal woman to be held before girls and young women in schools is the wife and mother in the home….
In the discussion that followed, the elderly ladies who had sponsored the resolution explained that the reason it was so conservative was that Chinese custom was so very much more conservative that any attempt to move faster would discredit all other efforts, especially those in education.
Up popped old Dr. W. A. P. Martin, who had been in China since 1849, had long been president of the Imperial University in Peking, and was the author of The Lore of Cathay, the book David had read stretched out on carpets of pine needles beside brooks during his hike across New York State to Silver Bay two years before. The venerable warrior moved that “the first part of the resolution, as to dress and customs,” should be struck out.
A MISS NEWTON Dr. Martin, the ladies know a little better than men the effect of foreign dress.
DR. MARTIN I leave the question of taste in dress to the ladies. The question of dress, however, is not of taste but a lesson of politics. I refer to the Dowager Empress of China adorning herself in a foreign dress from Paris, and when she asked her Chief Eunuch how she looked, he replied if she continued to wear such a “barbarous” costume, he would dash his brains out on the floor. Whereupon, Her Majesty discarded her Parisian robes. Are the ladies here to put themselves on a line with the eunuchs, and object to Chinese women wearing civilized dress?
Dr. Martin’s amendment was voted down by an overwhelming show of hands, and the whole of Resolution VI was adopted.
* * *
—
THAT EVENING David sought out Goudy Beach, who had had two years in Soochow and who had struck David as the brightest of the young men he had met. Could Beach help him to get all these resolutions straight in his mind?
“Don’t you see what’s going on, Treadup?” Beach said.
“Well, I hear the votes, but—”
“Ah, man, there’s been a struggle going on. Don’t you see, the elders—the fogies, I call ’em—they’ve always thought that the only proper work of God’s shepherds in the field is the saving of souls. Oh, for them, it’s urgent—the judgment day is near, and there’s so much to be done before it. It’s ironic, they’re a lot like the old Confucianist heathens, they put all their stress on morals. Right morals will make a right world. These old boys believe this. But there’s this new generation—the majority right here at the conference—you’ve seen them—their beards aren’t white yet—some of them shave their chins. They’re turning things around. Didn’t you read the Dennis book?”
“Dennis?”
“Look here, Treadup, Christian Missions and Social Progress. I’m surprised at you. Dennis?—a chap in Syria. It’s what the new people here have taken up. They’re fighting for a new idea—that missions can help bring about the social regeneration of the world. Western nations are superior because of Christianity. We don’t say the Christian nations are free from all evils, not yet, but at least we have a spirit of protest against all those things that degrade human personality. Among the heathen nations, corruption, thievery, licentiousness, cruelty to the weak—all taken for granted. Our Christian missions have a duty to instill in these nations a new conscience, that will rid them of both moral laxity and social injustice.”
