“What! Shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?”
“For yourselves know that we are hereunto appointed.”
“FROM the year 1661 to the year 1893 there were 130 Protestant Missionaries martyred in all parts of the world, while during 1900, and including the murder of Mr. Stenhouse in 1901, there were 136 Protestant Missionaries and 63 children (altogether 189) martyred in China alone. In Shansi we had 88 workers in June, 1900. More than half that number were killed (47), only 41 escaping.”
It will be readily conceded, therefore, that this narrative touches a period without a parallel in the history of Missions. As I look back upon it in the light of all I have since learned of that hour of darkness. I marvel more and more at the miracle of deliverance God wrought for the 41 (myself amongst them) who came out alive from the bloodstained province of Shansi. The fact can be explained upon no human method of interpretation. Unique as is the history in regard to the numbers of those who fell, it is scarcely less unique in regard to the numbers of those who escaped the edge of the sword of the “Great Sword Guild.”
One cannot attempt to review the events connected with our escape without some brief reference to the causes which brought it about. An effect can never be rightly understood apart from its cause, and this is eminently true of the flood of Chinese wrath which broke bounds and hurled itself relentlessly against the foreign community in the summer of the year 1900. Seven reasons may be cited in the light of which the crisis should be read and judged. It is not within the scope of this narrative to do more than simply refer to them.
1. Among natural causes that which should stand first undoubtedly is China’s racial antipathy to foreigners and everything foreign. Speaking generally, hatred of the foreigner is in the blood of the Chinaman. This natural hatred has from generation to generation been fostered by a national exclusiveness born of an overweening pride which boasts that the world is a square, China a circle within it touching the four sides, and the four corners outside the circle the domain of the foreign barbarians. And of late years it has been fed by an ever-deepening suspicion of the designs of foreign nations founded upon one demand for territory after another, which to the Celestial’s mind boded nothing else than the eventual breakup of the Empire.
2. But this innate hatred had received a serious moral aggravation. The opium evil—England’s sin and China’s sorrow—was virtually forced upon her by the foreigner at the point of the bayonet; and from being merely a “foreigner,” he has come to be in her eyes a “foreign devil.”
Can we wonder? The crying wrong rankles deep in the heart of the Chinese as a race, and it has never been forgiven. In the province of Shan-si, where the writer was called to labor, the practice of opium eating was all but universal. It is no exaggeration to say that nine out of every ten of the entire population of the province are addicted to the habit more or less. And yet never does he remember meeting a Chinaman who did not look upon the indulgence as a vice. It is essentially sin (tsui) in his eyes. So much so that, where every other appeal to his moral consciousness seems to fail, you can always bring home to an opium smoker the fact that he is a sinner through the medium of his degrading habit. Not infrequently have we as Englishmen been cursed in the streets while preaching, for having brought in the devastating drug; and the average Chinese mind fails to comprehend how a “devil” who has helped to damn him, soul and body, can be taken up with a concern for his salvation. He argues, Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean and how can the Gospel of the love of God come from a land which sent the opium The following pregnant passages, furnished by Dr. Arthur H. Smith in his suggestive work China in Convulsion (vol. i., pp. 92 to 94), may well be digested by the unprejudiced reader who wishes to arrive at a right understanding of a vexed question from the Chinese point of view. “The use of opium in China is indissolubly linked with the foreigner, even in its name (‘foreign earth’). While the Chinese have become almost a nation of opium smokers, the national conscience still exists, and vigorously protests against the habit which it is powerless to stop. It is easy to show that many of the most thoughtful of the Chinese in the Empire connect the decay of China and the general use of opium as cause and effect. The following pointed statement upon the subject is taken from the paper written by the Tao-t’ai of Soo Chow, who is in charge of the salt gabelle in that city: ‘From ancient times to the present day there has never been such a stream of evil and misery as has come down upon China in her receiving the curse of opium.... From the time that opium was first introduced into China until now, a period of over 100 years, the number of deaths caused by it must mount up into the millions. Now in China there are many among the upper classes who seem to be in ignorance concerning the true state of affairs, and are not willing to blame the Chinese for their fault in using opium, but ascribe the real cause of the trouble to the avariciousness of foreigners, and thus look upon them with hatred. Also the ignorant masses having even intenser antipathy towards them, we continually see on every hand anti-Missionary outbreaks and riots.’
“This passage is sufficiently explicit as to the Chinese hostility to the instruments of the national ruin. That the most intelligent men in China hold the strongest opinion as to the injury done by opium is easily proved; as, for instance, by the widely circulated and popular work of the celebrated Governor-General of the two Hu-kuang provinces, Chang Chih Tung, lately translated for English readers under the title of ‘China’s Only Hope.’ In this there is a chapter headed ‘Cast out the Poison,’ from which the following paragraph is an extract: ‘Assuredly it is not foreign intercourse that is ruining China, but this dreadful poison. Oh, the grief and desolation it has wrought to our people! A hundred years ago the curse came upon us, more blasting and deadly in its effects than the Great Flood, or the scourge of the Fierce Beasts; for the waters assuaged after nine Years, and the ravages of the man-eaters were confined to one place. Opium has spread with frightful rapidity and heartrending results through the provinces. Millions upon millions have been stricken down by the plague. Today it is running like wildfire. In its swift deadly course, it is spreading devastation everywhere, wrecking the minds and eating away the strength and wealth of its victims. The ruin of the mind is the most woeful of its many deleterious effects. The poison enfeebles the will, saps the strength of the body, renders the consumer incapable of performing his regular duties, and unfit for travel from one place to another. It consumes his substance, and reduces the miserable wretch to poverty, barrenness and senility. Unless something is soon done to arrest this awful scourge in its devastating march, the Chinese people will be transformed into satyrs and devils. This is the present condition of our country.’
“When the most respected and most influential Chinese in the Empire addresses to his own countrymen words like these, it is evident that there is behind them a profound conviction. While His Excellency is at great pains to show that the Chinese are themselves to blame for the ruin wrought by opium, it is certain that most Chinese connect the misery, degradation, and wreck wrought by this baleful drug directly with the Western lands, through whose agency it became universally known, and that this fact has had an important influence in creating, and, from the Chinese point of view, justifying hostility to foreigners. While no riot can be said to have had its origin solely through the use of opium, it is doubtful if there has ever been an outbreak in China against the men from beyond the sea which was not either started or promoted by opium smokers, at their places of resort where the worst characters in every Chinese city, market-town, and village are invariably attracted.” (The italics are mine.)
3. Another disturbing cause of a local character was at work in Shan-si. The agents of the Peking Syndicate had during the preceding year been prospecting for coal, iron and petroleum in the province; and the suspicious fears of the people were more than aroused. To show how real a factor their coming was in the situation, Mr. A. R. Saunders, of the China Inland Mission, subsequently all but lost his life on the supposition that he was one of the obnoxious engineers; and we ourselves were narrowly questioned all along the route of our flight as to whether the business which had brought us into the interior were not of the same nature. There is no doubt that the memory of the visit of Messrs. Shockley and Sabioni (who represented the Syndicate) to our own station of Lu-an, S. Shan-si, in the early months of the preceding year, contributed in measure to feed the rage of the people against us, when once it was set ablaze by the Boxer agitation.
4. The long prevailing drought and threatened famine was for us another most serious element in the situation. For several years in succession the harvest had been going from bad to worse, and the distress of the people of Lu-an was so great that in the summer of 1899 it all but culminated in a riot. Our premises and even our lives were threatened. The day of destruction was fixed; and we knew that nothing short of God’s direct interposition could hinder them from carrying out their purpose. At the time the tumultuous rain-procession, numbering many thousands, was to repass our gates, we were gathered for prayer. It was a solemn hour, for, humanly speaking, nothing could save us; but prayer was turned to praise as we heard the passing clash of the gongs, and mad beat of the drums, grow faint and die away in the distance. We learned later how God had wrought for us. Unknown to us, the Prefect had sent a detachment of soldiers to guard the gates, and himself, with several of the leading gentry of the city, stood by to hold the rioters in check.
This will suffice to show how desperate the situation might become if the drought continued on into the next year. As indeed it did. The Boxer movement found the people ripe for lawlessness, under the stress of circumstances which were sufficiently appalling.
In our district the early wheat harvest was of the lightest, and as the weeks wore on and still no rain fell, the failure of the autumn crop became a certainty.
The price of grain was steadily rising in the market, and the seed already sown was rotting in the ground. April and May passed with nothing more than a bare sprinkling from a shower or two, which only seemed to mock their hopes; and measures must be resorted to.
Orders were issued by the Prefect forbidding grain to be sold away from the district, and a city merchant who dared to disobey the order was heavily flogged and fined. But above all, the wrath of the gods who were withholding the rain must be appeased. Arrangements were made so early as the first week in June for a series of rain-processions through the streets and fields, while the Prefect himself made special pilgrimages to the city temple to entreat the favor of Heaven, and to know what he should do to secure it.
In times of public calamity, the superstitious mind of the heathen casts about in every direction for the cause; and, in the case of the Chinese, the scapegoat is invariably to be found in the hated foreigner. For some time wild rumors had been in circulation that we had poisoned all the wells, and this was so generally believed that my Evangelist would not allow me to take a long-looked-for itineration with him into the Tseh-cheo Prefecture, as he said it would be as much as my life was worth to show myself there.
Such a report was as fuel to fire. What with the drought and poisoned wells, we found that the attitude of the people was far from reassuring. From outward friendliness it had passed to indifference, but indifference was now giving way to unconcealed aversion and open contempt. The hissed “iang kuei-tsï!” (“foreign devil!”) as we passed along the road became the rule rather than the exception, and a menace the significance of which was unmistakable. The women shrank from any contact with the lady missionaries, and our services, at the church or on the street, were literally deserted. The rain did not come—why? The answer the priests gave back was, “The foreigner has blasphemed our gods in proclaiming them to be no gods; and he has insulted their majesty by bringing in his own gods; and foreign blood must be spilled before we can have rain.”
5. It is a fact to be deeply deplored that one of the leading factors in the disquieted state of the people was the policy pursued by the Roman Catholic Church in China.
Mr. C. H. S. Green (C.I.M.), in telling the marvelous story of his deliverance from the Boxers, has not hesitated to affirm, on the universal testimony of the malcontents themselves, that Roman Catholicism alone is responsible for the creation of the Boxer Rising. That it was a powerful lever in setting the Boxer machinery in motion is unquestionable. Other inflammatory elements, however, were in the movement, as I have already indicated; and all these together conspired to bring the passions of the people to a head. Invariably the question (usually the first) put to us by the mob was: “What are you? Are you Roman Catholics?” Had we been, it is absolutely certain we should never have got through. If ever murderous hate looked out at the eyes of men, it was when that question was being asked. It is impossible to exaggerate the bitterness of the hatred that the Roman Catholics have brought upon themselves. Their aspiration to temporal power and spirit of political intrigue; their secret, and withal unscrupulous, methods of work; their arrogant pretensions; their interference in the Law Courts, backed by threats of appeal to the Government of their country; their rule of celibate living; their despotic exercise of priestly power—all this and more had provoked the natives to the point of exasperation. A brother missionary working in An-huei once told me that, when itinerating in the north of that province where the Romanists had been laboring, he found that to mention the name of Jesus was to open the floodgates of blasphemy. To use his own words: “The Roman Catholics had made the name of Jesus literally to stink before the people; and the mere fact that the two religions owned the same Jesus for their God was enough in itself to defeat every effort to obtain a hearing for the Gospel.”
6. From all this it will be readily seen that the state of popular feeling was ripe for any organized development of lawlessness; and it was taken full advantage of by the initiators of the Imperial Boxer Movement.
Whatever theories may be advanced to account for the origin of this remarkable disturbance, one thing at least may be safely affirmed, viz., that it was a movement “from beneath,” immediately Satanic, the result of the necessary antagonism of darkness to light. It was a direct effect of the persistent advance of Gospel effort. Indeed, the victorious ingress of the true light into every part of the Empire could not fail to provoke sooner or later an organized opposition from the power of darkness, begotten of fear not less than of hatred.
The appeal made by this movement to the masses was not merely patriotic, nor was it even only anti-foreign. The writer would humbly venture upon the conviction that it was essentially and before all else religious. Directly recognized by “the Great Religion” —a blend of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism—one might almost say it was formally initiated under its auspices. So early as March, 1899, the Buddhist Llama Abbot gave it substantial support; and later on the head of the Taoist sect, Pope Chang, in an interview with the Empress Dowager, counseled the slaughter of the foreigner. Close upon this followed an Imperial Edict of strong Confucian type, aimed directly at the Christian Religion, “ordering all civil and military officials to strictly observe the Sixteen Sacred Edicts of K’ang Hsi,” and also the “Teachings of the Emperor Yung Cheng” against heresy and heterodoxy, and “to set apart certain days every month to explain the same to the masses.”
On June 25 a proclamation, evidently the substance of the Imperial Decrees of the 21st of that month, was posted up at the telegraph office at T’aiüfien Fu, the headquarters of Boxerism, which concluded thus: “Foreign religions are reckless and oppressive, disrespectful to the gods and oppressive to the people. The Righteous People (that is the I He Ch’üan, or Boxers) will burn and kill. Your judgments from Heaven are about to come. Turn from the heterodox and revert to the true. Is it not benevolence to exhort you people of the Christian Religion Therefore early reform. If you do your duty, you are good people. If you do not repent there will be no opportunity for after-regret. For this purpose is this proclamation put forth. Let all comply with it.”
Nay more, the style adopted by the Society itself was “The Buddhists’ Patriotic League of Boxers.” Their banners bore the legend, “Feng Chi Mieh Kiao” — “By Imperial command exterminate the Christian Religion.” The decrees they issued were given out as the very utterance of the gods themselves, and flamed with all the fervor of religious fanaticism. They professed themselves to be moving by the command of Heaven, and they claimed to be under the immediate favor, control and protection of Heaven. The qualifying tests to which the recruit was subjected on enlistment were before all else religious. He was required to repeat over and over a certain brief formula, “until the gods took possession, and the subject fell backwards to the ground foaming at the mouth and lying for a few minutes as in a trance, then rising to drill or to fight,” whereupon he was declared to be invulnerable to foreign sword and bullet. They were for the gods, therefore the gods were for them. In a word, the movement was dominated by the religious idea. True, it was directed against the foreigner as such; but the root of the trouble lay not so much in the innovation of his barbarous civilization as of his blasphemous religion. That this was so is evidenced beyond dispute by the Boxer manifestoes.
What, therefore, we were called to face was distinctively a religious persecution. The foreigner was to be dealt with primarily on the ground that he was a religious propagandist, “a setter forth of strange gods.” On one occasion during our flight we were sitting by the roadside hemmed in by an armed mob, from whom we were momentarily expecting death. I had spoken a few words on the Gospel message of the love of God, when they began at once to blaspheme, and one cried out, “Away with your Shang-ti (God) I We will drive him beyond the sea, never to return.” At another time, while I was speaking to the soldiers who guarded us in the cart, one of them said, “Stop that talk! Don’t you know that the Emperor has made it a State crime to preach the Jesus doctrine? Your Jesus has brought trouble enough to China, but China will have no more of Him now forever.”
The Boxer rising would have been formidable in any case, but when the movement received the Imperial sanction and support, all hope of our being able to remain was gone. The masses welcomed it as their great opportunity. Yü-hsien, the newly appointed Viceroy of the Province of Shan-si, lost no time in transferring the headquarters of the movement from Shan-tung (the sphere of his former rule) to his new command; and his plans were quickly matured for the extermination of the Christian religion in the destruction of all who believed, natives and foreigners alike. It was soon in the air that he had the Empress Dowager behind him, and ere long it was openly confirmed by the attitude of the officials themselves. We were informed that they had received instructions to withdraw all protection from us; and from that hour we knew we were at the mercy of the merciless mob.
7. How precious at such a time to be able to “look, not at the things that are seen, but at the things that are not seen”! All that contributed to this great upheaval was after all subservient to and controlled by a Cause that was far above out of men’s sight, revealed to the eye of faith alone. It lay in the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. The heathen might rage, and the rulers be gathered together against the Lord and against His Christ; but they could do no more than “whatsoever Thy hand and Thy counsel determined before to be done.” But for this knowledge our hearts would have fainted indeed. That our God was behind the persecution, and would make the wrath of man to praise Him, was a fact in which we found true rest and comfort. Through all the evil, He was working out His own good and glorifying His own Name. Had He not a gracious purpose in view? For—
Was He not granting us the high privilege of knowing in measure the fellowship of the sufferings of His own beloved Son?
Was not the persecution His call to the pastors and teachers, native and foreign, to fulfill their ministry in filling up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ, for His Body’s sake?
Did He not design by the persecution the purification of His Church in China?
Was it not the only way known to His wisdom in which the answer could be given to our constant prayers for the opening of “a great door and effectual” to the Word of His grace?
Was it not His opportunity in us for proving to the native converts the power of the truth we had so often preached, namely, that we should “take pleasure in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ’s sake,” and “rejoice that we are counted worthy to suffer shame for His Name”?
Was it not meant to be, to ourselves individually, an evident token of salvation, and that of God, a seal of our sonship, and a means by which we might become “partakers of His holiness”?
And was it not, after all, only what He told us to expect as the appointed portion of all who will to live godly in Christ Jesus and enter the Kingdom of God?
Yes, there was a needs-be for our sufferings. The silver lining to the cloud out of the sea, was “the eternal purpose of Him Who worketh all things after the counsel of His own will,” the Cause behind the causes. And in Him we had peace.