A MODERN PIONEER IN KOREA
THE LIFE STORY OF HENRY G. APPENZELLER
A.D.1858-1902
By
WILLIAM ELLIOT GRIFFIS
Preface
APPENZELLER of Korea built himself as a living stone
into Christian Cho-sen. The coming of a live,
typical, American Christian in 1885, into the mysterious secrecy of an
inhospitable hermit kingdom, the abode of cruelty, oppression, mental darkness,
ignorance and disease, was like an invincible sunbeam. Bold as a lion, tender as
a woman, aflame with zeal for the Master, yet able to work and live with all
sorts and conditions of men, he won steady success. As traveller,
explorer, teacher, organiser, evangelist and Bible
translator, his labors were manifold, while his temper was ever sweet. His
seventeen years of service were crowned with success. His greatness in the hour
of death tallied with the unselfish victories of his life. He died while saving
others.
It is no pious panegyric that his friend and
correspondent, who knew him from the time of his arrival in Korea, has tried to
write; but, against a background of reality, to show what Appenzeller and his
fellow workers under God achieved. Appenzeller found Korea in pagan barbarism.
He left the Land of Morning Calm worthy of its name, full of hope, promise and
attainment. He lived and toiled for the Christian Cho-sen of today. Hence the larger part of this book is devoted to the country and to
the people whom he loved and for whom he gladly died.
A man of system and scrupulous regard for both exact
facts and general truth, this servant of Christ of high ideals and master of
details kept, from his youth up, journals, note and common-place books, copies
of important documents and letters; and to these I have had unstinted access
from the widow and daughter of this missionary pioneer. Scores of
correspondents also have enabled me to make my story trustworthy and authentic,
as well as vivid and interesting. To these and to the “help meet” and loyal daughter,
do I make my grateful recognition.
May John Milton’s hope be fulfilled in this book, in
that “life unto life” shall, in this case, mean that the story of Appenzeller,
who died too soon, shall stimulate others to still nobler consecration and
achievements. And this,
“ Through the dear might
Of Him who walked the wave.”
W. E. G.
Ithaca, N.Y.
Introductory
1. God’s Korea—Morning Splendour.
2. Man’s Korea—Realities of Life. 3. The Hermit’s Doors Forced Open. 4. The
Methodists and the Appenzellers .5. A Christian Soldier’s Training . 6. Korea
as a Topic—Lure or Chill?. 7. The Great Decision. 8. Voyages and First
Impressions. 9. Inside a Korean House. 10. New Seed in Old Soil. 11.
The Leadership of a Little Child. 12. On Horseback—Old Korean Capitals. 13. In
the North—Ping Yang, the Boat City. 14. Housekeeping—Fun, Fact and Fancy.
15. Prospecting for Gospel Treasure. 16. The Monopoly of Letters. 17.
Mastering the Language. 18. In Time of Pestilence. 19. School and
Church. 20. On First Furlough—Home. 21. A Pioneer of
Civilisation. 22. The World of the Imaginary. 23. Yoke Fellows
in the Gospel. 24. Second Visit Home. 25. “He Saved
Others”. 26. The Whitening Harvest. 27. XXVII. The Wind of the Spirit
Introductory
I BEGAN to pray for Korea on the morning of March 2,
1871. As an educational pioneer in Japan —the first to live as a guest in the
far interior—I had spent the night previous with my escort of fifteen two-sworded knights at Tsuruga,
whence one looks across the sea to Korea. As we emerged into the road leading
to Fukui, our party stopped before the great Shinto temple, at which the
Empress Jingu, who lives in Japanese tradition, as “the conqueror of Korea” and
her son, the war-god Hachiman, were worshipped. Three of my guardsmen stopped,
bowed reverently, clapped their hands together and worshipped.
“Idolatry” or not, I was touched by this simple act of
piety, as they understood it, and looking westward over the water towards
Korea, my heart went out to the one living and true God, in the hope that this
land lying to the westward, might soon be blessed with the gospel. Studying the
Land of Morning Splendour through Japanese and
European sources of information, I began on my arrival home in America, in
1874, besides making it a subject of daily prayer, to write and lecture on
Korea, the Hermit Nation, and at Washington to urge Congressional committees to
secure by treaty the peaceful opening of the country. In 1881, 1882, and 1885,
books treating of Korea were published. Yet in those days it was, as a lady
said to me, like talking about a “strange seashell,” picked up from an unknown
strand in the far Orient.
My neighbour and friend in Boston, Phillips Brooks,
used to say that foreign missions were “the last of the heroisms” and so he
preached. My friend and correspondent Appenzeller illustrated in his life and
final hour Bishop Brooks’ thesis. I have endeavoured to tell the story of his work among the people whom he loved. It is not
panegyric, but reality that I offer. Appenzeller was a hero, but he hated cant
and sham. Hence I have shown the country and the people, as well as the worker.
I have left out the word “heathen,” because this term is neither in the
Hebrew, nor the Greek of the original scriptures, nor, strictly speaking, in
the Revised Version. In the languages of Europe—itself once a mission field,
the word was and is a term of contempt, and such a feeling toward the Koreans
was the last in the breast of this man, their friend and lover. Even when in
ripest knowledge of the natives— and he was, both as a scholar and a preacher,
ever in living contact with the people—Appenzeller, while he hated what marred
and ruined both their bodies and souls, was ever affectionate to them as human
beings. He felt about the Koreans as he did about his own countrymen. “We
should be ashamed of what some Americans do, but never ashamed of being
Americans” was a famous saying of his. He loved much and honoured many things in their character and civilisation, while despising and abhorring,
with a hatred born of his love of holiness, whatever degraded them or his own
countrymen—both common sinners before God, and in need of the same grace. His
attitude was never that of the Pharisee, but as one who, knowing and
appreciating the undeniable graces and virtues of the Korean, ever felt like
taking him by the hand and saying “Come brother, let us both together strive to realise in our lives our ideals of what a Christian
ought to be.”
I have omitted also both the pious stock phrases and
the vulgar slang about the “Oriental” and the “Asiatic”—as if human nature was
one whit different there or here! To the eye of the scholar and the Christian,
who knows the history and evolution from semi-brutality of our own savage
ancestors, there is no Orient and no Occident, except as these phrases are as
convenient and about as accurate as our commonplaces, “the sun rises” or “the
dew falls.” The student of history, with the eyes of science and imagination,
sees in the colonial America of a hundred, or the Europe of five hundred years
ago, pretty much everything that is, or only lately was, visible in China,
Korea, and Japan. Human nature and the race are one.
One will quickly find also that I do not accept the
alleged Korean history which is only folklore, or appraised at its traditional
and local value the native chronology, which, like that of Japan and China, is
founded on national vanity and mythical zoology. I also avoid, as far as
possible, any emphasis on the wonderful and sensational, as peculiar to the
peninsular country or man; for, having lived in the interior of feudal Japan, I
find little or nothing in Christless Korea different from that in Christless
Japan. In all essential particulars, of custom, social life, indirection of
misgovernment, oppression of the people, hoary superstitions and things odd and
strange, the fibre of civilisation in the peninsula
was identical, or nearly so, with that in the island. Unreformed countries in
Asia, before the advent of true Christianity, all bore a common likeness. Their
ancient history ends and their modern story begins when the religion of Jesus
sways the hearts of men. Yet before the temple of truth can rise, Christianity
saps and rends hoary structures, causing at first much ruin, as it reduces to
rubbish the long buttressed falsehoods of ages, on which the moss of artistic
charm has gathered and over which the vines of sentiment have luxuriantly
grown.
Startling changes have taken place within forty years,
since prayer first went up for Korea—a hermit nation becoming social, a Sahara
of paganism transformed into a garden of Christian hope. The outflowering of Japan, the shattering in war of the Chinese
dogma of universal sovereignty and the extension of American power and
influence in the Pacific, were all within the lifetime of our subject. These
events were followed by the check given to
the notion, long cherished in the Occident, that any
one race of men, of whatever color or nation, or of any one form of government
was to “dominate the Pacific,” or the world; the humbling of military Russia;
the logical absorption of Korea, with the official proclamation of its most
ancient name of Cho-sen, or Morning Splendour, into the Japanese empire; and the commotion of
1912, that prefaces a new China. All these call for fresh interpretations of
the old facts that underlie ancient social systems and an analysis of the new
forces that are recreating humanity. What is good in Asia, the mother
continent, must be conserved and not lost. We are not to doubt but that with
the everlasting righteousness which is fresh every morning, new resultants of
power will be gained. “God fainteth not, neither is
weary” and from the rising of the sun until the going down of the same, his
name shall be, yea is, great among the nations.” This is the way of the Holy
Spirit and so He taught, who came “not to destroy but to fulfil.”
In the divine making of all things new on the earth
the consecrated lives of Christ-filled men and women are the greatest forces
for good, and the story of such a man we proceed to tell.
I.
God’s Korea—Morning Splendour
MANY are the names of the rocky ridge, which is set
between the Ever White Mountains and the Yellow Sea. Long under the
intellectual shadow of China, the Central Empire, Korea called herself The
Little Outpost State. In early ages there were the three Han, or states. The
fading flower of The Korean “Empire,” proclaimed in 1897, was called Tai-Han or
the Great Han, and after a troubled life of thirteen years, it withered away,
even before it took root. Of many fantastic legends, attempting to account for
the origin of the people, one makes the White Cock Forest a favourite term from medieval times. The Buddhists have given names appropriate to the
land of the former glories of their church and there are various others
bestowed by travellers, which suggest geography, the
face of the country, the social life of the people, or describe the last, but
now extinct dynasty.
We have thus the Land of Gentle Manners, the Country
of the Eight Circuits, or Provinces, the Realm of the Twelve Thousand Serrated
Peaks, the Land of the Plum Blossom, and the Country of Kija, the legendary
founder of Korean civilisation. In poetry the chief ruler is the Sovereign of
Ten-Thousand Isles, the people being sentimentally “Our Twenty Millions.” In
census mathematics, there are about two hundred islands and twelve million
souls. To not a few visitors, Korea is the Land of Mosquitoes and Malaria; to
hunters, the Country of the Tigers; to the lovers of the beautiful, the Garden
of God. To a few, who have borne the cross of grief, it is the sleeping-
chamber of the Beloved Dead and ante-room of resurrection glory. To the
Christian, it is The Land of Golden Opportunity. In prosaic fact, Korea, in
which great cities are absent, is The Land of Villages.
Oldest, grandest, suggestive of all things ancient and
venerable, oftenest in the mouths of the natives and wisely made official, in
the treaty of absorption by the Japanese Empire in 1910, is Cho-sen, that is, Morning Splendour.
Other values expressed in English for the two Chinese characters, may be
Dayspring, Radiance of the Dawn, Matin Calm, Tranquillity of the Morning, etc. Nevertheless those, who at the opening of history, coined
this term, were not thinking so much of the smile of Heaven, the blush of the
aurora, or even of “the innocent brightness of a newborn day,” as of the favour of “the dragon countenance,” that is, of the Chinese
Emperor. Their eyes were on China. Korean nursery tales ascribe the first use
of the name to Kija, 1122 BC. The reality arose from
the vassals, who, coming over the borders from the eastern land, basked in the
glow of the. suzerain’s favour. This indicated the
fresh new day’s hour of promise.
Mother Earth’s wrinkled skin, as left in condensing
from the fire mist, furnished Korea with the frontiers bordering other lands,
besides boundaries for the provinces. The corrugations on “this terrestrial
ball,” that formed as the planet cooled, are the rocky ridges. In endless lines
and chains, the mountains cross and recross the surface of Korea, making an
amazing network of valleys, which have little space for plains in a lakeless land. One mighty range furnishes the eastern
backbone of the peninsula, while the lower western hills and slope give the
land its fertile fields. From the peak which crowns all Korea, the Ever White
Mountain, containing in its crater, the Dragon’s Pool, flow the two streams
that create Korea’s northern frontier. By the rivers and the mountain chains,
the old eight provinces were divided one from the other. Nature thus dictating
the lines of demarcation, and making convenient divisions. Of late years, five
of the large provinces have been partitioned into halves, making thirteen in
all. Those facing China are named Tranquil Peace, Yellow Sea, Capital Circuit
and Complete Network. Those fronting Japan are named Perfect Mirror, River Moor
and Joyful Honour.
Ordained by the Almighty, who set this people between
the mountains and the sea, to be a nation, and determined the bounds of their
habitation, thus so distinctly marked, the destiny of the Koreans seemed
foreshadowed by their situation, while the two “great voices” of freedom, named
by Wordsworth, made them lovers of their own national life. This, though so
much and at so many points like the Chinese or Japanese, is notably different.
Facing China Korea received more than she returned. With her mountain back
turned to the archipelago, she gave freely to Japan, yet gained, until lately,
little in return.
So, in its larger features, Korea, as it came from the
hand of God is beautiful. As if the vast undulations of a stormy sea had
suddenly frozen at the divine command, Cho-sen is a
mountain land, so full of peaks and lines of hills, of mountains, range on
range, as to seem to the native born as much alive as himself. While on his own
soil, he can not escape them or be out of sight of them, for always and
everywhere they are visible. As the Hebrew saw the mountains “skipping,”
“leaping like rams,” “rejoicing” and the trees on them “clapping their hands”
and otherwise acting as if they were living beings, endowed with a will and a
purpose, so the Korean personifies his native hills over all of which is the
Great One, Hannanim, whom Christian natives call
Jehovah.
Long ago these summits wore God’s clothing and were
rich in forests, the growth of ages, but exactly like the wasteful Chinese of
ancient, and Americans of modem date, the Koreans cut down their trees,
neglecting to replant. Hence their land has suffered as China has and America
will, while the Japanese, on the contrary, plant two trees for every one cut
down. To the islander, who is a forester by habit, Korea is the Land of
Treeless Mountains.
“Wilful waste makes woful want.” Today the energies of millions are wasted in
raking up grass and leaves for fuel and warmth where abundance of excellent
timber ought to be and might yet, by wisdom and care, be at hand. Already have
the new masters of the land replanted millions of little trees to redeem the
error of the past. Forbidding are the bare hills and inhospitable seems the
land from a ship’s deck, but once within, the rich valleys and fertile farms
reverse grandly the picture. Let no one judge, while at sea, the country’s
resources or dwell in his prejudices created by coast impressions. Looking like
a cave from the outside, it is like Ali Baba’s crypt of treasures when seen
from within. When the Russo-Japanese war in 1904 was precipitated by the
Russian spoliation of the great timber forests at the head waters of the Yalu,
the world was surprised at the amazing resources of Korea in lumber.
Like country, like people. As one must not judge the
face of the land wholly by its appearance along the coast, so must one withhold
his verdict upon the people when studied only at the seaports, or by tourists
who get up late and saunter out doors. Korea is above all a farming and village
country. Nine-tenths of the people till the soil. The peasantry is a hardy and
industrious one.
The land is well watered. The rivers are sufficiently
abundant to carve and cut through the rocks, make beautiful scenery, furnish a
certain amount of navigation, yield moisture for greenery and storage of
irrigation for rice—the great food crop for her millions. On the northeast is
the Tumen, which divides the State from Russia and Manchuria. On the northwest
is the historic Yalu, whose native name Amnok, shows that its glancing color
matches the exquisite sheen upon the green duck’s plumage. On its magnificent
bosom, when in flood float the greatest rafts of timber in the world, while on
its banks are cities and sites of battle fields. The Yalu is the line of
demarcation between pigtails and topknots, the prosperous, blue-coated farmers
from China, and the poverty-stricken, white-robed Koreans. For ages it has been
in history Korea’s Rubicon, the crossing of which, from either side, meant war.
Further south is the Ta Tong, or Great Eastern River, on which lies Ping Yang,
a famous and historic city, the seat in legend of the founder of Korea’s
civilisation, containing even his reputed tomb. Once the Sodom of Korea, it is
now one of the fairest flowers in Christianity’s newest garden.
The central river, which, passing by the capital and
ever rising first in the national imagination, has its sources in the recesses
of the mountains which overlook the sea of Japan, is the Han. Traversing,
westwardly, the whole peninsula, it furnishes the life-blood of circulation to
the centre of the national body. It is called Salee
(or salt) on French maps, and the capital Seoul (Soul). Other cities besides
Soul or Keijo (in Japanese) nestle upon its banks. At its mouth a rocky island
fitly called Kang-wa, or River Blossom, deflects its
main flood south and some of the water to the north. Still further south are
smaller but no less enriching rivers that water the warmer and more fertile
southern half of the peninsula. One famous stream, the Nak Tong, navigable for
a hundred miles, drains the great southwestern province facing Japan, the most
populous in the realm. In this valley, with its seaport, lay glorious Silla,
the medieval state, whence Buddhist missionaries and civilisers crossed to Japan, and to which Chinese fleets were guided by the mariner’s
compass, before Europe ever heard of such a thing. To Silla’s ports came Arabic
vessels and carried to the Occident that trembling finger of God that led
Columbus across the deep to find America. At Bagdad, the fame of Korea’s
artistic products was well known and some of the most entertaining of the sea
and wonder tales in the Arabian Nights are probably only idealised stories of voyages to Korea.
From north to south, this Nak Tong, flowing through
the entire length of the province and navigable for over a hundred miles,
drains the most extensive and populous valley in the realm. Chosen would not
be the superbly fertile country that it is, without its rivers.
Thus with the seas almost wholly encircling her, rich
in mountains, glens, arable fields and fertile terraces, Korea is ever robed
not only in tints produced by the constant caresses of the sunlight falling
upon the moisture-laden air of countless valleys, but also in colours of spring and autumn that excel the storied
shepherd’s coat or a kingly robe. Their country is beautiful, and the people
know and feel its charm. One might almost call this the Land of Lilies, were it
not that other families of flowers, violets, eglantine, roses, white and red,
lilacs and rhododendrons are equally prolific, while in the orchards, peach and
pear blossoms fill the land with glory and beauty. In the endless procession of
the seasons there are lovely blossoms from snowfall to snowfall again. Hills
and valleys become a riot of colour from the azaleas,
that strike the gamut of tints from snowy white to deepest orange. One
botanist, in a single afternoon’s ramble over the hills around Soul brought
home a bouquet of forty-seven varieties of flowers; another near Chemulpo, in one day, exceeded this number by a dozen.
Not all the flowers are affluent of sweet odours, but enough of them carry aroma in their chalices to
make the breezes sweeping from the mountain heights delicious to the senses. In
spring time, especially, the winds often come perfume-laden to refresh and
delight. In the autumn odour yields to colour and the hardier flowers. Among these, the aster and
golden rod drape the hills in scarlet, gold, purple and varied tints. Even if
one were blind, he would learn from the Korean’s delighted exclamations while on
the road, from his heart that speaks in his face, from his poetry and folklore,
from the habits of travellers and even from the
common burden bearers who are cultured to enjoy, how fair is nature and how
lovely is the landscape to the native. The choice places of resort and famous
scenery have been celebrated in the common language and in the poets’ lore of a
thousand years.
As if the blendings and
variegations of earth and sky, of the interplay of aerial moisture and sunshine
did not sufficiently enrich Nature’s palette, there are other tints, varied and
abundant in the plumage of the birds and the fur of a rich fauna. The black and
white of the snowy heron, the pink of the ibis and the brilliant markings of
the pheasant attract, while even the striping of the tigers and spotting of the
leopards are noteworthy—though best enjoyed when off the beasts and on chair or
floor. Those with a passion for colour will find in
the veinings and stains of the rocks, the tinting of
the soil, the variety in gems, metals and building stones much to please the
eye, even though granite is the predominating rock, its mass making mountains,
and its attrition the whitish-looking soil seen everywhere.
One may easily believe in the recently elaborated
theory that all great races and civilisations are
permanently maintained only in regions visited by a certain number of storms
annually and where the climate is, in large measure, an uncertainty. In this
view, Korea, which has one of the most delightful climates in the world, with
seasons that are almost too regular, is not calculated to breed a hardy,
self-reliant race capable of the greatest achievements. There are indeed
extremes of temperature, from ten degrees below to a hundred above zero. In
valleys in the north, snow to the depth of three feet lies on the ground a
fourth part of the year and river ice three feet thick is known, but the winter
over the larger area of population is rather mild. South of the Han River one
hardly ever thinks of sleighs or skates, though these furnish temporary fun for
alien dwellers in the country. The winter, for the most part, is delightful.
Then comes springtime, with its armies of flowers, its mantle of green and bloom,
its billows of grasses, and the lovely haze that softens the whole landscape.
In April and May the early and light rains fall. The most depressing of all
seasons is that of the heavy rainfall of July and August, when the rivers rise
with a rapidity that perils life and property. Then Soul, a cavity among the
mountains, becomes a bath tub, with shower attachment and steam galore. Twenty
inches of rain are deposited on the surface of the earth and occasionally a
fall of five inches is recorded. It seems then, for the soil, a staggering task
to carry off to the sea, the river of heaven that has apparently dropped from
above. Everything out doors is bathed in moisture, while within the house it
gathers on furniture, floors, and coverings of all sorts. Then the walls
glisten and the drops run and chase each other downward as on a window pane on
a rainy day. Whatever is of organic texture grows a heavy crop of mould. Sometimes, even overnight, black leather shoes look
like piles of greenish snow in the morning. The autumn is beautiful and early
winter lovely. In a word, for ten months, nature makes life a delight. A more
uncertain and bracing climate, with the steady discipline of uncertainty, would
breed a tougher type of man, and richer in moral stamina. One hardly looks in
Korea for the kind of people that are grown in Old or New England, or in
Scotland, Holland, Denmark, or Scandinavia. The Korean’s gifts and graces,
which are many, are otherwise manifested.
Over the greater part of the peninsular area there is
no question as to the fertility of the soil. Yet despite the abundant watering
of the land, in its valleys and river channels, the supply from the river of
heaven is by no means regular. Since rice is the most precarious of all crops,
requiring plenty of moisture at certain critical periods, the crop fails if the
rain does not fall in the nick of time. Korea, like China and old Japan, has
often known what famine is, and the Government realises that when the storehouses are empty, riot, tumult, and political disorder,
sprout in place of grain. “Keep their bellies full” was one of Laotsze’s maxims for the social quiet of the masses.
Oftener there is patiently borne suffering, with multitudinous deaths. On the
whole, however, the conditions favouring agriculture
are excellent. In the long run, Korea has been a land in which people were
fairly well fed, cases of starvation not common, and beggars rare.
In a word, Korea, as it comes from the hand of God and
as Nature has endowed it, is gloriously beautiful, like that land of promise
described in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy—if the natives and men besotted
with Confucianism only knew it! The soil being above the average in fertility,
is able to bring forth more than enough food for the people who dwell in it.
The surrounding oceans form an endless storehouse of food, as well as material
for light and the fertilising of the fields. The
rocks are rich in lodes and galleries of mineral wealth. The precious and the
useful metals are fairly abundant. The timber preserves of the northern
forests, the possibilities of communication, and the whole inventory of natural
resources and potencies, when considered, either in the light of the devout
believer, or the man of science, call fourth in the human spirit ascription of
glory to God and of thankfulness to Nature. To the reflective mind, however,
the situation provokes the wonder that man, put on this beautiful land, as
tenant at will, but with large powers as an agent, given by his Master, has not
done more to make the willing earth yield more abundantly and to win out of the
ocean, the treasure-stored hills, and the rivers rich in golden sand, more
substance for the comfort, enrichment, and exaltation of life.
It seems almost the law of the universe, as it
certainly is the voice of human history, that in place of those who do not
hear, understand, or obey the divine command to “replenish and subdue,” there
comes sooner or later another race of men, who, hearing and obeying,
demonstrate of what the earth is capable. That law has been demonstrated in
Korea, which is now an integral part of the Empire of Japan. The Korean realm
is no more a Hermit Nation.
II
Man’s Korea—Realities of Life
WHAT is Korea’s true history? We all know the story of
how in 1122 BC, when the Chow dynasty in China came to an end, a statesman
(whose name is read Kitse in Chinese and Kija in
Korean) who declined to serve the new ruler left the Court and journeyed
eastward with five thousand followers. So far the Chinese annals.
The Korean nursery story is that Kija came into the
peninsula, established his capital in the valley of the Ta Tong River and at
Ping Yang began his civilising operations. He taught
the people laws, ethics, measures and standards of value. To every Korean
child, this legend is as sacred writ interpreted by infallible orthodoxy.
Hundreds of foreigners living on the soil accept it without salt and a hundred
gravely written books and the encyclopedias repeat this pretty tale.
Now apart from what actually happens in human
experience, the writing of history is an industry which, like all other crafts
and arts, follows models and is influenced by human conceits, rivalries, and
prejudices. Just as our savage ancestors in Europe, when they received Roman
letters and Latin culture, followed Trans-Alpine, Greek and Hebrew patterns in
literature and took even their new religion in its Latin form, so the early
tribes in Korea, when rising from barbarism into civilisation, gained their
first knowledge of writing from the Chinese. Possibly some of this learning
filtered into the peninsula before or about the time of the Christian era, but
all that the early or late Koreans, or the Japanese knew about their own
history, previous to the introduction of letters, has been derived from written
sources in China. When the peninsular tribes came to political consciousness
and, borrowing from the Chinese annals, scholars, began to put down on paper
what they supposed to be their history, in all probability they then, for the
first time, heard of Kija and the story of his eastward journey. How dogma is
manufactured, and often when and where made, is as clear as crystal, especially
when, as in Japan, it is used as an engine of government.
It may be safely affirmed that the story of Kija’s
settling inside the boundaries of modern Korea and founding for the Koreans
their civilisation did not take form or become elaborated, until long after the
establishment of Chinese learning in the peninsula; that is, at some time
later than the sixth century, a.d. The existence of a
tomb at Ping Yang, which was badly damaged in the China-Japanese war of 1894
and has since been rebuilt, proves nothing as to reality. In this statistical
Sahara there is always a “history” of “4000 years” and a Korean family of
“20,000,000 people.”
The great outstanding event in the development of the
Korean nation is the introduction of Buddhism a.d. 352, when the various tribes were already-organised into three kingdoms, or states. Buddhist missionaries came in, bringing images,
writings and art. In their train, for centuries, followed a long line of
teachers, artificers, scholars and men of skill and learning, by whom the
native people were made cultured and enlightened and given hope of life
hereafter, of which Confucianism knows nothing. By the tenth century, when the
three warring states were fused into one kingdom of Korai, Buddhism had become
the faith of the mass of people. From Quelpart Island
to the Ever White Mountains, Korea gained religious as well as political unity.
During this period of a thousand years of Buddhism’s
establishment and expansion, Korea enjoyed her most brilliant era of
prosperity. Those monuments of skilled labor, in the cutting and rearing of
stone tablets, pagodas, astronomical observatories and other structures, the
ruins of which litter Korean cities, colossal images, carved out of granite and
still rearing their imposing forms above the forest that covers the overgrown
debris of what were once monasteries, temples and cities, show what the Koreans
could do when in the full strength of faith and the energy of belief. The
almost utter absence of artistic memorials after the fall of Buddhism and the
devastations of hostile armies in ruthless invasions from Tartary, China and
Japan, have left the country scraped so bare, that travellers of today doubt and wonder whether they ever existed. Contemporary records,
however, are rich in their testimony as to Korea’s former prosperity and
comparatively high grade of civilisation. Japan’s debt to Korea, in the gifts
of peace and the loot of war, is written large.
Nevertheless the pride, insolence and intrigue of
priests at court, when the state religion of Korea existed for parasites to
fatten upon, invited revolution and disastrous overthrow at the hands of a
revolting general. After a brief civil war, in 1392, Buddhism was supplanted as
the religion of the court and put under disgrace and ban. Though some writers
view this change as a national uprising worthy of all praise, it is none the
less a fact that the common people of Korea, deprived of their pastors, were
left as sheep without a shepherd. The religious experience of no nation more
than of Korea illustrates more strikingly the sentiments of Washington, in his
farewell address, as to the necessity of religion in a people. Without teachers
and helpers the natives fell back into that primitive Shamanism, or cult of the
spirits, from which they had been lifted by the Buddhist evangel. Korean
Buddhism, degenerate through latter worldly prosperity, was far removed from
Shakya Muni’s noble eightfold path of virtue, even as the simple Christianity
of Jesus has been corrupted by priestcraft and overweighted by dogmas of which
he knew nothing. From 1392, Confucianism became the state ritual and the
medieval philosophy founded on it the creed of the average Korean gentleman.
Let us look at that primitive belief which antedates
all others. No better mirror of what the Korean actually believes can be found
than that furnished by his folklore and painted on his battleflags and in his shrines. This form of literature, older than writing and book
religion of any sort, has survived all imported rituals or systems of thought.
These fundamental dogmas of beast and spirit lore show the working of the
average man’s mind. Some of this lore is undoubtedly of medieval and later
growth, especially that in its present verbal or written form, but the
substance of it reveals the pre-ancient belief in the existence of spirits
everywhere, most of which are malignant. Folklore shows an incalculably large
population of active intelligencies, more or less
bestial in their shape and ways. They are continually busying themselves with
the affairs of men. They inhabit the trees and rocks and dwell in the mountains
and valleys, where they groan and sigh. No part of earth, air, sky, or the
waters under the earth is free from their interference. Wherever human
activities take place or in any structure reared by man, they come in troops.
Among the rafters, on and under the floor, in the flues, beneath the
foundation, by the kitchen fireplace, and on the walls, they are liable to be
found as thickly as the vermin that in Korea lurks in the habitations and makes
use of the human cuticle. In box, bundle, and jar, on brush and broom, wherever
man and especially woman goes, they are surrounded by them as surely as science
assures us, we are beset by billions of germs and spores. These demons are ever
ready to work havoc in the form of disease. At every point of his life, they
are believed so to touch the superstitious native, that as one studies the
subject, he beholds, in this doctrine of the omnipresence of demons, the
delirium tremens of paganism and the caricature of a most precious truth—that
of God’s indwelling presence everywhere.
The most interesting results of these degraded
beliefs, to which students of comparative religion give learned names, is seen
first in the horrible growth of the human microbes—geomancers, necromancers,
fortune tellers, demon exorcisers, etc., who fatten upon such a culture. These
rob the Korean not only of his purse, but of his very life. In the second
place, out of such mental morbidity springs a vast array of demon shrines,
carved log idols, old trees decorated with rags, heaps of stones piled up in
fearsome places, dusty fetiches suspended from the rooftrees of the houses, and
spirit posts found near the house in nearly every yard. All these growths of
superstition, both human and material, as of deadly night-shade, mean the loss
of millions of dollars every year. Out of these superstitions and decomposition
of old beliefs have arisen breeds of witches and wizards—the former more
numerous than the latter—whose native names show that they claim to have
communications with and power over the spirits. Whether the house-father will
sow seed, build a dwelling, take a journey, make a venture in business, marry
one of his children, seek wealth or health, or be healed of disease, he as the
poor slave of superstition must pay the soothsayer for his antics of tomfoolery
and deception. In sickness he must bear the burden of mental agony in addition
to pain and bodily discomfort. In every village, a tax is laid upon all to
propitiate the mountain god, to hold back the tiger, or to prevent the letting
loose of woes unutterable. At the devil shrines, bags of grain must be offered,
even if children starve. In the mountain pass, the shrine-keeper’s fee must be
handed over to him or calamities will follow. At each village entrance, rudely
carved posts, uglier than Milton’s sin or a Jersey scarecrow, represent the
“General of Heaven” and the “Queen of Hell.” Old Korea was a domain of fear and
in it dwelt twelve million slaves. Whatever theories one may hold as to
demoniacal possession, it is certain that this realm was full of the possessed.
Nevertheless, despite all that was disgusting to the
senses and degrading to the intellect, there was much to make the Korean proud
of his country. So long as he had for comparison only Japan, on which he looked
as an island-kingdom of semisavages; or mighty
China, his own country’s superior in every way, reverenced as a glorious
model, whence had come all culture in letters, learning, philosophy, science,
morals and manners, the Korean could feel that his, after the Central Empire,
was the greatest country in the world and his own the greatest people. Had he
not everything to be thankful for? Must he not be grateful to his ancestors, to
his sovereign, Favourite of the Most High, and the
dynasty in that wonderful city of Soul, to which all roads led, whose splendours every native hoped to gaze upon before he died?
What if, to the cold eyes of the alien, this capital
city seemed little better than a mushroom patch, an odd collection of thatched
huts, a filthy hole, with the majority of the people living in what would be in
the West considered abject poverty? What if the land cursed with slavery cast
out its sick bondmen and women to die outdoors when abandoned as useless
animals? What if an imaginary “twenty millions” of natives and a real half of
this number were oppressed and robbed in the name of the law, by a million lazy
parasites, of the Yangban or official class? The average Korean gentleman hated
manual labor and honest work as he did a cat. He would not soil his hands to
help others. His women might spend their lives in cooking, washing and
laundering for him, so that he might appear in the immaculate white cotton, or
in gay colored silks and the large black, wide-rimmed hat of his class, while
waiting for office, or in some way expectant of or depending upon the public
crib. Like many other patriots who fed on tradition, rather than facts, many of
these genteel persons in the salaried official brotherhood—of whom three
thousand held office in Seul, while eight hundred sufficed for the rest of the
country—they were for the most part astonishingly ignorant of their own
country. When their General Min committed suicide in 1905, because his country
had lost her independence, he left a farewell address containing about a
hundred characters, in which the phrase, “twenty million compatriots” occurs
four times, though the first census, taken in 1910 showed only a few over
twelve millions in the peninsula.
These then were the things, in substance and in
imagination, of which a Korean might be and was proud. He was keenly sensitive
to the beauties of nature, the grandeur of the mountains, the glories of the
sky and earth, the traditions of his fatherland and of the ancestry which he honoured and worshipped. He was polished, polite,
dignified. He took time to be courteous. Long years of familiarity with
inherited conditions had blunted or blinded him to those things, unpleasant or
revolting, which a foreigner from the West might at first notice or despise.
His sense of smell, for example, was for him, as for us all, less a matter of
sensitiveness or insensitiveness, than of education. He had by acquiescence
from childhood travelled in the deep rut of custom, which was to him as iron
law, and so slipped easily through the grooves of circumstance. The graveyard
and its voices governed him. His ideal of the golden age was in the past.
If he lived in the capital he would be wakened in the
morning, or lulled to peace at night, by the blasts of sound, supposed to be
music which accompanied the opening or closing of the city gates. If in the
village, he might keep up the illusion of city grandeur and high walls and
gates, when there were none, with a similar sound of instruments. At breakfast
he was served by the women folks, servants and children. During the day he
followed the routine of service as officer or hanger on, or killed time with
smoke, games, wine and dancing girls. The curfew of the great bell in the centre of the city and the grating of the hinges of the
city gates told him of a day past. Then looking up at the peaks of the Great
South Mountain, he would behold the beacon fires which, carrying the message in
flame from frontier and seashore as by telegraph, from peak to peak, announced
that all was peace in the land. Then, at 9 p.m., while he gave himself up to
chat with his fellows, in his own or some neighbour’s social front room, with refreshments or sedentary games, the females of his
household were free to go outdoors, find fresh air in the city streets, or make
social calls.
This was the Korean woman’s hour of freedom. Reversing
our notions of propriety, the authorities punished severely with the paddle all
male humanity discovered at large, while the female world employed the
opportunity for visiting, gossip or mutual help. Until too many aliens invaded
and modernised Soul, this absence of men and boys
from the public streets was the rule. A thousand dancing lanterns told of
woman’s privilege on the thoroughfares. Nightkeys among the men were unknown.
Thus, with his food and clothing prepared for him, the
well-to-do head of the Korean family let the years slip by to old age. When he
at last went to sleep with his fathers on the hillside, he knew that his sons,
in filial piety, would maintain the house tablets and the stated sacrifices in
his honour, would watch over his grave and see that
it was kept in order and free from desecration. The spur of fame drove him to
seek, at every hazard and sacrifice, male issue, sons who should be his
worshippers after death.
So within the limits of his light and knowledge, in
the ordinary times of prosperity, the Korean was contented with his lot.
Whether in humble life and ordained to toil and taxes, or among the ranks of
privilege, he might at times complain, but in the main, he was submissive to
what he called fate or custom, or Heaven’s decree, and higher standards being
absent, he settled into a fairly cheerful view of life, with habits of
abounding hospitality. He was possessed of virtues, which, though too often, in
their excess of manifestation running into vices, helped him to enjoy life. He
counted this a good world to be in. Even when disease, suffering, poverty, or
oppression from those of higher station had to be endured—being past all
cure—the native had at least the compensation of feeling that they were the
troubles of his own household and not caused by a foreigner or from gall-sores
caused by wearing a conqueror’s yoke.
What booted it that Korea had been repeatedly invaded
from every point of the compass, devastated by the ocean islanders, the
northern savages who lived behind the mountains, and the great Chinese hosts?
By the mass of the people, the sturdy peasantry, of fine physical development
and solid qualities, these far-off events were as quickly forgotten as are the
desolations of volcanoes. When the lava cools, the vineyards rise. For two
hundred years and over, Korea had been the Land of Great peace. As for the
danger of similar visitations in the future, the people never dreamed of such a
thing. It was as though in the castle of Indolence, Thorn Rose still lay
sleeping.
In a word, the mental attitude of Korea was well
expressed in the reply to the American minister Low, who in 1866 sought to make
a treaty—“How tan four thousand years’ ceremonies, music, literature and all
things be, without sufficient reason broken up?”
III
The Hermit’s Doors Forced Open
SUDDENLY like the stroke of doom, what seemed to be a
sub-oceanic earthquake lifted, before the eyes of the Koreans, “a great blue
sea of troubles.” The tidal wave of modern civilisation rolled over the land
and threatened to overwhelm it. Fleets and armies from Europe humbled the China
that had hitherto been thought invincible. The sacred capital, Peking, despite
its cyclopean walls, was forced and even the Son of Heaven affronted in his
palaces which were laid in ruins. In Japan not only did the starry banner
appear in her waters, but without firing a hostile gun, the American commodore,
in 1854, with his warships, won two open ports. Then Harris, in 1858, eclipsing
even Perry’s triumph, gained the rights of trade, commerce, and the residence
of the missionaries of the dreaded religion. Civilisation seems often to ride
on a powder cart, but America in the East has been, as President Arthur said, “
the Great Pacific Power.”
On February 6, 1858, two events took place; in space,
seven thousand miles apart; in the progress of the kingdom which is not of this
world, they are in harmony and true spiritual perspective.
Townsend Harris, at Shimoda, in Japan, virtually
concluded the main articles in the treaty by which foreign residence was
secured in five ports or cities in Japan. In America, near Souderton, Montgomery
Co., Pa., in the old homestead, near the Bethlehem Turnpike, was born Henry
Gerhard Appenzeller, destined of God to do a mighty work in Korea. In the sight
of Him who notes the sparrow’s fall, in the progress of the Kingdom, the two
events, the warship and the cradle, may be of equal value.
The Japanese turned their faces away from China and
the graveyard and looked toward Christendom. Within the lifetime of a single
man, Nippon abolished her feudalism, united her local factions, and stood forth
a resistless unity armed with modem science and in panoply of war. Nothing in
Japan’s history has so much impressed Confucian Asia as her solidarity. Her
ability to smite hard as one mass where dualism and division formerly ruled,
astonished the Koreans who looked at their neighbour’s transformation with shivers of impotent fear.
Russia, dismembering northern China, extended eastward
her borders to the Pacific Ocean and southward until, across the river along
eleven miles, the Koreans could see Russian soldiers and traders; while near
by, at Vladivostock, defiantly named “Dominion of the
East,” rose a fortress impregnable even to European navies. Invading traders
and armed robbers from the United States, France, and Germany violated the
frontiers of Korea and entered her rivers with armed hostile expeditions.
The French priests who in the disguise of widowers in
mourning had crossed her boundaries, became bolder and diligently propagated
their dogmas until tens of thousands of believers, only too ready to invoke
French military and naval intervention, formed an imperium in imperio. Thus while it seemed as though the whole
greedy Occident was about to extend its depredations to the hermit nation, dire
evils portended at home. The reigning family failed to produce an heir to the
throne and three royal widows at the palace were at the mercy of the intriguing
rival or hostile parties.
At this juncture, the strong man, like Germany’s
Bismarck, or England’s Cromwell, unexpectedly appeared in Korea.
First, a boy must be nominated heir to the throne. He
is that same individual who, as helpless minor, adult king, bone of contention
between China and Japan, centre of intrigue, riot,
battle, kidnapping and humiliation, refugee from the palace to the Russian
legation, petitioner at Washington and at The Hague for intervention, restored
figure-head, hater of pro-Japanese reform and unquailing persecutor of reformers, pigmy emperor and bestower of a constitution, which
was a mockery and a farce, debaser of the coin and finally a deposed prince,
vassal of the Japanese Emperor and passive member of the nobility of Japan—a
creature of vast hopes and colossal disappointments—is well known to the world,
through his oft-taken pictures reproduced in books and newspapers.
The royal candidate’s father was supposed to be a mild
and suave nobleman and absorbed scholar, with a lack of political ambition
tantamount to self-effacement. Yet when he received the title of Tai Wen Kun,
or Great Palace Prince, he mounted the airplane of a vast ambition and soared
out and up into regions of power, to which even few Korean sovereigns had ever
aspired. He embarked in schemes of terrific extravagance in the way of palace
building, increased the taxes, catered to the rougher elements in society and
among the lower classes, threw down the gauntlet of defiance to all aliens,
taunted the reformed Japanese Government of 1868, in a stinging letter of
insult, and in general showed a fierce determination to make Korea strong by
exerting the full resources of the realm for his own glory. In the spring of
1866 (the year of the advent of the American armed schooner, General Sherman
and of the German, Oppert’s attempted robbery of the royal graves) this man,
with “heart of stone and bowels of iron” lured traitors and informers to expose
the whole Roman Catholic situation, issued anti-Christian edicts that resulted
in the slaughter of probably ten thousand native Christians, and enticed out,
through betrayal, or secured by voluntary surrender, nine French Catholic priests.
These were beheaded, after slow mutilation on the common execution ground by
the river side.
After these spring massacres, the French Admiral Roze,
with seven ships of war and fifteen hundred men came to Korea to inquire and
avenge. Two gunboats were sent up the river and lay in view of the capital.
Receiving no apology, the French admiral landed a force which sacked and burned
Kang-wa. Then, with a detachment of marines, organised more like a picnic than for serious war, and
expecting to lunch in the Buddhist monastery as in a lightly entered chapel of
ease, the French marched gaily inland. Instead of fenced garden, they found a highwalled fortress. Bravely met by the northern tiger
hunters, they were driven oft with many dead and wounded. The Admiral departed
with his ships, and the average opinion among the natives was that “our boys
had handsomely beaten off the enemy.’’ So they thought also about the
Americans who came in 1871. To compare, for example, “Admiral Schley’s Own
Story,” (and especially the sensational illustrations made for it in 1912 in
order to fire the American war-lover’s heart), with the situation as seen by a
Korean, or even one familiar with the facts, shows how patriots on opposite sides
see things differently.
The anti-Christian edicts published throughout the
realm and in Soul were engraved in large Chinese characters and upon a stone
tablet erected near the great bell in the centre.
The ban of death read as follows:
“The barbarians from beyond the sea have violated our
borders and invaded our land. If we do not fight, we must make treaties with
them. Those who favour making a treaty sell their
country. Let this be a warning to ten thousand generations.”
In later years the Methodist Book Store and printing
press, founded by Appenzeller, stood within a few yards of this vanished token
of reaction, overwhelming with the flood of science from presses and stores of
literature the ideas out of which such a memorial could arise.
This stone of defiance was reared in the year 1871,
when it was expected that the American Expedition under Rear-Admiral John
Rodgers, was on its way to demand satisfaction for the destruction of the
schooner General Sherman and her crew at Ping Yang in 1866, and to force a
treaty. Admiral Bell wanted two thousand men, in addition to the marines and
sailors in the Asiatic squadron, in order to hold Soul. Rodgers, who had asked
for a larger force, came on May 30, 1871, with five ships of war, mounting eighty-five
cannon and manned by twelve hundred and thirty men and anchored near Kang-wa island. Minister Low of China was on board the frigate
Colorado for peaceful diplomacy. Rodgers sent two gunboats, the Monocacy and
Palos, towing a squadron of boats, to enter and survey the Han River, though
warned by the obedient Captain Blake of a sure fight within a few minutes. The
Americans were fired upon. Later our men stormed the forts, seven in number
killing or wounding about three hundred natives. Having “vindicated the honour of the flag,” Rodgers came away.
The Korean tiger hunters from the two northern
provinces, fought nobly defending their native soil. They not only stood their
ground against vastly superior arms and numbers, but charged repeatedly on the
Dahlgren howitzers that blew them with shell and shrapnel to atoms. In the
forts, or near by, they fought until the last man yielded up his life for his
country. Morally judged, the American could boast nothing over the Korean whose
land he had invaded. Rodgers’ expedition of 1871 laid an endless obligation on
Christian America to send spiritual ploughmen to blood-reddened Korea, and
Christ-filled men skilful in the use of the pruning
hook to carry the gospel of the Prince of Peace.
The land was quiet for five years notwithstanding that
in Japan the old two-sworded samurai, socially the
kinsmen of the Korean Yang-ban, clamoured for the
invasion of Korea.
A greater moral battle, than ever Japanese fleets or
armies, before or afterwards won, whether in Manchuria or the Sea of Japan,
took place in the Japanese cabinet in Tokyo, when the embassy round the world
returned from their tour in the autumn of 1873. It was held and fought out by
brain and tongue before the Emperor himself. It was a struggle of wits that
meant Japan’s weal or woe. The war party, clamouring for instant vengeance on Korea, was beaten. Wise men in power saw that for
Japan to irritate the Northern Bear, fight prematurely when unprepared and
their modem weapons too new, would be to play into the hands of Russia. The
peace party won and warlike activities were postponed a few months, later to be
transferred to Formosa, where Japanese in modern dress and arms met the head
hunting savages.
On September 10, 1875, Japanese sailors in the garb
which all the world has borrowed from the British navy, since Nelson’s time,
were surveying in Korean waters to get material for their superb chart-room in
Tokyo. These men were mistaken for Frenchmen and fired on from the fort at
Kang-wa. Though but a handful in numbers, the
Mikado’s marines, giving an object lesson of Japanese valour and of the power of modem rifles, stormed and captured the fort.
When the news reached Tokyo, the Government saw its
opportunity, even while holding the war party in check. A diplomatic expedition
was organised on the model of President Fillmore’s
peaceful armada of 1853, even to details that seem comical. Having as yet no
navy of any size, transports were painted with mock portholes to look like
men-of-war. General Kuroda was sent to Soul to make a treaty that should recognise Cho-sen as an
independent nation, while Mori the Mikado’s envoy acted in Peking. This
procedure was meant to insert the wedge and strike the first blow of the beetle
that should split to pieces forever China’s decrepit doctrine of
world-sovereignty, which demanded that all neighbour nations be also subject to
her as vassals and pay tribute.
By tact, backed by a show of force, a treaty was won
and the way thus paved by which the United States, also, through China’s
approval and the assistance of Li Hung Chang, secured a treaty.
The American Commodore Shufeldt signed the instrument
on May 7, 1882, at the magistracy nearest to Chemulpo.
It was in fourteen articles and in comprehensiveness far excelled the treaty
obtained by Perry from Japan thirty years before. Yet Shufeldt’s great triumph
attracted little notice. He obtained no thanks from his Government, but only
neglect. This was probably on account of the publication, unknown to him, of a
private letter, concerning the Empress of China, to a friend. Official
jealousies of estranged politicians in Washington, however, had much to do with
it. The treaty was sent to the Senate July 29,1882, ratified January 9, 1883
and proclaimed in Soul, May 19 and June 4, 1883, when General Lucius H. Foote,
the American minister had already arrived in Soul and secured audience of the
king.
China also made a treaty, but evaded the question of recognising the full sovereignty of her ancient vassal
Korea and therein sowed the seed that ripened in the war of 1894-95. Meanwhile
the Korean crown prince had become king and been married to a lady of the Min
family, three years older than himself, and possessed of the highest mental
force. A typical Korean woman, of the most pronounced hereditary and national
characteristics, past master in palace intrigue, she was well worthy to lead
the most determined, most unscrupulous, and the most powerful of all the clans,
or factions, that claimed a strain of royal blood and demanded the chief spoils
of office, the Min. An absolute slave to superstition, she was ever ready to
seek favour alike
The Hermit’s Doors Forced Open 51 from sorcerers,
wizards, Buddhist priests or Confucian bigots, in order to secure her ends,
personal, feminine, maternal, political, or patriotic. By far the strongest
character in the palace, she overshadowed in ability her husband—one of the
weakest of weak men.
IV
The Methodists and the Appenzellers
TO return American courtesies and to ratify the
treaty, an embassy, consisting of the cousin of the Queen and ten other
persons, started in an American man-of-war for Washington, arriving at San
Francisco September 2d. They spent three months in the United States. With this
embassy, I had the pleasure of spending the evening of Nov. 25, 1883, at the
Hotel Victoria in New York, conversing with them through the medium of the
Japanese and especially with the aid of Lieutenant Foulke, U.S.N. This noble
Christian gentleman, who later became the intrepid explorer of the Eight
Circuits, was ever the undiscouraged friend of Korea, despite the attack on his
life by native ruffians.
In crossing the American continent, the members of the
Korean embassy were met by Dr. John F. Goucher of Baltimore, the distinguished
educator and founder of Goucher Woman’s College in Baltimore. Learning of the
conditions and opportunities in this virgin field, Dr. Goucher offered $2000 to
the Methodist Mission Board in New York for the founding of a mission in the
Land of Morning Splendour. The fifteen or more
editorials of Dr. Buckley, in the Christian Advocate during the year, also
brought forth further gifts from Methodist gentlemen, amounting to $2000. A
little girl in California, nine years old, gave $9—an earnest of the noble work
later done by the young people of the Epworth League.
Things had hardly quieted down in Korea. Morning Calm
was hardly yet a fitting name for the country. Against the brilliant woman
Queen Min, the undying hate of her father-in-law was kindled and burst out
unquenchably Eke volcano fires. The story of the relations of these two
ambitious rivals and clan leaders is a travesty on the idea of filial piety and
of Korean theory, orthodoxy and tradition. It is one in which “envy, hatred,
malice and all uncharitableness” ruled, and in which
attempts at murder by the sword, poison, powder and dynamite were common
incidents. The feud finally culminated in the old fellow’s leadership of an
armed body of ruffians from over sea, who forever disgraced the name of Japan
by murdering this woman and cremating her body, with petroleum-drenched mats
from her own palace floor, October 8, 1895.
Although this incident, in the order of our
narrative, is anticipatory, it gives a correct idea of the elements at work
which kept the country in a state of dangerous unrest. There were imminent
potencies of public explosion, while the laws and edicts prohibiting
Christianity and under which torture and the murder of thousands had been
wrought, were unrepealed.
In the teeth of all these forbidding circumstances,
Bishop Fowler, secretary of the Missionary Society, pressed forward the
enterprise of spying out the new land as a preliminary to further occupation,
in the Caleb-like faith that the Methodists, under God, “were well able to
possess it.” At the meeting of the General Missionary Committee, in 1883, it
was decided to found a mission in Korea, and Dr. R. S. Maclay, then in Japan,
was appointed to visit the capital. He arrived at Soul in June 1883, the first
one of any Protestant Church or society to enter lawfully the Forbidden Land.
When the United States minister, General Lucius Foote, explained the proposed
enterprise, the king approved, being particularly glad that the work of healing
and teaching would be begun.
Soon after Dr. Maclay had returned to Japan, Dr.
Horace N. Allen was transferred by the Presbyterian Board from Nanking, China.
He arrived September 20, 1884, not only as the first resident missionary in
that land, but also to be the pioneer of science and, later, the able and wise
expander of American diplomacy and enterprise in Korea. As an accomplished
member of the two classes—missionary-propagandist and commercial-diplomatic,
and knowing both the Korean ways that were dark and peculiar, as well as those
of greedy foreigners, more or less altruistic, and being himself a bright and
delightfully human personality, he was able to render extraordinarily good
service between the United States and Korea, the natives and aliens, the Korean
Government and its own citizens and foreign guests, its friends and its
enemies. In short, Dr. Allen, in the twenty-one years of his service, under four
presidents, made a record that is unique in American relations with the Far
East. Other men may stand more conspicuously before the public, even as the
fighter and bloodshedding victor in war strikes most
powerfully the popular imagination, and just as Dewey met with salvoes of
popularity, while Kempfi, the peaceful vindicator of
American policy in China, was ignored by his President and Senate and is
popularly unheard of, and even Shufeldt is virtually unknown to fame. Yet we
repeat it. No man in the Far East, in the American diplomatic service, ever did
more for fair play and sound statesmanship, for justice between the races, for
the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the earth, and for the realisation of that ultimate civilisation which exalts the triumphs of reason above those
of force and of peace above those of war.
Meanwhile in New York, from the watch tower of
observation the Methodist Mission Board sought out two pickets for the advance
line in Korea. A force was to be gathered to attack the great uninvaded realms
of disease, ignorance, sin, vice, and superstition in the Hermit Nation. These
men and their wives were to go out in the name of Him who came to fulfil not to
destroy. Their business was to preserve not only life, health and moral
excellence, but to conserve whatever was good and worth keeping in the civilisation
of the old kingdom. Cool-headed, warm-hearted, hot with zeal for the Master,
yet level-headed and wise through self-effacement, they must be men willing to
bear and suffer, to labour and to wait. The one was
to bear chiefly the spiritual message, to minister to minds diseased and to
feed hungry souls, the other to heal bodies and improve health. The medical man
was William B. Scranton, a graduate of Yale University and of the College of
Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Happily he had not only a good wife, but a
mother who made a noble record in beginning the educational uplift of the
native women. She virtually opened the intellectual and spiritual history of
womanhood in modern Korea. Yet how pitifully small seemed this forlorn hope of
Methodist Christianity to invade the raw paganism of a hermit nation!
On December 8, 1884, while a coup d'état in Soul by
the returned Korean Liberals, followed by the decapitation and murder of their
rivals and a bloody street battle between the Japanese and Chinese soldiers,
the latter led by China’s man of destiny, Yuan Shi Kai, was taking place, Dr.
Scranton was ordained in New York city by Bishop Fowler.
The missionary colleague of Dr. Scranton was Henry
Gerhard Appenzeller, destined to seventeen years of signally successful service
in Korea, whose story we shall proceed to tell. In that wonderful ethnic
composite—the American people, Switzerland of the free has furnished not the
least potent ingredient. Among the Teutonic Swiss, the men of Appenzell are
among the best known in art, poetry and history, while also furnishing many
illustrious names in the Reformed church, the annals of education and the story
of civilisation.
Of Lord Macaulay’s reference to “ Appenzell’s stout
infantry,” in his poem “The Battle of Ivry,” all the world knows. This trio of
words is far more familiar than the German Zellweger’s four-volume History of
the Appenzell People: the American Consul-General Richman’s scholarly study of
“Appenzell: Pure Democracy and Pastoral Life;” or even the overthrow at the
battle of Nancy of the Burgundian Duke, Charles the Bold, by the hardy Swiss
mountaineers.
In our narrative, the name Appenzell is both
appropriate and prophetic of the gospel pioneer in Korea. When steeped in
ancient Teutonic paganism, Christian missionaries came from Ireland with the
gospel story into northeastern Switzerland, and famous indeed is the story of
their triumphs. The idols of the forest and glen were thrown into the lake and
in their places rose churches dedicated to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The
methods of the monks of St. Gall were those fitted for their age and they grew
in power and influence. The abbot’s cell (abbatis cella) became, in local phrase, “Appenzell.” A Christian
community, or monastery centre, of refining
influences throve where idols had long overawed. Thus was accomplished the
first reformation, which was under Latin forms of culture and in governmental
harmony with Rome as the seat of ecclesiastical power. In time the people freed
themselves from the secular rule of the prince bishops, had their code of laws
written in the “Silver Book” and governed themselves as a democracy.
Early in the sixteenth century Appenzell was permitted
to put two golden keys in the forepaws of the bear, on its coat of arms.
Brilliant is the picture given of the great cantonal meetings, when the whole
commonwealth assembled in the open air for political deliberation.
Under that re-birth of Greek theology, based on the
oldest text of the New Testament, and with the Bible in the hands of the
people, the second or great Protestant Reformation began. Zwinglius,
the native Swiss, beginning his preaching in 1518, was the leader. The Church,
reformed according to apostolic simplicity, with the laymen in control of
ecclesiastical offices and sacraments, became one of the many Reformed Churches
in Europe.
In 1597, the Appenzell people divided, one-half of
them taking to the Latin and medieval phase of the Christian faith and the
other half to the Greek, primitive, or reformed order, which politically was
named Protestant, because against the arbitrary and Roman methods of the
Emperor Charles V thinking men protested. From such origins arose and
developed the (German) “Reformed Church in the United States,” one of many
branches of the common stock, in the Reformed churches in the various European
countries, which was rooted in the Bible and not in a human corporation in
Italy. Of this great movement of the human spirit, Methodism based on personal,
experimental religion, is one of the noblest developments. It was not enough to
have the aristocratic intellect of Calvin. It pleased God to send into the
world John and Charles Wesley, with warmer hearts, to broaden the message.
From the time of Charles the Bold, when in 1477, that
truculent bully was overthrown and slain by Swiss peasants, to Napoleon
Bonaparte, many of the young Appenzellers, thirsting for adventure, took
military service under foreign captains, winning just fame for the steadiness
and valour which Macaulay has so celebrated in his
verse. In local history, also, the Appenzellers won fame as warriors. Rich is
the lore and many are the tales of heroism and valour in the days when war was the rule rather than the exception.
The first Appenzeller, ancestor of the gospel pioneer
in Korea, reached Pennsylvania—the Holy Land of the American Germans—in 1735.
This fugitive from government oppression was like the Syrian pilgrim named
Jacob. He was a “redemptioner” and lived all his American life as tenant on a
farm. Out of the class of “redemptioners,” scholars note the rise of such men
as Charles Thompson, secretary of the Continental Congress; the father of
General John Sullivan; and Matthew Thornton, signer of the Declaration of
Independence.
The gentleman who went to Philadelphia, selected Jacob
Appenzeller as helper, paid his passage, brought him to Souderton and gave him
employment, was named Thomas. His farm, which was on land surveyed in William
Penn’s time, was part of the later homestead of the Appenzellers. The
redemptioner married into the Oberholtzer family and two sons were born of this
union.
In the second generation, Jacob, the older son wedded
Nellie Savacol, in the northern part of Hilltown
township in Bucks County, and thus came into possession of the Appenzeller
homestead of fifteen acres, to which he later added another twenty-five acres.
The Revolution coming on, he took the oath of allegiance to the United States
Government. A member of the German Reformed Church, his three children, Henry,
Jacob and Elizabeth were baptised under her forms.
Until 1807 the Dutch and German Reformed churches in America were under the
same government.
The education of Jacob, in the third generation, who
was born June 8, 1783, and lived always on the homestead, was in both German
and English. Of his four children, the eldest, a son, David, saw the light
March 26, 1808. Jacob’s son Gideon, in the fourth generation of the American
Appenzellers, was born January 14,1823, and married December 22, 1855, Maria
Gerhard—a family name that suggests the debt of the world to the poets,
theologians, scholars, and men of science, who came of this family stock. Three
sons were the result of this union, the middle one being Henry Gerhard
Appenzeller, the gospel pioneer in Korea, born February 6, 1858. Thus, in his
heredity and name, were blended in the future apostle to the Koreans, besides
much that was ancient and honourable in one of the
oldest churches of the Reformation, the elements of promise and vigour.
V.
A Christian Soldier’s Training
HEAVEN, home, mother,” three of the noblest words in
our English tongue, were as one in Henry Appenzeller’s thoughts. Each stood for
a powerful influence, yet were one—a trinity of spiritual force. He could not
separate them. In mental associations and heart life they made unity.
A devoted mother, Maria Gerhard spoke little English
to the day of her death and with her Henry used only his mother’s
tongue—“Pennsylvania German”—until the age of twelve. He began his schooling
when five years old. On the playground and at home the talk was in the German
local dialect, but before the teachers and in recitations he used English.
Henry’s mother came of old Mennonite stock and was
thus of the same culture that nourished the earlier life of that noble servant
of Christ in Korea, Dr. E. B. Landis. Bible study is one of the features of
life in a Mennonite home. So she, as had been her own mother’s custom and
delight before her, gathered her three boys around on Sunday afternoons and
reading to them and with them in the German Bible, in the version made by
Luther, kept them familiar with the narratives of Israel and the rich spiritual
truths of the New Covenant. Devoted to the details of a well ordered home, she
ever held up before her children high ideals of life
Thus both by absorption at home and later through
critical study A. knew the language of the German Fatherland, using it easily
with pen and voice, in America and Europe and with Germans in Korea, till the
day of his death. By later scholastic training, the biblical languages, and
French learned in later days and always read easily, were his own and in use of
them, he was scholarly and fluent. In loyalty to English, he would have
satisfied De Quincey, who placed faithfulness to one’s language next to the
flag of his country.
A bright and eager child, Henry was duly drilled in
the Heidelberg Catechism. This superb manual of Christian nurture concerns
itself with immediately personal religion, being based on the Ten Commandments,
the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostle’s Creed, and is also rich in gems of thought
and felicities of language. Besides being powerfully ministrant to that piety
which springs out of experimental acquaintance with divine truth, the
Heidelberg Catechism serves also as a means of private devotion and an aid to
spiritual reflection. Henry refers to this “catechetical class” in his boyish
diary. His father was not warm towards the idea of infant baptism, so the boys
received no water-consecration until near the time of their own personal
profession of faith. When fourteen years old, four days after being baptised at home, November 12, 1872, Henry was confirmed in
the Emmanuel Reformed Church, near Souderton, by the same pastor, Rev. Peter S.
Fisher. This edifice is popularly called “Leidy’s church,” after a famous
Pennsylvania family—the bronze statue of Professor Leidy standing in front of
the City Hall in Philadelphia. Henry enjoyed his first communion in this
sacred building, which is used by both the Lutheran and Reformed congregations.
In the older cemetery adjoining, the thickly clustered stones bear well-known
local and historic names, and in the newer enclosure his parents lie buried;
his ancestors sleeping in the burial ground of the Indian Creek Reformed
Church, a few miles distant.
All intellectual advantages, within the possibilities
of his parents’ means, were offered to the bright lad and these he eagerly
improved. After public school training, he was sent to the West Chester State
Normal School in preparation for college.
On January 29, 1912, the biographer visited the
Appenzeller homestead. It is situated on the highest ground in the county with
a superb sweep of view on all sides. The township is well named Hilltown. The
present, substantial stone house was erected in i860.
From about the year, 1870, “Harry” kept a diary, a
habit which was in line with his systematic and orderly mental processes, so
that he rarely if ever blundered in dates, while his thought in deliberative
gatherings and in public discourses was clarity itself. These records, both
boyish and manly, tell of a chaste, clean, finely developed body, well cared
for, of a pure brave soul, of a strong, modest, clear-seeing spirit and of a
well balanced organisation in superb manhood. No
tobacco stupefied or added reek to breath, clothes, or physical structure, nor
did alcohol stimulate or dull that alert brain. No strong coffee, drugs, or
anything out of bottles or druggists’ vials were needed for daily or special
tasks. Appenzeller believed in being “full,” yet not of that “wherein is
excess.” He did heartily believe in being “full of the Spirit.” His was a body
ever able to respond without stimulants to the calls made upon it, for
continuous work; while for fresh emergencies there was a reserve of vigour. Well wrote, in 1912, Bishop W.. F. Anderson, his
classmate at Drew Seminary: “Physically he was one of the stalwarts.
Intellectually he was alert and scholarly. He had a warm heart and a
sympathetic nature.” Faithful in duties, quick in favourite studies and fairly so in the distasteful or difficult ones, A. appreciated, in
true filial piety and in good measure, the advantages which he enjoyed.
The first of these diaries, in an ordinary copybook,
shows a real boy, eager in his farm work, and in games and sports, who enjoyed
a healthy life and liked to be trusted. He could gear a horse, thresh grain,
pull feed for stock, go on a tramp, ride to the store and get what he was told
and bring it home safely. He made himself generally useful, while learning to
love the earth and sky, the birds, animal life, and nature in many moods.
His knowledge of boundaries, land values, and whatever
meant thrift and tenacity in farm economy served him admirably when in Korea.
He was a true lover of the soil.
Reading these abundant personal records of thirty-two
years, from 1870 to 1902, in the perspective of today, with the side lights and
correctives of collateral testimony and information from many sources, the
biographer feels that he can safely call his subject a knightly soldier,
“valiant from spur to plume,” a warrior of God who took on the whole armour. In defense and offense, he answered to Paul’s
splendid picture of the legionary of Jesus. A. was a Christian hero, “without
fear and without reproach.”
This “triumphant Pennsylvanian,” as the author of “The
Vanguard” calls him, seemed sensitive on all sides of his being to the beauties
of God’s worlds of nature and revelation. Possessed through heredity of a pair
of singularly bright, keen eyes, the Spirit that “lighteth every man that cometh into the world” enlarged and extended his vision also for
the things unseen and eternal. Through creation and revelation, Appenzeller was
a man who saw God. To his child Jehovah not only was, but is.
Not all his soul life, nor the deepest, did this
refined gentleman, who never wore his heart on his sleeve, put down in diaries.
Like Browning he felt
“God be thanked, The meanest of his creatures boasts
two soul-sides
One to face the world with; one to tell a woman when
he loves her.”
So he talked to his own heart and set down in black
and white his deepest emotions—but not where others might read. When seeking to
win the hand and heart of the one who became the “help meet for him” and the
mother of his children, he kept his thoughts and correspondence in a separate
book. Tied with white ribbon, he put in her own hands when, the mother of three
children, she lay upon a sick bed, this autograph record for her cheer. A
potent medicine indeed! Other husbands might well test the efficacy of such a
prescription in the day of a wife’s despondency. In the United States Navy the
standard toast to “Sweethearts and Wives” is this: “May every sweetheart become
a wife and every wife remain a sweetheart.”
It was while at West Chester, that the depths of
Christian experience in the soul of Henry Appenzeller were sounded unto true
conversion and it was in the Presbyterian church of that pretty town that his
spiritual enrichment took place. The plummet of a catechism may reach no deeper
than the head. A personal conviction of sin through heart-searching, an
awakened conscience (or in-wit, our Teutonic ancestors called it), followed by
the entrance of God’s light-giving word of peace, and a soul opened fully to
the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, through a will strengthened by Divine help,
results in the assurance of faith and transforms the whole being.
Throughout his life Henry Appenzeller was grateful to
the Father, after whom every fatherhood in Heaven and on earth is named, for
having been brought in His Providence under the preaching of the evangelist Mr.
Fulton, who was holding special services in the Presbyterian Church at West
Chester. The date of his conversion, October 6, 1876, he annually celebrated as
his spiritual birthday.
Between his coming to school at West Chester and his
graduation from college at Lancaster were included several events and
experiences, which tended to develop the lad who was growing in favour with God and man. When converted, he started a
prayer meeting in the school which continued for years, and out of which grew
the Young Men’s Christian Association of West Chester. Later he taught school
for one term in Delaware Co., Penn. At Elizabethtown in Lancaster county,
during his college course he was also engaged in teaching, in order to secure
his financial maintenance until graduation. Furthermore, by teaching, he
learned what he really knew and what he did not know, thus testing his powers.
When Harry was ready for higher intellectual
discipline, he entered, according to his father’s wish, Franklin and Marshall
College of the Reformed Church in Lancaster. It was named, after the Yankee
domiciled in the Quaker City and the “Father of the Supreme Court,” Franklin
and Marshall. Matriculating as a freshman in the autumn of 1878, he was
graduated in the class of 1882.
With Lancaster are associated some of the most
inspiring of Colonial, Revolutionary, anti-slavery and civil war memories and
heroes. Here many a council with the Iroquois Indians had been held. Here were
raised the German regiments, including the Body Guard of General Washington,
and here also the people first saluted the leader of the Continental armies, by
the title so familiar to them, “Father of his Country.” In this region, such
leaders as Generals Hand and Muhlenburg, Colonels
Hartley and Hubley, and Major Burckhardt arose to lead freedom’s hosts. For a
time it was the national capital, for the Continental Congress met here while
the British possessed Philadelphia. Here, or near by, the Hessian mercenaries
employed by the German king of Great Britain, George III captured by Washington
at Trenton, coming among people and clergymen of their own tongue and stock,
were shown and convinced of the badness of the cause into which they had been
impressed and the meanness of the work in which they had been ignorantly engaged.
Thousands left the service they learned to hate, including Fritz, Washington’s
coachman, and Custer, the grandfather of our brilliant cavalry leader—“the boy
general with the golden locks.” Of thirty thousand Hessians who came to
America, only seventeen thousand returned to Germany. Here lived and were
buried not only James Buchanan, last president of the slave-holding American
republic, but also Thaddeus Stephens. The unquailing enemy of human servitude and champion of the rights of man, lived, laboured, and died in Lancaster, his sepulchre being still within the city’s limits. Conestoga river, near by, gave its name
to a tribe of Indians, deadly enemies of the Mohawks and also to a form of
wagon invented here, which possibly a million of hardy emigrants to the Far
West made the home on wheels of their wives and little ones. Thus the memory of
the pioneers was an ever living one and there was no lack of inspiring
patriotic associations in Lancaster and A. was a stalwart American.
With the college are associated the names of such
epoch-making teachers as Joseph Berg, John W. Nevin and Philip Schaff, besides
such educators as the Stahrs and Appels, Atlee,
Gerhart, Krebs and others of local fame. Few New England historians have ever
told the story of the educational work and influences in the Middle and Western
States, of the Pennsylvania Germans, or the epic of the Germans in the United
States. This work was reserved for Professor Faust, of Cornell University.
Under teachers like Dr. Dubbs, who, knowing the heroic
and poetic, as well as homely details of the Pennsylvania pioneer settlers
under William Penn’s noble charter of freedom, and their varied life, as
churches and individuals, could give a tongue to every acre and make each
mound, stream, and rock eloquent with stories of romance and adventure, Henry
Appenzeller was richly nourished. Out of the local as well as the general
history of achievement, he was prepared for a grand work in a distant land, that
in spiritual splendour should outshine even the lustre of those German Pilgrims to Pennsylvania, who with
William Penn crossed the ocean for conscience’ sake. Of the college faculty,
Dr. John Brainard Kiefer, holding the chairs, first of the Ancient Languages
and then of the Greek Language and Literature, was especially stimulant to the
mind of A.
There were at least two events during his college
career which as Christian and student affected favourably his future. The one represented grace and the other grit. The first coloured his whole after life, and the other, which for a
few days made him unpopular with a few—though afterward these same men honoured his action—showed him the determined foe of
brutality in any form.
It was about this time, in 1879, the change in his
church life was made that was pivotal in his career. He was thrown much with
the Methodists and, when in Lancaster again, attended various churches, being
evidently for a time, as his diaries, and especially the entry of April 5,
attest, in a state of mental restlessness, withal spiritually dissatisfied with
himself. He yearned for a richer experience. Besides being attracted to the
prayer and class meetings of the First Methodist Church, he studied on April
16, the minutes of the Philadelphia Conference and deeply impressed wrote, “ I
rejoice in the good work the church of my choice is doing.” On the following
Sunday, he made entry in his diary:
“Today all my previous thoughts and debates about the
change from the Reformed to the Methodist church were ended, when I was taken
in as a full member in the Methodist Church, which is the one of my choice....
This step is taken only after prayer and meditation for some time. Since my
conversion October 1, 1876, I have been among the Methodists most of the time
and feel more at home than I did in the Reformed Church and I feel it to be my
duty to join the M.E. Church and what I did today I did with an eye single to
the glory of God.”
It was under the pastorate of Rev. H. C. Smith in the
First Methodist Episcopal Church, in Lancaster, he heartily adopted John
Wesley’s form of life as a follower of his Saviour and was admitted into membership April 20, 1879 He ever afterwards referred in
grateful memory to this date. The text of the sermon heard at this initial
communion with his Methodist brethren, so singularly appropriate and stimulant,
remained indelible in memory. It was this—“Grow in grace and the knowledge of
our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” How in Korea he told of the change in his
church home and his reasons therefore, may be read, on page 93, of that most
fascinating romance of missionary life in Korea, “The Vanguard” by Dr. James H.
Gale, who was his colleague in Bible translation. In this story, Appenzeller is
depicted under the name of “Foster.”
“McKecheren greatly liked
Foster, in spite of his Arminianism. The more he saw, the more he prized him.
At last to his extreme joy, he learned on Foster’s own statement that he had
been converted in a Presbyterian Church, (at West Chester, Pa.).
“There noo,” said McKecheren, “I kenned there was something about you;
there’s nothing in the world like Calvinism to pit fibre intil a man’s banes, but whit way did ye backslide
into Methodism?”
“Well,” said Foster, “I felt so glad and happy that I
just had to shout Hallelujah, and you know they never would tolerate such
goings on in the Presbyterian church, so I had to backslide and be a shouting
Methodist.”
“I’m thinkin’ there’s
perhaps a place in God’s economy for us’” said McKecheren.
“I’m mair inclined to the Methodists than I used to
be. I did na like them yince;
we had nae Methodists in Scotland, but since I’ve been on the Mission field
I’ve learned that there are God’s people among the Methodists as well as among
the Presbyterians, but its a great mystery.”
“Nothing was more interesting to Foster than the
peculiar dry Calvinist that he found in McKecheren.”
Appenzeller, like many another chivalrous student who
loves fair play, hates brutality and despises the oppression of the weak by the
strong, could not and refused to understand why savagery, after being improved
off the face of the earth elsewhere, should still linger in the American
college. When hazing at Lancaster was carried so far that members of the
tormented lower class were tied to trees, or butted against posts, Appenzeller
rebelled, and became insurgent against the code that breeds outlaws and
lynchers. He not only refused to conform to the dictation of the bully, but he
brought the matter to the faculty’s notice. Of the same stuff of which Caleb
and Joshua or our own Nathan Hale was composed, he would not hesitate, if necessary,
to turn “spy” and “informer” at the call of duty. In conscience, he attacked
what was treachery to the good name of a college. In one instance, when after
the class in council had decided to “slope” and cut recitations for the day, A.
protested and declared he would attend all the recitations, which he did.
Afterwards those who imagined him “Puritanical,” admired and approved “Appie’s
course.”
Bravo! Majorities may be tyrants equal to monarchs.
The Christian life to Appenzeller meant instant and
continuous service for Christ. He had a high-souled disdain for merely negative
goodness. As he read his New Testament, he found that the emphasis of His
Master’s scorn was not directed against the tempted, the outcast, or even the
“sinners,” so called, so much as it was with lightning-like directness against
those pious do-nothings and orthodox drones who were the opposites of the Good
Samaritan
In A.’s view, knowledge divorced from action was as
disease and sin. The command “Feed my lambs” was as real in his ears as if
spoken, to his face, in a.d. 1879, and not, it may
be, a.d. 33. Those words of the Son of Man, blessed
and awful, “Inasmuch as ye did it not unto me” were like Sinai’s positive
commands. Intending to be a preacher and a shepherd of souls, and believing
that the best way to learn to deliver the gospel message was by actual
practice, he began preaching in a little chapel in Lancaster. This “East
Mission” thrived under its young shepherd and later became a church duly organised, and in the summer of 1911, its neat edifice for
worship was dedicated.
Studying the preparation and delivery of a sermon, as
including both science and art, and ever persevering, Appenzeller became a
fluent, forceful and persuasive preacher, to whom throughout life public
speaking was a private joy and a public crown of success. He had “the wooing
note.” He was a son of consolation. He won his hearers. In Korea, his own
countrymen as well as natives, “mercantiles” as well
as “clericals,” officials in the custom house and men of the legations, loved
ever to hear him.
Here, then, was a child of God who set himself, in the
obedience of love to answer the Heavenly Father’s challenge to prove the Divine
readiness to bless. Of that willingness and ability, A. was persuaded after
earnest study of the Word.
VI.
Korea as a Topic—Lure or Chill
FOR the study of theology, the college graduate, now
an A.B., went to Drew Seminary, at Madison, N. J., a place twenty-five miles
distant from New York and inhabited chiefly by men doing business on Manhattan.
The town itself was named after that suave, fourth President of the United
States, “Father of the Constitution,” who gave Dr. Robert Morrison, the English
apostle to China, a warm letter of introduction that opened British hearts and
paved the way for missionary success at a difficult time. The Seminary edifice
was surrounded by a park of ninety-five acres, the gift of the capitalist and
Methodist layman, Daniel Drew, was then in its pristine vigour,
with a faculty in which the names of Drs. James Strong, G. R. Crooks, S. F.
Upham, R. L. Cummock, J. Wiley, J. P. Silverman and
the still living professor, now (1912) president, Henry A. Butz were magnetic.
As one of the contributors to the McClintock and
Strong’s Biblical Encyclopedia and as personal friend of both editors, the
biographer finds among his papers an invitation to the celebration by the
Seminary, in 1881, of the completion of this great work.
These teachers found Appenzeller an appreciative and
diligent student, one of those who make the joy of a professor’s life. He
excelled in Greek, thus unconsciously fitting himself to render the New
Testament into Korean. Throughout his whole career as student, in college and
seminary, A. had in large measure to support himself. At Drew he acted as
private secretary to Dr. George R. Crooks. Often given work of research to do,
or references to verify, the professor was wont to say that anything looked up
by Appenzeller could be depended upon and he need seek no farther. As long as
we are human, there will be certain ones among our teachers who influence us
most profoundly and most richly fertilise our minds.
Dr. Butz and Dr. Wiley had the strongest attraction for “Appie”—the
personality of the men more even than their subjects. In the class prayer
meetings, he took unflagging interest, making it a principle to be always
present.
Appenzeller spent his Saturdays in pastoral activities
and his Sundays in preaching and teaching. In connection with his field at
Montville, both being in the same circuit, he laboured at Taylortown, in the mountain district of New
Jersey, utilising a school house as a temple of
worship. The latter field was lean and difficult but he was none the less
faithful, his experiences forming a rich treasure in memory. In his senior year
he served the church at Green Village, N.J., very near Madison. This was
jocularly spoken of by the students as the “ Fifth Avenue of Drew Seminary
appointments.”
Happily for the young preacher, he was as ready to
hear and learn as to speak in public or teach others. Self criticism saved him
from donning that militant halo, which a much flattered seminarian consciously
or unconsciously often wears, very much as a proud Indian chief puts on a war
bonnet for the fight. He was saved also from that frame of mind that so often
turns the missionary freshly arrived on foreign soil into a hurtful prig,
making him among the best hated of the varied characters in a treaty port and
marring alike his reputation and his usefulness. Because the holy man’s welcome
is not as emotionally warm as in the atmosphere, tearful and often femininely
sympathetic, of the farewell meeting at home, the young apostle is apt to show
the temper of a Pharisee, often without knowing it.
As many a discreet wife cools the conceit of a budding
pulpiteer even while, like a good gardener, she wields the pruning hook with
both wisdom and tender sympathy, so at Montville the young pastor had the
inestimable blessing of both a Priscilla and Aquila, in “Father and Mother
Hixon,” who entertained the preachers. By wise hints and the young theologue’s
own frankly sought criticism, they saved him from mistakes and infelicities,
while often pointing out the right line of advance.
“Appie” always came back to the Seminary classes on
Monday morning, with a song in his heart, joyful in the memories and soul
enlargement of the previous day. He loved dearly his work. Besides being gifted
with a fine voice and passionately delighting in music, he was fond of rousing
hymns, especially those with a historic perspective, like that beginning
“Faith of our fathers living still
In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword,”
or “Lord, it belongs not to my care,” “Safely through another
week,” “If through unruffled seas,” “Far down the ages now,” “Oh, where are
kings and empires now,” “The Son of Man goes forth to war,” etc.
Leaving no talent buried, he played the melodeon, led
the singing and served gladly as factotum, inspiring others to diligence also.
He taught and lived the Wesleyan motto (in its revised version), “Sanctification,
justification, and [more than] a penny a week.” As in manifold instances
elsewhere, “a Methodist and a hymn book,” in New Jersey, had soon raised a
church where none was before.
Besides this lively zeal, he made the systematic and
orderly oversight of souls his careful study and looked well to the finances
and discipline. Thus he illustrated handsomely Heaven’s first law. When later,
his chum Wadsworth followed “Appie” at Montville, the newcomer found nothing at
loose ends, but everything in good order and well organised.
The copy of the Holy Scriptures, presented to their pastor by the young people
of Montville, became Appenzeller’s study Bible and constant companion for
years. It was afterwards lost, at Kobe, Japan.
One rich gift of God was notably appreciated. “Appie”
had a keen sense of humour. His love of fun and
rapidity of catching the point of a joke, or discerning the amusing side of
things, made many a burden light by keeping himself and others in good spirits.
He refused to let irritating people or circumstances spoil his temper. He was a
true “son of oil” in keeping things lubricated and running easily without
friction. Indeed he often felt that this capacity for enjoyment, seeing, and
telling about things humourous was one of the many
blessings vouchsafed him by his Heavenly Father. He would have subscribed to
Marion Harland’s recipe—“There is no better combination than a sense of humour and a little religion.” It is certain that this gift
and grace of God enabled him later on to open the hearts of the pagans. The
Koreans love jokes and enjoy fun even at their own expense, if they see that
the foreigner loves them. Many a man in Soul was first attracted to Appenzeller
because of the sunny American’s wit and humour, to
become a true brother and loyal follower of the same Lord. The wayfaring man
might come to scoff, but he often remained to pray. Long before being able to
preach in Korean, A. was able to tell stories, quote proverbs and cause stolid
faces to blossom with smiles.
“Appie,” on leaving his native Keystone State for the
classic region of mosquitoes, certainly felt the comical side of his
experiences with the tiny pests as producers of insomnia, even while he planned
to circumvent them.
New Jersey’s fame as a breeder and nourisher of these
musical insects, was formerly greater than at present, probably because the
culex were not then suspected of being angels of pestilence. Often questions of
the ethical ends in creation, the moral uses of dark things, etc., were
debated, but no theologian, amateur, or professional was able to solve the
problem, “Why was the mosquito created?”
When a “man of science” in 1873, suggested the
existence of the mosquito as Nature’s warning against malaria and her notice to
man either to quit or to drain the swamps, one English editor (in Japan) made
merry at such “delicious teleology.” They continued to be looked upon in the
light of being only as the harmless jokers of creation, with activities that
were only inconvenient.
Since their reputation as common carriers of disease
has been established, their ultimate doom of extinction in civilised countries is perhaps sealed. In Korea “land of malaria and mosquitoes,” it was
the nightly duty of A. in summer, as a thoughtful father, aided by the mother,
not only to protect both children and parents with netting, but to gather out
from the inside the younger and tinier pests that entered through the meshes.
The industry and irritating powers of these creatures,
whose musical activities, with “horns of elfland faintly blowing,” were especially maddening in late September and early
October, or until the energies of Jack Frost were fully exerted, made many a
student “flunk” when most anxious to win success.
On one occasion “Appie” felt profoundly the need of
absolute rest, in order to be fully prepared and in the highest efficiency for
a special service. He was to face his class and professors next day, as critics
of his “trial sermon.” He believed in the physical as well as the spiritual
preparation of the preacher. “Appie,” as yet unarmed by bars and gauze against
the foe, begged of his chum Wadsworth, the loan of his protective netting. The
latter cheerfully found such immunity as was possible under the sheets, while
the “triumphant Pennsylvanian” garnered strength for the next day’s ordeal. His
discourse was from the text, “There is no other name given under Heaven whereby
we must be saved, than the name of Jesus Christ.” It was well written and
finely delivered.
How he came to be a missionary is a clear story of
gradual conviction, of yielding to duty’s call and of full consecration to it.
On February 19, 1881, when a Junior in College, at the age of twenty- three, he
heard a sermon on missions and contributed $2.50, wishing that he could give
more. Under the date of Sunday February 26, 1881, he wrote in his diary, “The
ambition of my life is to spend it entirely in the service of the Lord.”
As time wore on, this interest in the foreign field
increased and in the Seminary it took definite form. He thought he might be a
missionary in Japan. Two books which he and his chum Wadsworth possessed and
read with interest treated of Japan and Korea. The note of the one was the
strength of solidarity—a nation open to the world united and anchored in the
Mikado and Imperial House; of the other, the hermitage of a nation, resulting
in the weakness of a recluse.
Wadsworth especially was filled with the idea of going
to the Hermit Nation. Commodore Shufeldt, the American sailor-diplomat, with
next to nothing of naval or military aid, had in 1882 utterly eclipsed the
achievements of his predecessor, Matthew Perry of 1853, so far as real
diplomacy was concerned. For all that Perry, with his mighty fleet and costly
armament, obtained from Japan, was the opening of two ports to sailors in
distress. Shufeldt actually secured not only these, but also the opening of
Korea to trade, commerce and residence, thus opening the way for teachers and
missionaries. For this noble work he received neither honour nor recognition at Washington.
When the seminary students dropped in “the big front
room in Mead Hall,” to chat with Wadsworth and Appenzeller, the talk ran
promptly on Korea. At least one man, who already felt that he had a parish in
the Hermit Nation, was full of the theme and enjoyed practising his new knowledge on others, hoping to draw out their interest and even to
provoke them to put questions to him. The results were as varied as they were
curious. Not all the patients exhibited the same symptoms. What was tonic to
one was as an icy febrifuge to another. Some took the new medicine as a
sedative and even a soporific. A few stayed, listened, asked questions, and
chatted by the hour, seeking more light, while deepening their sympathies; but
such stimulus of appetite was not for all. At the mention of Korea, some
retreated, even before their hands had left the doorknob, without entering.
With others, extemporised engagements immediately
followed any mention of such mythical geography. Projectiles, elevators and
escalators must be thought of to get the true idea of accelerated motion at the
name of such an unknown country. In 1882 there was neither stomach for a debate
nor spiritual craving to know the demands of such a field. Shame upon the
Christian church that she lagged so far behind her opportunity! It looked as if
Shufeldt, the naval officer in the van of civilisation, had outstripped in
zeal the professional heralds of the gospel. Nevertheless a few of the Drew
students did actually look up the place on the map. With mild astonishment,
they found that our new treaty Power was not in Africa, or the Mediterranean
Sea, or at the poles. This was at least hopeful. Today the conscience of the
church should awake to the loss of two precious years. “The children of this
world,” etc.
Here, as in a footnote, the writer, then in correspondence
with Japanese in Korea and Peking, would recall as if from oblivion his efforts
which God allowed him to make during the cryptic years, from 1874 to 1882, to
get Congressional committees interested in the matter of opening Korea to American
trade and residence, and by writing letters, and editorials, and furnishing
facts and statistics. This was done more fully when Senator Sargent of
California offered a resolution in the Senate to appoint a commission to
negotiate a treaty with Korea, for which $50,000 were to be appropriated. In
the same year the author began writing for the Independent, The Sunday Magazine
and other periodicals on Korea. For years, he furnished an article for
Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia about the country and people, though often warned
by the editor “not to devote too much space to these picturesque barbarians.”
Meanwhile famine raged in Korea and the fields were white with human skeletons,
parts of which were frequently found in the invoices of ox-bones exported to
Japan. Less gruesome and more hopeful was the item of two Korean girls, in the
American Mission Home at Yokohama, sent from Vladivostok by their Russian
father.
After Wadsworth had decided to go and had actually
offered himself and been accepted for the newly opened field, he was compelled,
because of overwhelming private reasons, to decline. Providence had decided
that he was to stay home. Who then should take his place? Would Appenzeller
turn his gaze from the archipelago to the peninsula?
VII
The Great Decision
ON October 22d, after a prayer meeting, “Appie,” with
unusual seriousness, asked Wadsworth again concerning his chum’s call to the
mission field, for he himself had been thinking strongly of going to Japan,
feeling that God had honoured him by calling him to
this field. Having fully decided this question with God, he at once wrote a
long letter to the lady whom he had chosen as his partner in life, Miss Ella
Dodge, who had come from her native place, Berlin, Rensselaer Co., N. Y., to Lancaster,
in April, 1879.
Those who know of the life and work of the great
merchants of this name in New York City, of William Earl Dodge, the tireless
philanthropist and friend of Verbeck of Japan, need not be told of the great
value to the nation and to Christian America of this family stock. The
Americans named Dodge are almost all the descendants of the Puritan, William
Dodge, who came over from Chester, England, to Salem, Mass., in the fleet, in
1629. Of this stock, Miss Ella Dodge was by no means the least scion. Not only
as a betrothed maiden, ready to follow her lover, as his wife and help-meet to
the ends of the earth, but as a Christian woman, who daily prayed “Thy kingdom
come,” and waited and worked for its coming, she gladly hailed the idea of
leaving home and friends for Christ’s sake to cross the sea. And this, though
as she modestly told the writer, she had “never, except for education, at Albany,
N. Y., been away from the chimney comer, until twenty years old.” Until uniting
with the First Methodist church in Lancaster, she had been reared as a Baptist.
The Inter-Seminary Alliance was called to meet at
Hartford, Conn., in 1883, from October 24th to the 28th. The inspiring speakers
on this occasion were A. F. Behrends, Richard Newton, A. A. Hodge, L. T.
Townsend and A. J. Gordon, .all famous men in their day and representing as
many denominations. Mr. Horace Underwood, prominent and active in the
convention, had been educated in the Seminary of the Reformed Church in
America, which sent Verbeck, Brown, Ballagh, Wyckoff, Stout, Booth, Peeke, Miss
Kidder and others to Japan, but the Reformed Church, already grandly supporting
missions in India, China and Japan, was not able to expand into Korea. So,
under the Presbyterian church North, Underwood went to Korea to become the
pioneer scholar, lexicographer, translator, veteran missionary and the
unswerving friend and comrade of Appenzeller, the two men ever seeing eye to
eye. Drew Seminary was represented at Hartford by five men.
To New England “Appie” went, riding on the train with
250 theologues, and at Yale met the Lancaster delegation. Appenzeller was No.
345 in the convention, and he and three other students were entertained at the
home of Mr. and Mrs. R. R. Latimer, who were enthusiastic Methodists. “Appie”
while there, preached in the M. E. church, and carried away happy memories of
Hartford. He came back more than ever determined, by God’s grace, “to be
Wadsworth’s substitute” and go to Korea.
Shortly afterward, December 31, 1883, he celebrated
with others, the four hundredth anniversary of Luther’s birth and wrote
gratefully of a year of prosperity. Doubtless also he attended the “watch
meeting,” according to Methodist custom, which he later introduced in Korea—the
meetings being alternately at the Underwoods and the Appenzellers. The New Year
was begun by singing the hymn beginning
“Come, let us anew
Our journey pursue,
Roll round with the year.
And never stand still
Till the Master appear.”
“Appie” was a minute man at his Master’s call.
His marriage was set for December 17, 1884, and took
place in Lancaster, in the First Methodist Church. Then followed a visit to the
old homestead in Souderton. It was during Christmas week, in his father’s home,
that the field of Korea was definitely offered him, and its urgency pointed
out. Appenzeller, considering “the call of the church was the call of God”
accepted, though the time for leaving home, for farewells and all preparations
was to be but one month. Yet this was not the disciple going “to bury his
father,” before taking up the cross to follow his Master, whithersoever he
might call. It was rather the relatives and neighbours who conducted the
imaginary funeral. The missionary elect preached in the Souderton Reformed
Church, the historic, blood-bought and martyr-honoured church of his fathers, in which both the names of Gerhart and Appenzeller were
prominent, and into the edifice old friends, farmer folk, villagers and young
people crowded to hear. All admired the handsome and stalwart young minister.
The Reformed Church in the United States had not then awakened so fully as it
has so nobly since, to the Macedonian call, though its splendid station at
Sendai, Japan, was then five years old. Unable to peer into the future, mother,
father, and relatives wondered that a man, with such brilliant talents and
flattering prospects at home, should go out among barbarians, to “bury
himself.” Family pride was strong. Though the mother spoke little English, the
eyes of love betrayed her heart’s exultation.
“Appie’s” chum, there present, could read the mingled
pride and sorrow that overflowed in her heart, voice and eyes. No spoken
compliments could be the fitting equivalent for the motherly delight she felt
in her elect son, the scholar. Nevertheless, neither she, nor her husband, the
stronger character—a fine large man of commanding presence and superb physical
frame—almost the exact counterpart of his contemporary, Emil Frey, President of
the Swiss Confederation—could see any beauty to be desired in Korea. Having
full confidence in his son, the elder Appenzeller, frankly grieving at his
decision to work in the foreign field, became later reconciled to the idea,
though there were some that thought “Appie” was throwing himself away. What lay
with heavy weight on the home-keeping mother’s heart was her fear that Henry
would be drowned. For years, even to her death, this fear haunted her and she
saw often in vision what, after her own decease, actually occurred.
Perhaps the Souderton folk were no different from
myriads of others. Nevertheless the abounding prosperity of the Pennsylvania
Germans has not always ministered to their spirituality. Indeed too many of
them have made the great material blessings granted them a hindrance to the
education and intellectual advancement of their own children. Their ancestors,
arriving poor and wretched, fleeing from the horrors of the Thirty Years War
and desolation for bigotry’s sake, of the Palatinate, by the minions of Louis
XIV, were, when first in America, as “a Syrian ready to perish.” In William
Penn’s “Holy Experiment” and the good land of promise, these people have made
Lancaster county lead all others in the United States in agricultural wealth.
Yet in Pennsylvania, no more than on Manhattan, does prosperity necessarily
beget grace.
When the time came for leaving Drew Seminary for
Korea, Appenzeller’s teachers and his fellow students held an unusually
impressive service, on January 14, 1885, with an address by Mr. J. H. Knowles
of Madison. Nearly the whole household of the seminary accompanied their
comrade to the railway station, the students singing as they marched. As the
train waited, the hymns “Blest be the tie that binds” and “Shall we gather at
the river?” rolled out from the throats of young men, who felt that “ Appie”
was to be their representative as Christ’s envoy in the new land afar. Nothing
but death can erase the picture of that day of crisis and joy.
Already on the night of December 4, 1884, while in New
York, Bishop Fowler was ordaining Dr. Scranton, the Korean capital was being
made the scene of riot, incendiarism and battle, with the slaughter of armed
men and the massacre of peaceful Japanese, whose bodies were left unburied to
be devoured by the dogs.
The train sped across the country and on February 2nd,
in San Francisco, Henry G. Appenzeller was ordained by Bishop Fowler, an elder
in the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church to go to a country of alarms
and a city still hot with the ashes of war-fires. The new missionary wished to
join the Philadelphia Conference, but by mistake the official report of the
ordination was sent to the Newark Conference, to which thereafter, until March,
1886, he was nominally attached.
All was now ready for the “voyage out into the
mysteries of God’s yet unmanifested purposes.”
The cable that ever held A.’s ship of faith from
drifting, making it ride serenely in all storms, was woven of three mighty
strands of promise. They were these:
“Prove me now, herewith, saith Jehovah of hosts, if I
will not open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing, that there
shall not be room enough to receive it.”
And this from the Christ: “Ye are my friends.”
And this from the apostle to the nations: “We are
co-workers with God.”
So, waxing stronger with every exercise of faith,
Appenzeller joined that noble band, “the remnant,” or the “elect,” who believe
that “one with God is a majority” and that “the Creator of the ends of the
earth” makes no mistakes, never gives vain promises and “never takes too big a
contract” to bless, “Being fully assured that what He had promised He was able
also to perform.” To A., God not only was, but is. He went ahead in the radiant
joy of faith. Not with any the less reverence for the original apostles, but
with a trust in Omnipotence equal to theirs, he set his hand to the plough and
his face to the work. In his view, no age or time or place can weaken these
promises of God. The apostles of one century, and all of them, even the latest,
“can do all things through Christ.”
VIII
Voyages and First Impressions
ON board the Pacific Mail steamship Arabic, February
1, 1885, the three pioneers, two of them with their wives, Dr. W. B. Scranton
and H. G. Appenzeller, began their voyage to Korea. Nineteen years later, in
1904, Dr. Scranton wrote his impressions of his colleague, as he looked in
1885.
“He (Appenzeller) was a striking man, who would
attract attention in any company. Well formed, he carried his head high and
thrown back, making every inch of his goodly stature tell. He weighed from 180
to 200 pounds, I should think. He was well rounded out, even in his face, his
hair was curly and abundant and withal he had a ruddy countenance which showed
him to be a man in perfect health. His face was smiling, his laugh hearty and
his greeting always cordial and magnetic.”
“He was our superintendent and leader. On a Sunday,
February 15th, out on the Pacific Ocean “when the sea was unusually boisterous,
he preached so our little company... His text was of that satisfying and
positive character, which he ever those and which every minister would do well
to imitate—a positive and comforting promise or rock-founded principle of holy
faith. This day he led us out from the Word, from Exodus 17:6. “Behold I will
stand before thee upon the rock in Horeb; and thou shalt smite the rock and
there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink.”
After a prolonged and tempestuous voyage, on the
evening of February 27th, too late to get into the harbour,
the Arabic arrived in Japanese waters. Then Appenzeller, says a
fellow-passenger, “invited us all into his stateroom before we landed and there
led us in thanksgiving to God for our safe journey and in petition for guidance
and future direction.” The next morning, after twenty-four days of the vista of
blue water, husband and wife caught sight of Japan’s snowy pinnacle, Fuji Yama.
On their first view of the real native of Nippon, on
February 27th, in contrast to the elegantly dressed gentlemen, subjects of the
Mikado, whom he had met in America, A. could hardly believe his senses. Were
these hard working creatures, nude as to legs and arms and with bare heads, of
the same nationality? They toiled gaily, “with the snow pelting down on them,
while the steamer passengers in their winter wraps nearly froze.” Verily the
Japanese peasant, like the Korean, is hardy and healthy. The “simple life’’
does not need the drugs and luxuries of civilisation.
Met by Mr. (now Bishop) Harris and Mr. D. S. Spencer,
A.’s fellow-student at Drew, they were sculled ashore in a sampan and rested
their sea- weary feet of the often-shaken soil of Everlasting, Great Japan. One
week was spent as the guests of the Spencers and
another at the Davidson’s and a trip was made to Tokyo.
The American away from home found this a land of
fascinating contrast. In a word, the country was like all others inhabited by
human beings, themselves composite and uncertain. The viewpoint, rather than
the geography, or the ethnic stock, furnished the novelty. Here was the old and
the new. The horrible and disgusting lay cheek by jowl with the delightful and
lovely. Like the oriental stranger, Korean or Nipponese, in great New York, or
London, the alien visitor, sees, smells, hears, and remembers longest, among
his first impressions, that which the patriotic native would fain conceal from
view.
From Yokohama to Nagasaki, the voyage was quickly
made. Despite the dreariness of winter, the Inland Sea lacked few of its
beauties. They were met on shipboard and welcomed in their homes by Messrs.
Long and Kitchen, Methodist missionaries on the ground.
The winsome humanity of this “Paradise of children”
appealed powerfully to A., as he saw “the streets of the city full of boys and
girls playing therein.” Writing home about this time to bereaved parents, he
draws for them, in a beautiful passage, a lesson of comfort, blending the scene
in Japan with the tender utterance of the prophet (Zechariah viii 5). “You have
a city,” he wrote, and “your children are playing therein.”
Not then were the days of Japan’s public hygiene, now
so famous, nor were the people particular as to the chemical composition, or
the interior population of the water they drank. This being ever his chief
beverage, the Pennsylvanian was somewhat intense on the subject of quality,
while abhorring the idea of a census revealable by the microscope. He longed
for a drink from the old home spring, in Montgomery County, to him, “the best
in the world”—of course.
There was no pulpit open to him in Nagasaki and his
silver must for the nonce become golden. “L have had hard times in preaching,”
he wrote, “but it is harder to have one’s lips sealed.” Patience and grace are
prime requisites for a missionary here in the East. He heard tough stories of
the lives of foreigners in the seaports—the menageries of civilisation—but
nevertheless he believed in Christianity and the republic. “We must blush for
what bad Americans do,” he wrote, “but never for being Americans.”
After a day or two in Nagasaki, and at the first
opportunity, which occurred on March 31st, on one of the little steamers of the
Mitsu Bishi, or Three Diamonds Line, the Appenzellers
again set their faces westward for Korea. Among their fellow passengers were
Messrs. Underwood, Scudder and Taylor, Herr, von Mollendorf,
adviser to the king of Korea and members of the Korean embassy, which had been
sent from Seul to make apology, in Tokyo, for the murderous riots of the
previous December. At the dinner table, one famous dignitary, expansive and
affluent in big
black hat and white garb, sat opposite to Appenzeller.
As if to improve an opportunity of a bill of fare not too often seen in his own
land, the Korean partook generously of everything, in course, “from ox-tail
soup to toothpicks.” In less than an hour afterwards, there were sounds of
grief de profundis. All other refreshments
during the remainder of the voyage were taken by the dignitary in his
stateroom.
Eager to enjoy the impressions he should receive at
landfall, Appenzeller was on deck early on the morning of April 2d, when near
Fusan, to catch glimpses of the coast. The game, however, seemed to suggest
hide and seek, or April fool’s day. Here and there, mud-coloured houses emerged into view suggesting to him the beehives on his father’s farm,
rather than dwellings. The thatched roofs were netted with rice straw rope to
hold them down. Occasionally what seemed to be a bed of overgrown mushrooms
rose into view, but the Pennsylvanian found it hard to discover villages that
answered to his ideas. Was it for protective mimicry that human habitations
were made to look like the soil? For centuries, the policy, excogitated in
Soul, and rapidly enforced along the coasts, was to desolate the shores of
Korea, making the land to appear as forbidding as possible to outsiders. From a
ship’s deck off the east coast, everything looks shaggy and unkempt, bare,
wrinkled, and scraped, even to poverty itself. The western side offers some
improvement, but the danger of shipwreck is increased by the numerous islands.
Not until the interior is well entered and the “fat valleys” become visible
does one see much beauty in the Korean landscape.
Yet even in the town of Fusan, the tenderfoot American
with modest expectations was not disappointed. He found the public roads to be
paths only wide enough for two persons. Numbers of robust men loafed around,
doing nothing, while the women, with faces apparently stamped with the national
policy of repulsiveness, seemed to do all the work, especially in washing for
their lazy lords. They turned away their unlovely visages, as the foreigner
approached. The best answer of what Confucianism has done for Korea is the
Korean woman’s face. Sodden, sullen, forbidding, it tells a story of cruelty and
woe. Ages of oppression are stamped on it.
There were signs of poverty and misery everywhere. “In times of famine, single men, not having wives to support them, perish in
great numbers” he heard and wrote. There were not wives enough to go round in
the land where the girl babies hardly have a chance to live. Only the male
children are carefully nursed in a deadly sickness, and the first census taken
by the Japanese in 1910 shows a shortage of women.
At 3 p.m., having had enough for one day of the newly
seen land of his hopes, A. got into a sampan—a wooden, nailless boat almost innocent of iron, its name meaning literally “three boards”— to be
sculled back to the ship. At the jetty the “heathen,” apparently a hundred of
them, “raged” over getting the job of carrying his little bit of baggage.
Next day, in rainy weather, with plenty of
seasickness on board, the steamer left to round the southern end of the
peninsula. Thence through the foggy, island-studded gulf, on April 5th they
reached Chemulpo, the seaport, about thirty miles
distant from Soul the capital. Like Mary Chilton, on the Plymouth boulder in
1620, Mrs. Appenzeller was the first to step on the Korean rocks. It was Easter
Sunday. “May he who this day burst the bars of the tomb bring light and liberty
to Korea,” was Appenzeller’s prayer. In a Japanese hotel, served with European
food and warmly welcomed and encouraged by the Japanese consul, Mr. Kobayashi,
who at once offered to procure for the American a house, they felt a happiness
unexpected. One “good square meal” was enjoyed on board the U. S. S. S.
Ossipee, their host being Captain McGlenzie.
Nevertheless Korea was not as yet their land of rest.
The volcano crust of war had not yet hardened. The air was full of rumours. Soul, their field, was still turbulent and full of
wounded men. The busiest man in the realm, Dr. Horace N. Allen, the missionary
physician, was mending the bones and healing the bullet-pierced tissues of the
men of three nations. To take civilised women there,
under such circumstances, was out of the question. It seemed not wise to be in
haste. Their strength lay rather in waiting. After a council, the resolve was
made to return to Japan. On April 10, 1885, Appenzeller thanked Kobayashi for
his kindness, and in a letter to America on the 18th, he states that he
expected that his home would probably be in Japan for a year, adding that “The
physician must precede the evangelist missionary in Korea.” During his second
stay at Nagaski he made a trip in a jinrikisha to Kumanoto and through Higo. The swift river, the Kumagawa, had then no associations in his own mind or that
of the companion who was to survive him.
Not long, however, did this eager missionary abide on
the shores of the Mikado’s Empire. The Korean horizon was soon cleared of
clouds, and its stormy mien gave place to rosy quiet. Then the country, once
more worthy of its name, seemed to invite the passionate pilgrims to return to
Morning Calm. Dr. Scranton was in Soul by May 1st, and at medical work, and
Mr. Underwood who had arrived on April 5th, was the first clerical missionary
resident on the soil.
On the 16th of June, with their fellow passengers Dr.
and Mrs. Heron and Dr. Scranton’s mother, wife and baby, and on the same
steamer as before, Mr. and Mrs. Appenzeller left Japan to cross the seas again.
Since the ancient days, when Chinese sea-faring poets first penned stanzas,
these waters are celebrated as stormy. Living up to the ancient reputation, the
waves rose and the ship rocked in a way to create disturbance of both mind and
body. In the over crowded little steamer, the only ones not seasick were
Appenzeller and the Scranton baby.
In place of the seven million dollar harbor works,
which the Japanese are now building at Chemulpo,
which will enable a steamer to land passengers and discharge cargo at the
wharves, there was in 1885 only a vast stretch of mud flats at low tide. It was
odd to see great ocean-going junks squat in the mud and roll, much more than
“half seas” over, and stay in that undignified position until the furious tide
rushed in again. At other times boats, or men who made saddles of their loins,
brought the voyagers from deck to shore. There was no railway yet, or for
fourteen years to come.
At Chemulpo, the
Appenzellers remained until, in July, the mission premises should be ready in
the capital. Meanwhile at the port they abode in the semblance of a house. It
was made of packing boxes from the stores, and thus furnished literature as
well as alleged shelter. Mrs. Missionary could read business addresses,
exhortations to “keep dry,” “use no hooks,” etc., besides various mercantile
monograms and ciphers on her walls. It being the rainy season and the roof
resembling a sieve, it was not to be expected that anything but the bed could
be kept dry. At last they left for Soul, the man on horseback and the lady in a
palanquin borne on men’s shoulders. For the chair-bearers, the way was beguiled
with stories told on the run, by a reciter, who kept his breath, as he enunciated
the old jokes and narratives. Korea is the land of legend and nearly all labour done by men in gangs is social and made cheery with
song or story. Happily they arrived before sunset, after which the gates would
be shut. In the city they found welcome from Dr. Scranton and a temporary home
at the Allen’s. Like the Good Samaritan, who afforded relief to the first case
that presented itself, Dr. Scranton had begun in his own home. The notable
medical career thus initiated, is at this writing, still active.
A site in the western part of the city was selected as
that in which the native houses were to be bought and cleared away, or made
over, and the real estate to be permanently used for the mission, be located.
“We intend to make this end of the city a little bit of America,” A. wrote.
Instead of being obliged to occupy straw huts as they had pictured themselves
doing while in America, they lived in comfortable houses, and only on country
trips suffered inconvenience.
A house in Korea is much stronger and warmer than one
in Japan and more comfortable than one in China, besides lending itself far
more easily to occupation by a normal modem Christian from the West. Especially
is this true, if one appreciates fully the Heavenly Father’s abundant supply of
oxygen and its compound with hydrogen, besides much subsidiary blessings as
space, bath-tubs, fire places and “comforts.” The average native of “the three
countries” is hardly more than medieval in his desires for what are deemed
necessities in the West. Even on the subject of cleanliness, standards differ.
“A Chinaman washes his clothes, and a Japanese his person,” but, whether
outwardly or inwardly, in his drygoods or in simple
nature’s covering, the Korean standard comes up to that of the Middle Kingdom
or the Land of the Gods, is still a mooted question. It is significant that, so
far (1912), and after trial, the Baptists have made no impression on Korea. The
ordinary native does not like the smell of soap, or take kindly to either
immersion or bath tubs.
The orthodox measurement of a Korean room is eight
foot square, though eight by twelve is common, so that the first business of a
new tenant infected with western ideas is to remove partitions and knock
several apartments into one. This done, he feels at least more free even than a
dweller in the flats of a New York city sky-scraper; where, if he swing
dumb-bells in his cubicle, a man is apt to skin his knuckles on the steam
radiator warmed from the basement. Many Korean rooms have a larger area, but
the multiple of feet is 4 or 8.
Sufficient area being gained for rugs, rocking chairs,
tables and bookcases in the living room; for bedsteads, bureau, cradle, stools
and lamps in the sleeping chamber; or for range, dish closet, place for pots
and pans, refrigerators, tubs and basins, apparatus for fuel and lighting in
the kitchen, in a word, facilities for storage, illumination, food, sleep, and
existence, according to civilisation, it is possible to eat, sleep and live
comfortably, even in Korea and the rest of the business is easy. The first
comer may, but the old dwellers in the beautiful country and amid the lovable
people do not sympathise with an ex-American envoy in
Soul, who, afterwards, while in Washington, waiting for further appointment—no
European plum being ripe—said: “I should rather go to Siam than be hanged, but
I should rather be hanged than go to Korea again.” Things have been made
different in one man’s lifetime. At the Korea of 1912, the older generation,
who knew its nakedness and poverty, wonders. Above all others the missionaries
were transformers.
IX
Inside a Korean House
A KOREAN domicile is a smoker, built on the same plan
as a human tobacco-burner, with a fire at one end and something else at the
other. In the terminal kitchen, the fuel is placed and kindled twice daily,
making a combination of utilities. The rice is boiled, the extras are cooked
and the heat is utilised all at once. The products of
combustion pass into flues laid in the middle space under the flat stone floor
of the living rooms which are set between the kitchen and all out doors. The
exit for smoke, be it hole, vent or chimney, high or low, is at the farther
side, often quite low, even beneath the ground level. Twice a day, between
sunrise and sunset, a Korean city wears a gray pall of smoke, because of the
making up or replenishing of the kitchen fire, which warms also the house.
Towards night in winter, one on the street may have hard work to keep either
his nose or eyes comfortable in the acrid vapors or to find his way through the
pine wood smoke. In winter the hot floor of the kang is delightfully welcome to
the incomer who is cold, wet, or rheumatic; but in summer one feels like a loaf
set in an oven. In old Korea a night spent in a close room, between fear of the
tigers outside and the heated stones and poisoned air within was usually one of
misery. Between May and October one had an Ephraim-like feeling of being
half-baked. The “sitz-fleish,” as our German friends
say, may be well roasted, while the part furthest from the floor may be in
polar cold. The usual sensation is that of being in an incubator and wanting to
break the shell to get air and life. In time the veteran traveller in Korea learns to sympathise with an egg, but knows
not whether to call himself that, or an oyster, “stewed, fried, roasted or in
the shell.” Nevertheless “while in Rome, one must do as the Romans do” and so,
for economy and the peace and satisfaction of native patients, even modem
hospitals in Korea are built with a kang, or heated cement floor, for old
people who are afraid to lie on the raised bedsteads—for fear they may fall
out.
For the building of a house, the ground is first
selected and measured. Holes are then dug at intervals of eight feet apart,
into which pebbles or broken stone are cast. Then lusty laborers seize the
ropes and raise or let fall from pulleys, a heavy iron weight working on the
principle of an ore-stamp, or a pile-driver. In the village, the builder may
use a ram of heavy timber to pound the rubble into a hard mass. Water worn
pebbles or blocks of square-faced rock are then laid in the half-filled holes. On
these again the upright beams that support the whole frame are set. The roof
timbers are of heavy squared tree trunks, which make admirable rafters, which
when black with age resemble Flemish oak.
Smaller beams and slabs are duly framed to form the
roof, and on these is laid a heavy mass of earth, into which well baked tiles,
overlapping each other, are set. The total effect from the outside, of the
better sort of Korean roofs is pleasing, and the native craftsmen excel in
geometric combinations and contrasting colours of
plain and encaustic tiles, while their thickness and massiveness, by keeping
out wind and rain, conduce to one’s sense of coziness and comfort. When too old
or in ill repair, the roof can yield misery enough, when the elements are
raging.
Our description has been of the better sort of
dwelling, as occupied by the official or well-to-do classes. The average house
in town and country is in every way humbler and has a thatched roof. In autumn,
Cho-sen is, like Holland, the land of red roofs, but
the color is in patches only, and arises from the red chili peppers laid out on
mats to dry.
To complete the outward shell, stone walls are built
from end to end enclosing the platform, which contains the flues. The solid
level of earth for the floors and the walls of masonry are raised to the height
of from four to eight feet. Usually the masonry is of hard pebbles, and rarely
of dressed stone, but well cemented at the seams with white mortar. The general
effect, when in good repair, is not unpleasing.
By neglect and dilapidation the structure becomes
hideously ugly, unkempt and slatternly looking, much like its greasy inmates,
and often requiring props to keep it from collapse. Such a state of affairs is
smartly utilised by the burglar, who finds in the
loose stones, his opportunity. Instead of descending from the roof, through a
scuttle, climbing a verandah or fire escape, forcing doors or lifting windows
with a “jimmy,” as in western countries, the Korean housebreaker pulls out the
stones in the lower masonry, burrows his way in and up through the flues or
tunnels silently like a mole into the earthern mass,
beneath the sleepers. Then uplifting the flat coverings of the floor and
cutting through its paper carpet, he emerges for mischief.
The house walls are woven rather than constructed,
and in the process the craftsmen stand as before a loom. They fasten strings of
twine, or straw rope from the eaves to the base like a warp. On these again,
they tie lumps of hard earth or bits of stone, thus making a wattle, on which
they plaster a woof of mud, until a sufficient thickness of material between
the timber supports has been secured. Both outer walls and inner partitions are
thus wrought. The windows are wooden frames, covered with translucent paper set
high up and in the cities usually swinging outward under the eaves. In these
modem days, glass panes are common, even in the villages. In the Soul of 1912,
are many fine public buildings, modem dwellings and glass fronted shops, undreamed
of in 1885.
The house being now enclosed, doors that swing on
hinges are added, always with a little hole in the corner for the house dog.
The next and most important function is to provide the floor, which is to be
eaten, slept and lived upon. Flat slabs, usually of limestone two or three
inches thick, are laid over the bed of earth and across the three flues running
the length of the house. Over this surface, the hard, thick, tough Korean paper
is pasted. With daily use of moving feet and frequent scrubbing and wiping,
this paper carpet takes on in time a mahogany hue and the polish of a well-used
saddle, or even becomes as a shining mirror. The mud walls are also limed,
white-washed or covered with paper, usually white. Shelves, railings for
clothes, hat covers, cases for books, personal or household necessities, with,
it may be, a brass bound and mother-of-pearl inlaid cabinet, or chest of
drawers, complete the equipment of an average room in the better class. The
pillow box, the latter often finely carved, decorated, painted or embroidered
at the ends and made hollow to receive toilet articles, is in use in the
cities. In the country a log of wood, or some other material, as hard as
Jacob’s pillow, serves. The beds, in the better class of houses, are put away
in cubby holes and out of sight during the day, for in Korea, one hardly “goes
to” bed. Rather the bed comes to the sleeper. To “take up one’s bed and walk”
is a task easily accomplished. To open a roof and let down a sick man on a bed
would not be difficult. Often silk cushions are in use with the wealthy.
Let not our general description of a house above the
average mislead. Of the 2,742,263 human dwellings, enumerated in the census
taken by the Japanese in 1909, in which live 12,934,282 natives, probably two
millions have rooms eight by eight, thatched roofs and only mud walls and
floors without being papered. It is mud, mud, oiled paper and thatch
everywhere, with smells to correspond. Of Korea’s twelve millions, the only
bed, for probably three-fourths, is the floor with mats in summer and the
warmed kang in winter.
Since Korea is a land so long given over to neglect by
its rulers, in which the relation of governor and governed was like that of
the spider and the flies, the people being considered as so much prey to be
skinned and devoured, rather than to be taught, healed and helped, the
tile-roofed, well-furnished, or spacious house, with tree-planted yard or
flower-garden, is, as the census shows, the exception. The rule and average is
a one-roomed hut, with three articulations of kitchen, bedroom and smoke-vent.
The houses are more or less filthy, with a roof of thatch bound down with rope
to hold it in the wind, the surroundings being usually of the most uninviting,
unhygienic and unsanitary character. Besides a thousand other testimonies,
there is Mr. Robert Moose’s admirable little book on Village Life in Korea.
Christianity makes a mighty inward and a visible outward change in a Korean
villager’s house. Faith even makes flowers grow.
In summer, to hide the nakedness of mud walls and utilise space and sunshine for the growth of melons, or
other succulents, vines are planted and run up over the front and roof, which
in autumn blazes with the bright scarlet red peppers laid out to dry.
The house of a noble or wealthy man, with its numerous
and spacious apartments, attractive wood and lattice work, silken robes and
mattresses, clean papered walls, calligraphic scrolls, screens, brass candle
sticks, many signs of a lover of art and books, and with attractive flower
gardens and grand old trees, is indeed an enjoyable sight. Out of these houses
stride forth men of dignity and manly grace, and women whose toilets compel
admiration because of the evidences of the neatness and taste of ladyhood,
which is recognised anywhere in the world. Alas how
rare is a house that contains a true home, and in the whole realm how
relatively few dwellings that are clean and comfortable! The first reports of
explorers, like Lieutenant Foulke in 1882, tell of the revolting absence of
private conveniences. Yet out of most unpromising and unsavory surroundings may
emerge men in immaculate white or in gaudy silk garments—pink for the engaged
lad, blue for the official and rainbow tints for the little boy, especially at
New Year’s time, and ladies in winter dress of ermine-edged coats, or summer
garb of tasteful colours.
In many a village, one may be charmed at seeing
natural dignity, even amid repelling suqalor, and
faces that are saintly in the glory of pure and revered old age. Yes, this is
as possible as that “the white lotus may rise from the black mire.” For the
most part, however, Korea is a land of rancid poverty and of shockingly poor
people, where the sin of gluttony alternates with hunger, and dirty
slovenliness startlingly contrasts with the white suits of the men and ermine
linings and fringes of the women’s coats that shame pearls and snow flakes. It
is so in the twentieth century, it was frightfully so in 1885, that Korea is a
land of contrasts. The facts, borne witness to by scores of exploring travellers in every province, pioneers who made no record,
but told their experiences, and from half a hundred who put down on paper their
impressions, day by day, make a composite of truth that is unchallengeable.
Many a missionary author starts out, in his preface or introduction, to tell
us that the people and country have been misrepresented—as undoubtedly in some
things they have been and then as eye-witness, pours forth facts that confirm
one in old impressions. The language itself reveals the situation. All this,
since human nature is so varied and composite and divine grace so powerful,
does not contradict the facts of lovableness and the manifold excellencies of
character in the unspoiled Korean. Most old missionaries are enthusiastic over
their converts.
What strikes the newcomer from England, the land of
flower-gardens, or an American fond of trim dooryards, or a Japanese who loves
cherry blossoms, is that the Korean leaves all to nature. Landscape gardening
is virtually unknown. The native takes out in verses, what we require in living
poetry. Feathery bamboo, majestic pines, the soaring wild goose, bathing in
deeps of space and flashing into silver before the full moon, are all, or are
left in literature. ‘‘It never occurred to the Korean that with just a little
coaxing, trees and flowers and sweet touches of nature would come trustingly
down from their retirement in the hills and nestle about the home.” So the
average native misses the joy and delight of nature as a daily guest, who waits
to be wooed. In that field of education, wherein Jesus was master-teacher, his
children from over the sea were to be the exemplars of a new life for Korea.
Erecting first the solid pillars of truth, they added the lily work, “for glory
and for beauty.”
After having been so long fitted to his environment,
as hand to glove, the native, like his ancestors, was so used in habit, which
is second nature, to a Korean domicile, that to get inside a foreigner’s house
was like entering a new world. At once he lost both his wits and his sense of
reality. The new structure was so different in body and soul, equipment and
decoration, shape, size, measurements and piercings for light, air, entrance
and exit, that he was apparently attacked with intellectual vertigo, passing
quickly into muscular spasms. As for the rustic, he was like a bull in a china shop, or a lunatic at large, creating consternation
in his host and more particularly in his hostess, even while in imminent danger
to himself. Only by exercise of great caution could he get through a room
without running against a door, upsetting a chair, or flattening his nose
against a mirror, when he imagined he was looking into another apartment and
attempting to get there. Both his entrance and exploration were trials to the
housekeeper, Mrs. Missionary, however zealously she might coach him.
In training servants to get into harmony with their
new environment, the house-mother must virtually set up a college, or at least
a kindergarten of domestic science. In time, however, even a mere man in Korea
discerns the difference between a door and window, a floor cloth and a napkin,
and the relative honour and dishonour of various utensils. He even appraises critically the quality of scrubbing,
washing and drinking water, with other etceteras of
life too numerous to catalogue here. Nevertheless, at first, cases of native
mothers and sons drinking the starch water, with the indigo bluing and all,
were known. Happily, results were not fatal.
The native women seemed at first sadly defective in
that marvelous intuition, which we ascribe to the daughters of Eve. Except in
matters vitally feminine, they were no more acute than the males, boy or adult,
in learning the fitness of things as established for a thousand years in
Occidental lands. They did not actually sit down on red hot iron, but cases of
rapid rising from the suddenly felt caloric of stove lids, mistaken for seats,
have been known to occur within the foreigner’s new-fangled architecture. These
daughters of the land were especially non-plussed as to altitudes, when, from
one-storied houses in which the floor was the usual sitting place, they first
encountered chairs. Mrs. Missionary hardly knew whether to laugh, to cry, or to
scold, when a bevy of white-clad visitors perched themselves upon the high
backs of the odd things called chairs, with their stocking feet resting on
their seats. In the meeting house, it was of little use to introduce furniture
of the Western fashion. The women would sit on top of the back frames and the
men found the seats too hard. So in the native church edifices the people sit
on the floor— in perfect comfort. Only a straw curtain of matting divides the
sexes.
Nevertheless, responding to patience and kindness, in
time the native amah, or child’s nurse and the kitchen maid, or table servant,
made models of appropriateness, diligence and loyal faithfulness. Upon the mind
of even the lass or a matron from the country, the light dawned and. even the
mystery of chairs, pillows, bedsteads became clear. Natives of the masculine
gender sewed, washed and ironed, but they would not cook. That was woman’s work
and the sexes rarely worked in the same room. A Japanese cook was usually hired
for this special work.
X
New Seed in Old Soil
MRS. MISSIONARY saw many things that escaped a mere
man’s eyes. Many of her letters give piquantly racy accounts of what came under
her notice. The Pennsylvanian himself believed profoundly in the function of a
Christian home in a pagan land. He wrote: “A good wife is the making of a
man.... Since I am married I am much improved.... Missionaries’ wives are
brave, heroic, devoted women. They do much in making good homes for their
husbands. Homes, Christian homes are what are needed out here. They have no homes
as we understand the term. A husband never eats with his wife. None but
immediate friends are allowed to see her. May the good Lord help us to teach
them better things.”
He pitied the sex that was robbed of youth, for Korean
female humanity in pagan days had no girlhood, as we understand it. “Korean
girls live in the air and light until they are eight or nine. Then they are
shut up virtually as prisoners for life. Only the boys are educated.” A. was
asked by a young Korean if he knew the name of his wife before marrying her.
The surprised husband and unceasing lover answered, “Yes, of course.” He then
put the same question to the native. The answer was “No.” In old Korea a female
was only some man’s daughter, wife or mother, without a personality of her own.
Some of the names given to girls were shocking, for they recalled the inmates
of the pigpen, the rat trap or the barnyard. When numerous in a single family,
daughters were simply numbered, not named.
A. had in him a magnificent strain of contempt for
mediocrity, stupidity, or dullness. “Music pours on mortals its beautiful
disdain,” sang Emerson. “Appie’s” life was itself music—a song of praise to
God. In the soul of this eugenic mortal, this trophy of divine grace, with an
elect human ancestry and a still grander heredity from God, there was a superb
disdain for the commonplace, for the fleshly life below par, for needless
failure, for human beings who were not what they ought, but could be. For the
coward who shirked duty, for the lazy who wasted the church’s money for the
mean, the ultra-conceited and the deceitful, his anger was apt to flame forth.
In a word, A. was filled with a noble hatred of wilful waste and needless indolence. His wrath was akin to that of his Master’s, when
things holy were trampled in the mire, or pearls were cast before swine. In
college days, his indignation burst out against stupid blunderers who
squandered their time in brutal horseplay, or at hazing that fitted an Apache kid
better than a Christian heir of all the ages. In Japan he was indignant that
“our noble English language” was taught by the high-salaried, drunken, ignorant
riff-raff. For an able bodied lazy missionary, man or woman, that squandered
the resources of the Mission Board, living chiefly on rockers and cushions,
his contempt was apt to be outspoken. For the filthy, indolent, gluttonous,
beggarly native of Korea, he had no praise; for the lofty-minded, high-nosed,
starched erudite official ignoramus, monster of petty learning, proud of his
rank, and quick to avail himself of the facilities of his office and power to
sponge upon, rob, or oppress the poor, his disgust was profound.
The treatment which Korean women received at the hands
and tongues of men, from king to beggar, roused Appenzeller’s soul to constant
wrath. The hair shirt he wore was to feel the prickly smart of indignation,
while restraining his temptation to physical violence, or hasty methods of
repression or abolition. These interior feelings, shut up in his bones like
volcano fires, may explain why he at times, using his own judgment, boldly
braved alike the bully or the bigot in high office and the angry crowd, or interpreted
his rights as citizen, in the light of American history, rather than according
to the subjective feelings, even of his official fellow-Americans, when they
were moved to abridge his liberty. Sometimes this lack of nerve or wisdom
infected even the United States navy. For either the courage, patriotism, or
the soldierly qualities of a certain captain, who hesitated to send his sailors
or marines to Soul, to protect American life or property, because it was
“endangering the lives of his men,” who could have respect? The attitude of
such a man wearing the uniform of the service, honoured from Decatur to Dewey, was almost as ludicrous as that of a certain fresh
person, of whom Dr. Allen in his “Things Korean” tells, who asked “What is the
United States navy for, except to protect missionaries?”
Nevertheless the whisper, from ages past, “Wise as
serpents harmless as doves” sounded more clearly to Appenzeller, than did the
thunders of a howling mob, the threats of Japanese prigs overstepping their
authority, or the documents that issued from the American legation, when
certain men, in the earlier years, showed with how little wisdom the world is
governed. When the search warrant, bearing the seal of the United States
embassy, authorising the sleuths of the Korean court,
or its apes and travesties, the Japanese spies and mercenaries in Korean pay,
to search his house in order to drag to prison, torture, and death the victims
of personal hate, A. like a good law-abiding American, obeyed to the limit of
the letter. When however, he could save a human life that had sought asylum
under his roof, from the clutch of “the king,” or his minions, or from a
murderer of any sort, he was not slow to do so by giving shelter, or assisting
by food or in flight. For years anything like real government in Korea was a farce.
Despite abominable treatment by individual Japanese of
the Koreans, or the horrible mess which some of the Mikado’s servants made of
their business in the peninsula, one must justify the final action of the Tokyo
government, in 1910, in absorbing the sovereignty of a Court that refused to
reform and of abolishing a nation whose rulers had betrayed it. Nevertheless
some Japanese newspaper correspondents have lied, and do lie freely about
American missionaries, some of their statements suggesting a malice almost
satanic. In one case, near the end of his career, A. was attacked most brutally
and without cause by a Japanese railway labourer, and
lost blood in defending himself. In mildly punishing the aggressor by a
ridiculously short sentence in prison, the Japanese court made as big a farce
of law and justice as one could well imagine.
All this “beautiful disdain” does not however, reveal
fully the reality of the soul of the disciple in Korea, who followed the
example of his Syrian Master. In Jesus, the Holy One, the burning wrath, the
scourge of small cords, the defiance to his enemies to do their worst, even to
the shameful death of the cross, covered only divine pity and love that were
before the foundation of the world. Though rebuking Pilate the hangman,
scorching the hypocrites, shaming the cowardly disciples and bidding the traitor
hasten about his business, Jesus was yet tender to the children and forgiving
to the harlot, the publican, and the fugitive who repented. The tastes of the
Son of Man were one way, but his sympathies in another direction. For their
sakes and salvation, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, touched with healing the
lepers, and for us agonised in prayer for strength to
bear his own cross in our behalf. His disdain was for hypocrisy, spiritual
pride, for foulness and sin, but not for the sinner, nor for humanity. For our
sakes, in him, pity overcame disgust. To redeem us, he crucified his tastes. He
wrought salvation and victory by self-conquest and devotion to his Father’s
will.
According to the measure of the grace given him, the
disciple in Korea, feeling he was not above his Lord, was every day humiliated
by his shortcomings, while gratefully exultant that his Redeemer had called him
to salvation and had laid on him the duty of proclaiming it. So, Appenzeller
conquered his race prejudices, the white man’s instinctive repulsion to a dark
skin, his oft offended senses, his hatred of dirt, foulness, gluttony,
meanness, cruelty and nastiness of all sorts. His loathing was not for the
humanity about him, poor, neglected, errant as it was, but only for the sin
that had caused it. Rather as alert as an expert in gems, he caught sight of
the glittering soul-jewels buried in dirt and rags. No impresario, searching
Europe for grand opera songsters, whose voices might be worth a fortune for a
night or a king’s ransom for a season, was ever more discerning than was this
seeker after souls. To the inquiring penitent or spiritually hungry, to the
trembling soul at the foot of the cross, Appenzeller was all patience and
tenderness, grace and love. Were it the proud Confucian, startled out of his
crusted traditions, to behold in the Man of Sorrows the unique character of
all history, the illiterate beggar, cavernous with hunger, the loathsome leper,
in rags, the victim of royal or official hate, fugitive or in prison, in a
word, were it needy humanity, Appenzeller was a true disciple of Him who,
braving the lifted stones of the self-righteous, said “Neither do I condemn
thee, go and sin no more.” Like the Master who left us the example when, amid
the paid grief makers, he awoke the child to life and then said “Give her to
eat.” Appenzeller blended the most lofty spiritual purposes with the most
urgent dictates of common sense. His was both power and wisdom. It was his self
effacement, his Jesus-like pity, his unquailing patience in labours manifold that constituted the “beautiful disdain” of which we speak. From such a consecrated vessel and
instrument, the Master evoked the sweetest of all harmonies on earth, the
“still, sad music of humanity.”
The Appenzellers were among the first to give the
Koreans an object lesson in a pretty dooryard and to show that grass was in
itself beautiful, even when not mantling a hillock of graves, and that the
living, as well as the dead, had right to enjoy these glories.
Grass is the blessing of the Temperate Zone. Pampas
and prairies are American. In tropics and sub-polar lands, where is your grass?
Either moss or jungle one may indeed see. The lawn, cultivated for its beauty,
may almost be called the invention of English-speaking people. Wordsworth sang
of “the splendour of the grass,” as well as of “the
glory of the flower.”
We have all heard the gardener’s secret of the velvety
charm of the English turf—“Water, mow, and give constant care for three hundred
years.” In sub-tropical countries, the ubiquitous bamboo robes the earth and
makes beauty for the eye; but for sheep’s food it is like the forest of razors
in the Teutonic fairy tale, cutting to pieces the tender tissues. Except as
important for sacrifice, the sheep was unknown to Korea. Alas for the people
and their missionary teachers, in a land where flocks are unheard of! For them
the Bible has many blank pages. The lovely imagery of the ewe and the lamb, the
fold and the shepherd is dim, and too distant to be more than faintly realised. The south-western province, in the Nak Tong
valley, is perhaps richest of all regions in Korea in true specie of graminea, and Quelpart Island is
noted for its lawn grass.
Yet, no Lancaster county Pennsylvanian, with any self
respect, could live even in 1886, without grass in view, and Mrs. Missionary
determined upon a sodded yard, with flowers that talked of home and recalled
kindred blossoms in memory. So, we have a letter telling how the front yard of
the new home was made green with turf grown from imported seed, while five
flower beds in the form of four triangles, one at each comer of a square, with
a circle in the centre, made a homelike garden. No
fear of Chinese characters disturbed her. Soon each parterre was a blaze of colour. The front of the house was painted dark with
carnation trimmings.
How the sweet odours of
nature now blended mentally with the aroma of poetry and the language of
flowers, the perfume of past events which made the conservatories of memory
blossom again! Sabbath bells chiming, the house of God made beautiful with
greenery and flowers, labours in church and sabbath
school, family worship and grace at meals, faces of friends beloved—some in the
crossing of the host, or gone before, but all in “one family of the living
God”—joy song at piano and organ, the Pennsylvania vistas of rich grain and
cow-dotted fields, the mountain grandeurs of New York and Western
Massachusetts, of Rensselaer County, with the Berkshires in view—a thousand
hallowed memories of the past—rose to the resurrection of joy, when the home
flowers opened their hearts and revealed their glories. “Blessings on Mrs.
Missionary” was what husband, guests, and visitors, neighbours, and natives
said, as they saw “God’s thoughts” thus unfold in petal and corolla, while from
their chalices rose incense and perfume. Old scriptures—the “savor of life unto
life,” the name of the Beloved “as ointment poured forth”—took on fresh
meaning in the Land of Morning Splendour which now
seemed nearer to Heaven than before.
Yet all these children of the earth reached not
equally glory in their development. Some throve finely in their new environment
and held their own. A few even surpassed themselves and their vegetable
ancestors, increasing in size, splendour and quantity
of seed stored up, as it were, thirty, sixty and a hundred fold. Others, the
non-elect, as they struggled up, reminded one rather of the degenerate sevens,
in Pharaoh’s sinister dream of kine and com.
However there were those that believed in graft— of
the right sort. They felt that American fruit from the land of the Newtown
pippin, the Spitzenberg, and the King apple of
Tompkins County, ought to have the same chance in Korea. In the lake region of
New York, Iroquois Indian “crabs” had, despite all opposition or retardation of
sourness, worms, or blight, been transmuted by the faith and patience of
civilized man into luscious miracles. If the wisdom and loving care of American
and Dutch farmers, who began in Utrecht centuries ago, could thus co-work with
the Creator unto triumphs once incredible, why should there not in Korea be
wrought the same wonders?
Forthwith a bundle of apple and pear grafts, with wax
sufficient and directions, came by mail. The result was not only abundance of
delicious fruit in season on the daily table, but to native and alien alike,
the parable in spiritual things was too apparent to be lost by any. For the
exotic flowers and the fruits sent from afar, most of the natives were and are
now, even more thankful. Yet a hundred fold more are thanks to God given for
gospel grafting. By a happy coincidence, Dr. Nevius born in the region of
orchards in the Old Iroquois maize and fruit land, between the “finger lakes,”
Cayuga and Seneca, was made under God the classic wonder-worker both in China
and Korea, in the two distinct fields of pomology and Christian self-support.
To him missionaries and native Christians in Morning Calm Land and in the
Middle Kingdom are equally grateful for double blessings.
XI
The Leadership of a Little Child
SO in the new home of the Pennsylvanians, the cherry
trees, the apples—Northern Spy and Bell Flower—made colour,
perfume, a home feeling and refreshment for the palate. The letters of both
the man in the garden and the helpmeet for him show how grateful to the
Heavenly Father they were for their homelike Eden.
Yet all such food out of the earth and blooms of the
garden paled before the human blossom that opened in the Missionary’s home. To
mated couples all over the world comes this surprise, that so much sweetness
can be contained in so small a bundle. In this case, it was a whole kingdom,
even all Korea, that had her first experience of a white child, a girl, born
within her realm. Being the initial foreign baby of “Caucasian” race and the
first foreign Christian child to open its eyes in Korea, her birth marked an
epoch in Cho-sen’s long annals. The first boy, born
later in a Christian home, was a son of Dr. H. N. Allen.
How potent an evangeliser that Appenzeller infant was, could not be realised at
first, but as the motherly pride, feminine sympathy and curiosity and the
eagerness of the natives of both sexes and all ages opened ways unexpected into
their hearts, the Christian teacher found walls of opposition falling before
him. His house at once became a magnet to many who had resisted all his
approaches. “We must see the baby” was the sufficing excuse of strangers from
near and far. So the happy father gave new glory to God, and took courage. The
deathless parable of Isaiah, in which all the beasts of the forest—pre-ancient
enemies of each other and ever ravening with tooth and claw, sting and venom,
but now lying down in peace together—gained at once a new illumination and
illustration. The promise and prophecy, “A little, child shall lead them,”
vindicated the divine wisdom of the prophet, explained the method of Jesus,
made Christmas in the home to come every day in the year and recalled Tholuck’s favourite text and his
sermon on it, “The Christian life a glorified childhood.”
In a sense, the man of learning and scholarship was
humbled to find what a helpless and unconscious infant could accomplish in
opening with coral fingers of tiny size, gates long barred where he had
thundered in vain. No after anxiety of rearing, education, separation by
oceans, or scourge of solitude could ever dim the bright memory of that first
advent in the home, which reproduced anew both the Eden romance and its
subsequent discipline. A baby in the home makes book-philosophy an humble
subordinate, in comparison to the recreating and transforming experience of
parenthood. In a cradle, made by a Korean carpenter and entrusted to a
faithful Korean woman, this first member, in the fraternity of the second
missionary generation, that soon increased to scores, grew in favor with God
and man, but especially, woman. At times the children in the Appenzeller home
wore the pretty, albeit voluminous dress of the native little folks, which in
the case of the boy was as amazing in variety of color as it was the product of
laborious detail. A silver bell, duly inscribed, told also the sex of the
precious bundle of humanity and clothing, when swathed in full winter costume.
Certainly the Korean dress for little folks is decidedly pretty.
A son and two daughters followed in the Appenzeller
household, making four “hostages to fortune.” As seen in the perspective of
today, the record of achievements in the world’s work, of the missionary
children born in the Japanese empire is a noble one. Both the countries of
their birth and those of their parents confound the notions of the shallow
cynic, that ministers’ children fall below the standard in character and
ability, while grandly confirming the science of eugenics and fulfilling the
divine promises so abundant in the scriptures of the word of God.
What shall we say for the Korean small boy? Girls, we
know, “are the same all over the world.” In equal literalness, may we aver that
all the male youngsters are likewise, or is there greater variety, in their
surplus of animalism and impishness, of hope and of promise, in these budding
cranks and geniuses? Evidently from the letters of A. and the accounts of all
observers, which show marvelous uniformity of agreement, the young Korean
topknot holds under it as much mystery, wantonness, joyful love of mischief,
propensity to tomfoolery and power to plague dogs, cats, sisters and all
animate things, as does the urchin’s noddle elsewhere. Yes, boys are boys,
even in Korea. Yet the Korean native mother wants them, the father is
comfortless if he has none, the schoolmaster tolerates them, and the little
peninsular world, which could not get along without them, manages to thrive
with them. In the system of ancestral worship, they possess a sentimental
value, out of all proportion to service and reality. Yet between natural
inheritance and acquired character, there is a difference of worlds. Divine
grace knows nothing of geography in its limits. No better Christians were ever
made from twice-born lads, than in Korea.
A. noticed that many of the boys bore old traces or
fresh proofs on their back and limbs of parental chastisement, in welts and
scars, sometimes of sheer brutality. The round marks left by the heated iron
coins, placed with the tongs on their limbs, by infuriated fathers, had not
been always by medical advice. Filial piety was branded, rubbed, welted and
beaten into them. Ancestor worship has much of its basis in selfish cruelty.
Some of the pet names given to children by pagan parents were re vol tingly licentious
or obscene. Since Christianity has become the religion of tens of thousands of
Koreans there is a decided uplift in the quality of names bestowed, and while
it does not abolish the rod, its tendency is to do without it, even as love
drives out fear. Yet in the house the boy was apt to be spoiled by indulgence,
for the Korean father must depend on him as the future high priest of the
ancestor-worshipping cult. Not a few Korean boys are insufferable tyrants at
home.
In the streets, the urchins formed a dirty, ragged
bare-headed army. They were into everything and over everything, bawling,
laughing, full of fun and animal spirits, while exceedingly industrious in
activities usually very inconvenient to adults, especially of the feminine
sort.
In Korean Boy Land, on New Year’s Day (February) and
for two weeks, they flew kites and battled in the air, one striving, with
strings treated with glue and pounded glass, to cut the cord of the other. In
March, willow whistles were made and in April, “marbles,” played with small
stones, were the favourite game. Instead of polishing
the inclined cellar doors, of which Pennsylvania knew so well, they wore out
their clothes in the same place by sliding down banks of earth or on sloping
stones. Another season was devoted to swings. On straw rope and wooden seats,
three or four lads, forming a pyramid on each other’s shoulders, enjoyed
themselves in lively vibration. One was reminded of the Korean manner of
carrying eggs— in straw rope-bags resembling sausage links. In old Korea,
“swing day” took on the proportions of a national festival. One famous and
often bloody and fatal form of sport was seen in the stone fights, which were
as vigorously contested and as prolonged as in the old Philadelphia contests,
of the brick-yard regions and with the same weapons. Curiously enough, running,
jumping and ball playing were unknown in old Korea. New systems of indoor
athletics and outdoor contests have been introduced by the missionaries, and
from our marines the Soul boys learned to play foot and base ball.
The untutored sons of the soil, when young, did not
usually understand the difference between the first and second persons in the
study of the foreigner’s property, being very apt to lay their hands on every
desirable thing that was loose. In winter they scuffed along on clumsy wooden
clogs, having two under supports chopped out of the bottom to raise their soles
above the slush and mud. In summer they went barefooted. Their bareness, so far
from being limited to their feet, was spread over a wide area of cuticle. Very
little folks retained only the dress of Eden from early June to late September.
Yet the other side of the picture was gloriously true.
Like boys all over the world, the Korean brats could not be blamed for loving
action, motion and circulation. They followed gladly those who knew how to lead
them. In his heart, the universal boy is a hero-worshipper. He admires a
captain. He likes to be understood and appreciated. He responds to praise and
cheer. “Their heartstrings are too often torn by cruelty,” wrote A. The best of
them needed a firm hand, continuous discipline and a kindly authority too
strong to be safely challenged; but, when underneath outward force, love and
kindness were discernible, the transformation in character was marvelous. No
more wonderful work with boys has been done in any missionary field than in
Korea. Mobs of young rowdies have been transformed into regiments of decent
citizens and hopeful Christian men. The results in Ping Yang, for example,
probably equal in moral output anything attempted elsewhere at any time.
Military discipline, in the invincible army of Oyama, in China and Manchuria,
wrought wonders with the sons of Japanese peasants. Not less striking, if less
martial, have been the results attained in Korea by Christian teachers. Above
all other sorts and conditions of Korean humanity, A. was successful with the
boys, so much so indeed that at times he was embarrassed with riches. Korean
fathers and mothers, in various ranks of society, wanted not only a school
education for their sons, but also personal training, even to physical
correction, in the American’s family. They saw how well A. ruled his own
house. They often besought him to take their own offspring, both the average
and the incorrigibles, to make of them his servants, in order to develop them
into good men. They were mightily impressed with the power of Christian family
education. Some of these boys are now among the strongest pillars of the Church
of Christ in Korea. They were Christ’s “little ones,” and to their friend, they
were as “brethren.”
Yes, Appenzeller loved the Korean children. He thought
they were worth living for, and he proved his own greatness in the hour of
death by being willing to die for one of them. “He might have saved his own
life,” says Dr. H. N. Allen, “had he not gone back to attempt the rescue of a
native girl entrusted to his care for the journey.”
Yet this was nothing wonderful for Appenzeller. It was
just like him, for the secret of that beautiful life of his lay in old St.
John’s words, thus told in divine and childlike simplicity:
“We know that we have passed from death unto life,
because we love the brethren.... Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he
laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the
brethren”—and Appenzeller did.
XII
On Horseback—Old Korean Capitals
TODAY when Cho-sen has
nearly a thousand miles of railway and one can travel in luxury by rail and
steamer from London to Japan in sixteen days, it is easy to go from the Korean
capital to the frontiers, north or east, in a few hours. To the pioneers of
1885, however, it was a problem of many days upon pony back. At the resting
places, one had to make a choice between all outdoors and sleeping on a floor
preempted by armies of parasites, and near a stable noisy all night long with
dogs, donkeys, pigs and poultry. Nor could one tell whether his bedroom had
been occupied the day or week before by a small-pox patient or man with an
infectious disease. Public hygiene, except in its cruellest forms, was unknown.
A Korean inn consists first of a courtyard, into which
all comers, whether with two legs or four, enter. The central or living room is
opposite the gate and flanking it are the quarters of the servants, hostlers
and animals. One is charged only for meals, shelter for man and beast being
given free. It is hard to say when, for the unseasoned traveller,
sleep begins, for all night long the parasites are active with his cuticle,
while in the stable, near by, the four-footed beasts, keep up such a racket by
kicking, pawing, neighing and squealing, with variations of barking, yelping,
growling and crowing, that sound slumber is impossible. A. found that often it
was a woman who “run” the hotel and made the men, including her husband, “stand
round” and obey, bringing a central point of order out of whirlwinds of
confusion. In the stable, the pack and saddle animals are unslung and given
more area for their vicious activities. Yet there is a limit. Korean ponies
however are not allowed to lie down at night. They are hung up so to speak,
being supported from the beams overhead. Ropes, connecting with their belly
bands, so hold them, like a strait-jacket, that their hoofs barely touch the
floor. Thus, firmly saddled from below, the vicious beasts are prevented from demolishing
the woodwork, while attempting to bite or kick their neighbours—a playful game
which they mightily and persistently seek to enjoy.
Towards dawnlight, the
two-legged, feathered murderers of sleep, that might be named “Macbeth,” but
which in Japanese are called “the long singing birds of the night” flap their
wings, elongate their throats and make the rafters, if not the welkin, ring. At
any moment, from two to four a.m., the kitchen maids awake to activity. Fires
are kindled to cook the breakfast—rice for the man and hot bean soup, thickened
with straw, for the donkeys and ponies. Cows and oxen thrive on a steady diet
of millet, mush and straw, but on such food a horse loses flesh and strength.
Appenzeller’s initial purpose was to explore the land
and select strategic points for the preaching of the gospel and the planting of
churches. He started from Soul, April 13, 1887, in company with Mr. Hunt, of
the Customs Service, to go as far as Ping Yang at least. His first business was
to get acquainted with the animal he rode and the mapu,
or man who took care of the creature. In the annals of horsehood,
the small, wiry, patient, vicious, Korean pony has a unique place. Centuries of
cruelty have apparently spoiled any traces of original good character he may
have possessed. Nevertheless the beast yields measurably to kindness. With an
overplus of activity in the morning, he is eager to use his teeth, tail and
hoofs. Then he likes to go faster than his master may desire. In these
strenuous hours, the bells in front of his neck make a merry clangour and his rider or keeper can hardly hold him in.
Late in the day, when wearied, and on a jog trot, the lively jingle of the
morning bells becomes a slow monotone. Hardly so sure footed as ass, or donkey,
he occasionally shies, dumping his rider, or he falls off narrow ledges, pack
and all, but usually comes up smiling and seems hard to kill by any such trifle
as a tumble. At times he seems to gloat over dumping a foreigner, or his ropes
of cash, books and bedding.
The gospel prospector soon discovered the
peculiarities of his mount. He noticed especially how much more alert, because
of long experience, even than his alien rider, the animal was in recognising the flag that flies over the hotel gate. At the
sight of this cheering signal for refreshments, visions of beans, hay, fodder
and stable rest flit across his equine imagination and under a spurt he gallops
joyfully up to the gate of the inn. As for the mapu,
or ostler, all of the sense usually accredited to the horse is his and much
also that is distinctly human. He has his own ideas about the proper treatment
of horseflesh. In his eyes the foreigner may be a great man, as his servants,
who usually bully the hotel people, vociferously declare; but the same foreigner
certainly shows himself a stupid fool, if he overworks his beast, or if,
refusing to dismount, he keeps his saddle during a stiff climb, or up a steep
hill, for example. On the other hand, the biped who dismounts and strides up a
heavy grade and is otherwise merciful to his dumb servant, rises in the mapu’s eyes.
Korea being the meeting place of arctic and tropical
currents of air and water, one is not surprised to recognise both in the warm south and the snowy north many varieties and contrasts. The
water buffalo and the creatures associated with hot and moist countries are
numerous in the southern rice lands. In the colder, northern half of the
country, one finds a fauna of striking size, richness of colour and ferocity. There are bear, deer, leopards, wild boar, and smaller animals,
but in Korea the king of beasts is the tiger. This “Mountain Uncle” and “Lord
of the Hills” ever dominates the imagination of the natives by the terror he
inspires. The shadow of his craft and strength lay over the whole native
literature, folklore and daily speech, and his fame was great, even in Japan,
until the foreigner, with his breech-loader, his cyanide poison and his steel
traps invaded the land. Known to enter even walled cities, reputed to have
visited the capital and even to sneak into sentry boxes, to say nothing of his
chronic invasion of villages, he might of old be expected at all times and
places, but his range is now mainly in the north.
This most industrious of man-eaters formerly so
devastated the land that the census of human victims ran into the hundreds
yearly, while the loss to the farmer of his pigs and cattle made a notable item
of national waste and burden-bearing. The trap of heavy logs, seen near most of
the mountain villages, is usually baited with a little pig, and often the
houses are surrounded by palisaded enclosures of sharpened stakes too high for
the animal to climb or overleap. Rudely painted figures of the dreaded beast
are placed in the wayside shrines by the devotees, whose religion is one of
fear. On the battle flags, under which the tiger-hunters with amazing courage
faced the American marines, in 1871, were prominent the images of the rampant,
lightning-grasping, fire-breathing, winged fetich, showing the dominance in
thought and actuality of the creature that stands at the head of the feline
family. Among the upper classes of society and government, the tiger or leopard
skin, as a robe in travelling, or as a rug at home, is a mark of rank and
dignity. Japanese generals, until the Perry era, wore sword scabbards of Korean
tiger skin.
After the tiger comes the leopard that helps finely
the fur market.
Descending to the peaceful levels of life, on which
are found brutes which man has made to serve him, we find here again some
striking oddities. The bull, which in other countries is associated with
fierceness and danger to humanity is, in Korea, the gentlest of creatures, as
it is the strongest of burden bearers, yet the secret of his meekness is an
open one. There is a reason for their being “mountains of unconsciousness.” The
bull-calf is taken early from its mother and reared in the house among the children,
so that the docile creature never suspects its own power. Nevertheless there
are oxen warranted by their keepers “to fight any brute of equal
weight”—although Korea is not yet as civilised as
Spain in this respect, Cows, as in Samson’s day were used for ploughing, as
pack animals and also for traction, but not for the dairy, the use of milk for
human beings being unknown in old Korea. Mrs. Missionary has been known
however, in the presence of the calf, with an hour of heavy labour,
and much persistence, to gain a quart of milk at one endeavour;
but as a rule, the cow of Korea is ages distant in evolution from her
Devonshire or Friesland sister.
Of other draught animals, apart from the human
specimens, the most common of all, is the horse, which in the pure native breed
is but little better than a Shetland pony, or a big mastiff, in size. It is
viciously active and given even at night to the most variegated noises, besides
being astonishingly industrious with its hoofs. Then there are the ass and the
donkey, the latter capable of almost incredible pneumatic and vocal energy.
Compared with his amazing blast of sound, the automobile signal, the fog-horn,
and even the locomotive whistle seem tame. The donkey has never yet had a
suspicion that he is, in classic fable, “a disgrace to creation,” or has he
ever known what a funny animal he is. This is especially so, when after having
finished his hot slush of boiled beans and chopped straw, he extends his upper
lip to secure the last bean left in the comer of the trough. Then he excels
himself in comic attitude and facial expression. He rarely touches cold, but
through long training in hygiene according to Korean ideas, drinks only hot
water.
Among house pets, the dog is the favourite.
Hardly a dwelling, in country or town, is complete without a little square hole
in the lower comer, from which doggy looks out upon the world. Besides his
traditional faithfulness as the friend of man, the Korean dog must ever hold
himself ready to go into the soup pot, to supply his master in time of need. As
in other lands, the pup must try his teeth on things at hand. One native dog,
domesticated in a missionary’s house, was so active in testing ladies’ hats,
books, napkin rings and other novelties, that he was named “Chaucer”—the
phonetic value of the famous poet’s name being thus emphasised.
The Korean cat, though its tail is not abbreviated, as
in Japan, is no household pet. Having never attempted to cultivate sufficiently
the good graces of either the dog or the small boy, and unable to win canine or
human respect, it is tabooed by the children also. By adults, cats are looked
down upon with dread, being classed with snakes and vermin. The greatest thing
for a Korean gentlemen to dread, in visiting a foreigner’s house, is undue
friendliness in Pussy. To have one’s shanks rubbed and purred against is
abomination, but to have Kitty curl up in your lap may cause a fainting fit. So
feels a Korean. Of course rats and mice abound, and, as from the time of the
Philistines and the emerods and Israel’s golden mice,
to the last (new?) theory of bacteria-carriers, they are made to account for
diseases in men.
Possibly one ought to include among household pets
both the sparrows, that make their nests under the populous eaves, and the
snakes that lurk amid the vines and roof tiles. These feed too often on the
sparrows, but these little birds in time of danger call for the noisy magpies,
that peck at the reptile till it beats a retreat. Foreign cats have been
imported and bred to furnish pets for the missionary or foreign children and
also to thin out the rats and mice. The unacclimated and uneducated cat from Europe,
however, that tries to stalk a magpie, with the idea of a dinner in mind, is
usually lured on to disaster by this saucy fighting bird. Prominent in winter
are the magpie’s nests in the bare tree branches. In folklore this bird is
famous.
With all these animals, Appenzeller had become more or
less acquainted in Soul, but his long journey outdoors brought him closer to
them. He rejoiced also in the consciousness that in Korea, Nature is more
kindly in her usual manifestations than in Japan, where the typhoon and the
volcano often, and the earthquake, almost daily, bring terror and destroy life.
One great charm of travelling in Japan and Korea under
patronage more or less official, is the hospitality shown in the villages. At
every entrance, servants of the magistrates meet the new comers, bidding them
enter and escort them through to the farther end, there bowing a polite
farewell.
Having crossed the great Han River, the two horsemen,
Hunt and Appenzeller, entered the Yellow Sea province and through a narrow pass
into a region in which signs of splendour were and
are few enough. It was then called the Robber District. In medieval days
however, this mountainous province was grand with the imposing edifices of
Buddhism, for close at hand was the rich city of Songdo (Sunto)
the capital of old Korai. When the new dynasty, hostile to the faith from
India, was settled in Soul in 1392, the venerable monasteries and temples were
given to the flames. As usual, folklore finds in the peculiar features of
familiar vermin historical survivals. Nearly every great event in national
history may be commemorated in fantastic legend or explained by some oddity in
an insect, reptile or animal of some sort. The yellow variety of creatures that
love to share the bed with its human friends, are found here numerously in the
springtime under the stones.
The story of them, when told afar, is that they weigh
a half pound each. As rumour-mongers and decorators
of news items, with power to propagate, Old Korea excelled even our own
sensational press, incredible though this assertion may seem.
Like giant sentinels, probably fifty feet high,
looking with their stony eyes out of the ages past and looming above the tops
of trees in a dense forest, are two mir-yeks or collossi, one wearing the square and the other the round
hat. The male figure represents Heaven and the female figure the Earth. Both
were chiselled out of the solid rock, centuries ago.
Probably they represented the harmony of Buddhist dogma and Confucian ethics.
In any event, like the great images of Buddha in Japan, they were meant to add
to the attractions of a capital city. Korean Buddhism, then rich and increased
in goods, basked in state favour and could command
the labour of myriads of men. In the villages, the
humbler representations, by means of rudely carved logs or posts, are also
those of the General of Heaven and his wife, the Queen of Hell—an awful
revelation of the position of woman in Korea. Undoubtedly in stone or in wood,
the greater and the lesser idols are analogues in art, however we may explain
them.
Folklore, which is Korea’s most powerful voice, thus
gives the reason of the existence of these images. When Hanyang (Soul) was
rising as a city, the jealousy of Songdo was aroused. The high mountains around
Soul were so vast that they looked like a mighty cat ready to spring upon the
mountains near Songdo, which seemed in lesser height no more than rats. So the
king of Korai ordered these guardians of the city to be cut out of the rocks to
make faces at Soul and forever watch over Songdo—which they still do.
XIII
In the North—Ping Yang, the Boat City
THE squalour of the inns and
the untidiness of the sleeping rooms, reeking with smells and “hardly fit for a
hyena’s den” had the effect of enhancing by contrast the glory of Korea’s
natural scenery. Almost all the pretty places in the landscape and the most
attractive sites, made beautiful by the hands of man, seemed to be for the
dead. Apparently ancestral dust received more attention than living souls and
bodies.
In the fields A. saw women, with babies strapped on
their backs, labouring alongside the men. Usually,
when in the villages, any of them saw the foreigner, they ran as for dear
life—no doubt having heard frightful stories of these foreign ogres, who might
eat them up, pull out the eyes of their babies for medicine, and kidnap them
into slavery beyond sea. At the smaller streams, the natives stripped and in
nudity crossed over, but over the larger rivers, they were ferried in scows too
often overloaded.
At the village fairs A. noticed a row of particularly
ugly women peddling. At once there rose in his heart a swirl of indignation at
such a haggish exhibition. Why should these women be so repulsively ugly, save
for cruelty and oppression? For such beasts of burden, in womanly form, there
was no chance for improvement. They were too much the slaves of the pagan’s
whims to be pretty. The chivalry of this Christian knight rose in rebellion at
the sight of what paganism had produced and he determined to smite hard the
cause—yet by prayer, love and faith. To him the religion of Jesus was a creator
of beauty.
A. saw many things which were then new or mysterious,
but which later familiarity made commonplace. Old Korea had few large cities,
and Songdo was the first one entered on this journey. In the environs he saw
thousands of acres devoted to the culture of ginseng, which is grown under
sheds, a yard or so in height, on platforms of raised earth held in place by
slates. The plant itself looks much like a tomato at the top and exactly like a
carrot at the roots. In the markets, the duly treated glistening white root
sells for its weight in silver, while the dried red variety commands gold,
ounce for ounce. To the constitution of a foreigner, a concoction of the root
seems wholly inert, but the native and the Chinaman, who can easily get it as a
staple at any of their drug shops, see in ginseng a tonic and at times a
cure-all. It certainly raises the temperature of a Korean patient. The word
ginseng means man-form and around its name and shape, remotely like the human
body, legend has had a lively growth. After the roots have been well shrivelled in smoke, many of the contracted roots do look
like dried-up old gentlemen, who have come out of an oven, and whose toes and
fingers have
run to strings. It was once a fad with Americans,
before whose hopeful vision prospective fortunes, to be made in poor Korea and
rich China, danced like a will-of-the-wisp to start ginseng forms. Jack Frost,
however, by his too frequent and unwelcome visits, interfered, reduced the
dream castles to empty air; while Japanese monopolists, who buy up the whole
Korean crop and bum up whatever surplus might lower prices, completed the
disillusion.
It was in the track of the Japanese army to Ping Yang,
in 1592, in 1894, and in 1904, that A. was now following. In the trips
northward, which he made in later years, when he was well versed in the Korean
annals, he was able to read history more clearly from the landmarks, while the
landscape was eloquent to him because of the human story of the past. Yet the
first keen impressions made during this first journey, were never forgotten.
Songdo, the capital of the former dynasty appeals to
the imagination through its ruins,terraces, chiselled stones lying in confusion, and the stone bridge
bearing marks on its railing of the “ blood” of a proud martyr-patriot, who was
slain half a millennium ago, because he refused to do homage to the usurper.
Every fresh rain renews the red stains. Then the people, who dearly love a
myth, point to the “blood” and in wet weather, the veracity of the tradition is
not safely challengeable.
The Songdo people sport huge hats. These are of straw
and conical, with scalloped edges, looking like, a half opened umbrella. To his
amusement, A. found them jealous of the Soul folks and still keeping alive
their prejudices in favour of the old and against the
new dynasty, as vigourously as do some
monarchy-loving Frenchmen cherish the memories of royalty and aristocracy
against the republic and things modern.
Further north, on a promontory above the Imjin River, stands a memorial of the king’s flight from
Soul, in 1592, during the Japanese invasion. The owner of the mansion set it on
fire to guide the royal fugitive northward. Now there is a lovely legend
clinging to it like moss upon a rock, to the effect that long before, a prophet
had kept this wooden building well oiled, in expectation of its being given to
the torch, or “a great disaster would befall the nation.” The conflagration
served its purpose well and the king escaped.
Coming in view of the white walls of Ping Yang, on
April 24th, A.’s first impressions were decidedly favourable. The approach was
through a long avenue of trees, which then skirted the river banks —but which
were all cut down for bivouac fuel, by the Japanese army in 1894. The city,
which did not lie “four square or any other square,” was believed in local
superstition to be boat-shaped. Therefore no one must dig a well within
municipal limits, lest the whole place founder and sink like a body in quicksand.
The notion reminds one of the Dutch land-disease called the val,
or fall. In other parts of Korea—the country which rides upon the back of a
dragon—wells must not be dug lest the dragon’s back be lacerated or he be
irritated and work disaster.
One of the streets first seen, seemed to be lined with
tablets in honour of departed mayors or governors.
As the foreigners advanced, the crowd increased, only to be cuffed, collared,
pushed back, slung around and stoned by the soldiers guarding the two guests.
The etiquette at the gates of the yamen was elaborate and quite appropriate to
the city which boasts a founder, who, as an ancestor, ante-dated Confucius. The
white-robed governor received the visitors with vast ceremony and led them into
his office, where the native notables sat with their boots on, as if much
walking had been done. The same etiquette as to foot-gear prevailed at the
royal palace in Soul, where there were magnificent distances between gateway
and interior.
At the dinner, later on in the Governor’s house, a few
foreign objects were visible and the ticking of an American clock sounded
homelike. A. sat for the first time at a Korean table and did his best to
appear happy and to recognise that his host meant
well in thinking he was. He had by this time, when partaking of the national
dish and attempting to swallow a mouthful of kimché,
or red pepper and cabbage sauce, ceased to wear the appearance of mourning for
his deceased ancestors. At least, his tears were not so visible, despite the
interior heat. This staple Korean dish—sauerkraut, or pepper sauce, tastes
like a volcano in eruption and often causes involuntary weeping, when the
unwary alien takes his first spoonful of the hot stuff. The better sort of Korean
pickle, when flavoured with nuts, spices and various
fruit or vegetable ingredients, according to private receipts, is very
palatable and even delicious to foreigners, excelling even the chutney of
India. The other edibles at the Ping Yang feast were cooler.
Plenty of outsiders dropped in to look on; for
privacy, except in the women’s prison-like apartments, is but little known in
Korea. As in the day of old Japan, no foreigner had any rights of shelter from
prying eyes, which a native of any class, age, or sex was bound to respect. At
the inns, every hole in the paper partitions, whether ancient, ragged, or
round, because of fresh perforation by a moistened finger, had a Paul Pry
behind it. The walls were as full of eyes as the cherubim of Ezekiel. One’s nerves
were a long time in getting used to such a battery of peeping Toms and keyhole
Pollys. So also, even at an official banquet the chance, of seeing an “overseaman” feed, was, too rare and rich not to be improved
by a native.
After the feast had well progressed, three of the
governor’s harem walked in. One girl, rather plump and pretty, about eighteen
years old, smoked a cigar. The magistrate talked of these creatures, his
personal property, much like the proprietor of a stockyard of animals on the
hoof, or as an American farmer would of his horses or dogs. Ping Yang was
notorious, even in pagan Korea, for the large number of this class of women,
including also ge-sang—the word is the same as that
of geisha in Japan. In fact, from other provinces, these victims of lust were
often sent to Ping Yang, sold in childhood for gain, especially when left by
the father’s death as poor orphans, or were thus punished for the sins of their
male parent, when in debt. Yet so long as the Korean woman had no education, no
thoughts of her own and was simply an obeying machine, thought A., such a state
of affairs would continue. Christian education must, sooner or later, kill this
Korean “institution.” .
When the American pioneer inquired about his
unfortunate compatriots on the schooner General Sherman, 1866, which had also
on board the Scottish missionary who had accompanied them with the noble motive
of improving himself in the language, every mouth in Ping Yang became as an
oyster closed. Of course, no one knew anything about the occurrence, or were
able to point out where the affair took place. The true account is given on
page 108 of “The Vanguard.”
All the streams were lined with busy washerwomen. On
the day that the returning embassy from China passed through, the city was
gaily decorated and flags and banners streamed from large poles. In the
telegraph office was a Christian Chinese. A. met also one of his former pupils
from Soul, who wanted his American teacher to begin work at once in Ping Yang.
A. visited the gold and coal “mines.” He found among
grain fields, holes filled with water. The men who owned the land dug out what
they could and sold the mineral and metal to “the king,” who is owner of
everything under ground. In later years Dr. H. N. Allen, our American minister,
secured from the Government a concession of mining land. Many a million’s worth
of ore has been crushed, washed, or caught by mercury in amalgam, or dissolved
in cyanide, and sent, in the form of dust or shining ingots, beyond sea, to
enrich the already rich Americans. Yet we have never heard of the Koreans
getting up riots, because of this wealth “taken out of the country.” The Korean
laborers are declared to be ideal, as they are in Hawaii, and probably will be
so long as they are considered as merely “cheap labor” and are contented with
their low wages. At one place, A. saw the village idiot the sport of the boys,
in another “a Korean Tom Thumb.”
The return homeward was made without striking
incident, though the keen observer was as busy as ever seeing things. The
pastoral simplicity of country life in Korea opened to him a gallery of
biblical illustration, the customs being so “oriental” and characteristic of a
long settled country ruled less by ideas than by custom. Threshing, fanning
wheat for the bam and chaff for the fire, the coming of the bridegroom, and the
hired mourners in the funeral procession, reminded him of many a scripture
passage. At noon he noticed men and women in a comer of the field eating their
lunch, and a bull near by refreshing himself out of a great dish.
On May 16, the travellers were home again. At the Peking pass, some miles from Soul, seven of his Korean
friends met A. and escorted him to his house, where all the pupils of the
school stood in the gateway in a body ready to greet their teacher. They had
already walked out to the Peking pass to meet him, but being too early had
returned. A. was touched by this token of thoughtfulness. The usual question
of the native children, to one returned, was, “Have you had a peaceful
journey?”
After twenty-five days’ absence from home, his little
daughter asked who the stranger was. She had doubts as to the personality of
the sunburned man in a blue flannel shirt, but when he spoke, she knew her
father. Opening his mail he found that orders from New York meant “full steam
on, ahead.” Four thousand dollars had been appropriated in New York for a
school building—“the gift of the American people to Korea,” and the first
edifice of its kind in the kingdom should be a creditable piece of architecture
in foreign style. A. had wanted this honour for the
church and now this hope was to become fruition. He thanked God and took
courage.
XIV
Housekeeping—Fun, Fact, and Fancy
MRS. MISSIONARY found that every rose has its thorn.
When in her spiritual pride, she boasted secretly to herself of the advantage
she had with her glass panes and weighted sashes over the paper-windowed houses
of her neighbours, her conceit was lacerated as on a bramble. With
semi-Pharisaic mind, thinking her lot was not as others, she sat down to sew
and read and, since now there were children, to mend and dam. “Woman’s work,”
etc.
At once, however, the charms of solitude took flight
and pride had a fall. To every passerby, and there were many ever on the
lookout for that “boss novelty,” a foreigner, and especially one in skirts, was
as a rare specimen spitted on a pin in a museum. Was not the curio made to be
examined? Forthwith, wide open eyes were at the pane, adult fans fluttered,
wide hat brims bumped, and children’s noses were flattened on the glass as
they peered in. Even the saucy magpies, fluttering on the sill, could not at
first penetrate the mystery of the new-fangled transparent medium so alluring
to the eye, but not so satisfactory to the beak. Hence the misery to the
feathered Paul Pry was as great as to a gossip without news.
Inquisitiveness centred on
the sewing, reading, furniture, etc., but most acutely on the baby. What Mrs.
Missionary at times felt like doing is not to be publicly stated. It is not for
us to betray confidence. Nevertheless, in this connection, we may state two
facts, viz., that the New Testament word for temperance means control of one’s,
temper. As an item of exact history, negative indeed, but true, Mrs.
Missionary did not dash a pitcher of water, either cold or hot, into the faces
of the peering. Rather was she temperate, and, in true apostolic style, added
to this virtue patience, and even to patience, godliness and to godliness
brotherly kindliness and to brotherly kindness charity. Nevertheless, it was
hard, even in the interest of self-protection, to keep the curtains drawn all
the time. This is her later confession. “We like these people. Some of the
workmen seem like old friends.” Many women visited the house, expressing the
acme of surprise at the mirrors. When the house-father played and sang for the
visitors, all the workmen gathered at the doors and windows to listen and
enjoy.
The shoemaker, however, will not always stick to his
last. One day, a certain John Chinaman was passing by. He had served on board a
man-of-war and knew a little English. In spite of some rough heckling from the
sailors, who, when their leisure was over-abundant made John’s life a burden,
he liked foreigners so much that he w.as willing to take mild risks. He had
hardly, however, fathomed the ways of Korean womankind Edging his way up to
the front, he made a deep bow to the organ, and then, coolly and without
invitation, sat down on Mrs. Missionary’s private rocking-chair—the throne of
the American sovereign of the house. This might have been suffered, in all
Pennsylvania sainthood, by the alien master or mistress, but it was too much
for the intensity of the Korean’s loyalty to him. Hardly had the Confucian
ensconced himself in the rocking-chair, before that defender of propriety, the
grandma, who took care of the baby, rushed into the room. Astounded at such
sacrilege, she pulled up the rockers from behind, dexterously deposited John
Chinaman sprawling on the floor, and then triumphantly bore the sacred
furniture into Mrs. Missionary’s bedroom. To see Great China thus humbled
before little Korea, incarnated in a woman too, made the native spectators guffaw
with delight. Henceforth the amah was a heroine to the whole neighbourhood.
Korean help was good, but at first A. imagined that
most of those who applied for employment were half starved. Certainly the
native stomach was capacious enough to suggest the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky.
The prominence of the word “eat” in the language is the wonder of the student,
for many idioms are founded on it. As the food supply was small, it was
necessary to keep all rations, hot or cold, under lock and key. Nor were things
good to eat the only portable property that must be tied down, enclosed and watched.
Four servants were kept—tell it not in the Gath, among
benighted Americans, who do not read or know the social economics of any
country except their own—lest they expatiate on the “extravagance” of
missionaries. The Japanese cook had been brought from Nagasaki. The second
retainer, who, though forty years old, was classified as “the boy,” was
nevertheless the man of all work. The third in importance was the old lady
“amah,” who cared for the baby. Finally the gate man washed and helped in many
jobs. The hirelings were paid so much per month and they provided their own
food. All four cost less than one first-class city servant in the United
States!
Yet the “boy” had a fall from grace and favour. As jam and youth are usually associated all over
the world in the history of domestic transgression, so the violation of the
proprieties and commandments, by this adult servitor, came through his
coveting American preserves. Detected and dismissed, he begged to be taken
back and was forgiven. His later record was stedfastly honourable. The penitent thereafter was as devoted as
a lover to Mr. and Mrs. Missionary. In chasing away mischievous urchins and
abiding ever faithful, he was a paragon.
He liked to work for the foreigners, because among
them there was less caste and more humanity. He gladly added the honourifics when talking to any of them, even the baby, but
he used a string of exalted words, as long as a rope of cash, when addressing
the proprietor.
To be superintendent and treasurer of the mission—the
latter office being held during fifteen years—house, school, and church
builder, besides requiring much figuring entailed no small degree of detail,
study of economy, and constant toil upon A. Yet a preacher and translator must
be a student also. A.’s daily routine of work was arranged with the idea of
mastering the language and thus gaining as soon as possible the equipment of
the preacher. None knew better than he that “life is short and art is long” and
that speed must wait on thoroughness, especially in gaining the power to
preach and to translate the Bible. He aimed to give five hours a day to the
Korean, but was often interrupted. “You are very busy, but study little,”
complained his native teacher. Yet many a day saw a full tale, both of bricks
and straw. He was in his study at 6 a.m. He gave from 7130 to 8, for
breakfast. Then followed family worship with plenty of singing—the Korean old
woman getting all the books and chairs ready. An hour was taken for exercise.
Then with teacher, pen, and paper, writing, pronouncing and speaking the
vernacular from 9 to 12, these two “companions of the inkstone” were busy till
the bell rang for dinner. Varied work outside the house filled the afternoon
hours. The evening was devoted to reading and the pen. Books were A.’s dear,
silent friends. After his wife and baby, he prized his library, and his lists
of books read by him shows how well he kept abreast of the world’s thought and
progress.
At this point in his life, the thorough and
conscientious labours of college and seminary came
into play and habits of research, as trained under Dr. Crooks, were transformed
into abiding work. It was now power, even more than effort, that he put forth,
as all his fellow-translators gladly witnessed. As I write, a letter from his
old pastor in Lancaster, says, “Popular with students and professors, he was
known to have marvelous ability in the mastery of languages, of which he spoke
a number fluently.’’ Almost all missionaries with a record of disciple-making,
whose work abides and follows on after labours are
past, have been noted linguists or teachers.
A. was a lover of special days and seasons. He admired
that consecration of human time to the Timeless One, which is shown in the organisation of the Church Year. Hence, without regarding
the detail of the Roman ritual, or envying the people of the prayerbook, he
always observed in his household and church the great events narrated in the
gospel story, apostolic record and Christian history, especially those which
set forth the birth, resurrection and the ascension of our Lord, or recalled
the triumphs of the kingdom. Both patriot and Christian, he kept those days
especially set apart for praise and thanksgiving which recall the truth that
the hand of God has been signally manifested in American history. He was always
careful to select the appropriate scripture to be read, hymns to be sung, and
prayers to be offered, so as to make the worship a scheme of unity and harmony.
With the children, A. was a friend, always enjoyed
and ever welcome. On their special days, such as Christmas, Fourth of July,
holiday and picnic time, or when a romp or a merrymaking was in order, he was
with them, a boy again. When the home was made desolate and the new made grave
left a gash, both in the earth and the parent’s heart, A. was the man to help
heal the sorrow and lighten the heavy burdens with true sympathy.
In the pulpit and on formal occasions he was always
dignified as to dress, manner and ritual, making everything as far as he had
anything to do with it, a unity. Propriety was with him the law of all
discourse. The spirit of the old Levitic ordinance
that required the snow-white lamb and the clean heifer to be without spot or
blemish was in him. He would as lief have offered strange fire on God’s altar
as to have wilfully failed in those requirements,
which the Bible and his conscience alike demanded him to fulfil before the face
of Jehovah.
Some wise missionaries, especially while at home on
furlough, are said to keep two sets of photographs, one to show the pragmatic
and propagandist side of their life abroad, and to satisfy inquirers for
knowledge. They keep privately, however, under lock and key, for trusted
friends, only, those pictures which show the servants of the church, when
abroad, at such frivolous occupations as garden parties, picnics or other
rational enjoyment appropriate to human beings. The notion still lingers that
the ideal of a missionary is the man with a tonsure, a celibate, without wife
or child, the hermit of medieval days with cross and beads. Not a few books
written by globe-trotters, Cook’s tourists, and of people that can afford to
print limited and private editions of their travels, to say nothing of those
who supply “features” and correspondence to sensational Sunday newspapers,
decry Protestant comforts and homes, sometimes even traitorously maligning the
very hosts who have entertained them and caricaturing the hospitality received.
The wisdom of experience has proved how beneficial,
as an object lesson, is a Christian home and how great is the necessity of a
missionary’s being neither a recluse, a monk, nor yet a celibate, but a man
among men, a champion of civilisation and a home-maker. The statistics of the
insane, of those who break down, or become hardly more than semi-Christian in
mind, and whose routine of life closely resembles that of their pagan
neighbours, as compared with those who, as a rule, keep alert and influential
to the day of their resignation or death, would show a damaging verdict against
the Roman type of missionary activities and a result grandly in favour of Reformed Christianity, which makes no mistake in
refusing to follow the example of Buddhism, or of' Romanism. In the literature
of mission problems, we need well-written books discussing with scientific
accuracy and judicial poise the two contrasting types of missionary workers.
The rhetoric of hasty judgment and of shallow sentimentalism is worthless.
The Roman Catholic and Greek Church missionary
propaganda disturbs but slightly the paganism of the old nations. It hides but
little leaven in the social mass, because it lays little stress on personal
sin, and puts the emphasis on offenses against the ritual and customs of the
church. It bans all examination or challenge of the traditions taught, and
compels subjective reception of the ready-made doctrine and tenets sent out
from Rome or Moscow. It has spent too much time in definition of dogma and too
little on diffusion of the holy scriptures. Reformed Christianity, on the
contrary, first of all, puts the Word of God into the language of the people
and then insists upon its study by the individual. It rouses the conscience,
provokes thought, challenges hoary iniquity, even though caked into custom,
and, in general, recreates civilisation. We could well imagine all Asia, and
especially China or Korea, but slightly changed, even after centuries of Latin
Christianity. On the contrary, after a few generations of the Reformed faith,
the evangelised nation changes both habits and heart.
The new gospel message revolutionises the home,
recreates the national literature and art, and creates a new nation. There
would have been no new Japan, no recivilised Korea
and no modernised China without the Protestant
missionaries.
A workingman busy on the scaffold cannot see the
structure rise, as does a spectator at a distance. When looked at in
perspective, it is evident that these years of hidden toil, in the crypt of
Korean Christianity, were as important as those of later and grander
manifestation of results. However, as yet, there was no stone-laying, but only
foundation digging. “Gladly will I spend my life in laying the foundation
stones of our beloved church in Korea,” A. wrote. “Don’t look for a building
yet, for you will be disappointed, but pray for it and Methodism will flourish
in the Land of Morning Calm. I will tell you of an ambition that I have It is
to preach Christ all over this Kingdom... My term of enlistment will last at
least until 1910, or twenty-five years, in which time may the Lord help me to
know nothing among these Koreans save Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I believe
the Lord has sent me here to deliver a message—a message of life and I want to
deliver it faithfully... This is our great, our only work—to save souls...
Isn’t it a glorious work?... The Devil is pretty well entrenched behind his
works of ancestral worship, ‘customs,’ licentiousness, etc., but we shall not
fear to attack him, because we know in whose name we work. We know the power of
our glorious gospel.” It came to pass, in God’s providence that Appenzeller
preached the gospel to both the tiger-hunters in the north and the rice-growers
of the south in their own tongue.
The courage of this apostle—the original word means
missionary, and nothing else—was not that of “the blind man [who] does not fear
a snake.” His eyes were open, even if he were working as in a tunnel under the
East River bed. “He seized the triumph from afar.”
He wrote, “It is a trying fact that there is no
foundation [for the Christian religion] in Korea, except the distrust of
Christianity, as represented by Catholicism. We must remove the rubbish of
idolatry, superstition and custom. We must break the fallow ground. We must
plough deep if we wish to see good fruit.”
When the completion of his dwelling altered from a
native’s, was in sight, he wrote acknowledging his own limitations and perils.
“Everything here has been new. We have no landmarks here. I suppose we must
blunder for the benefit of others. I have heard it said, ‘ A man generally
spoils one house before he can build a good one.’ If that is so, I am ready for
the second, as ours is now nearly ready.”
Dr. Scranton thus pictures, in the perspective of an
eyewitness, his colleague. “It was a principle within which actuated him [A.]
never to spare himself nor to refuse work that came to his door. Education next to preaching was the subject dearest to his heart. He could see
nothing less than a university in Pai Chai College, and in every man who came
under his instruction he beheld future counsellors of State, the renovators of
Korea, the forces which were to bring in a Kingdom of Righteousness. He liked
to let the forces loose too, and believed there was a spirit working in them
which would lead them to the truth, and in line with healthy advance, even in
spite of occasional tangents and some courses unforseen.”
Some further details of his life, showing the habits
of a successful missionary and the secret of personal power and the influence
of a Christian home, may here be given as revealing the man.
XV
Prospecting for Gospel Treasure
CHIEF in the Old Korean gallery of female public
characters, which included slave women, fortune tellers, demon-exorcisers and
inn-keepers, stood the ge-sang, that is, the
accomplished person, the singing or dancing girl. The word ge-sang
and the two Chinese characters with which it is written, are the same as for
the geisha of Japan. She fulfils the same functions of amusement and service to
the men, on festal times, and stands in about the same condition of unstable
equilibrium as to moral character. Too often she is the victim, slave, sport,
and spoil of licentious men, or the trafficker in female human flesh. She is
usually more decently clothed, however, than the butterflies of the vaudeville
stage in Western lands. In a word, having no freedom of her own, her career
being determined for her by others, when in girlhood, she is less to be
condemned than the damnable social system and the panderers to it which grind
her into the moral and social waste.
The dances consist rather more of posturing, gesture,
and symbolism, than of rapid or active motion or locomotion. In most of the
official receptions, entertainment by the ge-sang, or
dancing girls, was offered the pioneer missionaries, when itinerant, and
firmly, while politely, declined.
Many journeys on horseback did A. take, in days later
than his Ping Yang trip, for he was a true itinerant missionary explorer,
mapping out the land for Christianity. He lived to preach the good news of God
in every one of the thirteen provinces of Korea and in the tongue of the
people. “Brother Jones,” of whom more than one traveller’s book speaks, who witnesses that Appenzeller “occupies the position of primacy
in the real work of founding the Korean mission,” once rode with him, in August
1889, from Soul across the mountains southwestwardly to Fusan. Now, on the
splendid railway system built on American models, one can make the journey in
eight hours. On horseback, it took the pioneers sixteen days. They had to carry
along besides books, those “provisions to sustain the mind,” as Commodore Perry
recommended to voyagers, cot beds, bedding and changes of clothing, which were
loaded upon a packhorse. They had learned the wisdom of experience in native
inns, and now took sleeping gear that was raised above the floor and the
parasitic population. Passports and a soldier guard of one man facilitated the
journey through a land in which the social levels of the comfort and of taste
were, as compared with the average American’s, as great as the Dutch difference
between dyke top and low tide.
Every touch of home and Christianity was left behind
at the gates of Soul. They rode eastward through Chung-Chong, the granary
province of the kingdom—the Nai-po of Dallet—“the
valleys and plains of which seemed to bend beneath the weight of the enormous
rice crops they carried.” At noon time, chicken and rice, with heartier food
from the tins, made their meal. While they thus refreshed, the crowd gathered
to see the strange animals feed. No “Van Amburgh,” of college days, or
Hagenbach, in a menagerie up to date, ever drew a more eager crowd of gaping
small boys to enjoy the sight of the oddities, than did these two Americans. At
night, in fine weather the turf was preferred as a site for their cot beds and
stars for a canopy, rather than the fetich-hung rafters of an inn, and the
hungry population, hidden in the floor and cracks but ever ready to emerge with
raging appetite.
If the weather drove them into the “mud-walled,
mud-floored, mud-ceiled room of an inn, which was often so scant of space that
Appenzeller, who was a six-footer, could not stand erect inside,” they
submitted to circumstances. “The reek of the mud would fill our nostrils and
keep us from going to sleep, so we would talk together, long into the night, of
America and of our friends, of the great church and our leaders, then of Korea,
always of Korea—the Korea we then saw, non-Christian and apparently hopeless and
locked in the sleep of centuries. Then we would venture to talk of a new Korea,
which we did not see as yet—a Korea possessing that gem of priceless value—the
gospel of Jesus Christ... Those early days... were great days in which to
dream of the coming glory.”
The mountain ranges increased in altitude, one
overtopping the other, as they neared the eastern bounds of the province of
Pure Loyalty. In one village the people were inhospitable—that is, they feared
that these foreigners, because travelling under government auspices, might make
requisition, without settling their bills—according to a playful habit too
common with the native gentry. There were five arguments, however, against
their pushing on to the next village that night. These arguments were, darkness,
the late hour, hunger, weariness and sleepiness. In an empty stall in the
stable and with only a straw curtain between man and horse, they set up their
cot beds and snatched repose.
The city of Wonju, when first seen, appeared like a
gem in the gift-laden hands of a giant. It lay nestling in an amphitheatre, in front of a rock screen of mountains, then
purpling in the late afternoon shadows. A massive gateway guarded the entrance
to the main street, up which two men rode to the Governor’s office. As from
hives of bees, the people swarmed out of their houses. The buzzing, excited
crowd, driven by curiosity to look at the strangers, were held back only by the
guards at the gate. With great courtesy, the magistrate, who in Soul had
learned of the imperial favour so generously shown to
the foreign teachers, gave them welcome and gladly assigned to his guests a
large pavilion.
The first joyful feeling of the Americans was that of
privacy, but, as the minutes trailed after each other, so the favoured friends of the guards, who had kept the crowd
back, surged in. The numbers, counted at intervals, as the hungry men waited,
were three, ten, thirty, a hundred, three hundred, with noise and a confusion
most unmilitary. Eating had to be done before a battalion of eyes. As the hours
passed and the time for sleep drew near, the crowd increased. No such
entertainment as that of seeing how foreigners went to bed had ever been
offered in Wonju and the mob proposed to learn, and be able to tell, how it
was done. For the Americans, solitude suddenly took on all the charms that
sages have seen in her face. Invitations and commands to the guards, and even
an extra police force, despatched by the governor,
and their words, remonstrances, and shouts, were in vain. It became ultimately
necessary for the Governor’s men to collar each spectator and by main force
dump him out of doors.
“The next day was Sunday. There were no native
Christians in Wonju and it was a lovely but very sacred service, which
Appenzeller and I held together,” wrote Jones, who adds. “Koreans are always
gentle, and though, in the intensity of their curiosity, they sometimes forgot
what is due to a stranger, they soon recovered and being past masters in the
art of generous and kindly hospitality, they made full amends for the first
discomfort caused us.”
Interviews with the governor, during which the purpose
of this “apostolic committee” of two was fully explained, paved the way for the
ultimate “messengers of the new life residing permanently among the people.”
Today Chung-Chong is a home of Christians and a centre of evangelistic and educational activity.
In the ups and downs of a traveller’s life in old Korea, A. enjoyed the fun when it was possible to extract any out
of the situation. He might joke about eating millet—the staple diet of the
country folks—but the operation of deglutition was much like earthquakes—too
serious to laugh over while in process. He never got wholly used to it, however
frequent the repetition. One victim declared that the boiled paste had the
taste of so much court plaster, and that it was equally difficult to secure its
descent. A.’s own receipt for successful swallowing was after the Washingtonian
maxim—“In time of peace prepare for war.” It was, to eat a scant dinner,
travel for hours up hill in a cool valley, then mix with boiled potatoes. By
summoning to one’s aid an iron will and letting the imagination play on
distant things congenial, one could force the poultice-like stuff down. In
spite of all aid of the intellect and imagination, however, the American palate
and stomach rebelled.
At times he found that, in the south as well as in the
north, the inn-keeper was a woman—not necessarily a Tartar, but only a Korean.
The whole array of men, other women, children and animals, and even the
inanimate place itself seemed to bow down before her, like the eleven sheaves
in Joseph’s dream, the edge of her voice needing no hone to sharpen it—“the
only edge tool that grows sharper by constant use... ” as wrote the bachelor,
Washington Irving. “She greeted each coming guest,” said A. “as if he were her
brother returned from a long sojourn afar, but her farewell was as to an
ordinary person.”
In the native hotels, apart from the ignorance from
which the guest must suffer as to whether a small-pox patient had slept in the
same room during the single night, or whole week previous, there was vexation
from armies of sleep-destroying biters, stingers, suckers and singers, equipped
with gimlets and tools for puncturing the human skin and for extracting and
drawing human blood. Their ingenuity, which seemed at times almost human and
even diabolic, made one almost prefer Darwin’s doctrine of the struggle for
life and the survival of the fittest, to the theology, or teleology, which
teaches that “whatever is is right.” Even a
twelvemonth after the Chemulpo variety of pulex irritans had feasted upon
and scarred one of her darlings, Mrs. Missionary wrote: “It is literally true
that he still bears the marks of last year’s conflict with fleas, while at Chemulpo.” Other practical studies in the entomology of
imported specimens, occasionally found on the children, need not be detailed.
One thing is certain that without its modern
accompaniments of soap and insect powder, Christianity, even in Korea, is apt
not only to disappoint those who there labour and
wait, suffer and are strong, but may even give rise to such sweeping generalisations as that made by a tourist professor, who
asserted that he saw “thousands of church members, but not one Christian.”
Would that all we hint at were memories and dream stuff, but it is certain that
true Christianity and the filth on which vermin feed have no concord. One or
the other must go.
XVI
The Monopoly of Letters
HUMANITY, in its eternal march and headed by its
dreamers, is ever trying to discover a Utopia, where all perfections are realised and the miseries of life are over. From Plato to
Harrington, from Plockhoy, “father of modern
socialism,” with his seventeenth century colony on Delaware Bay, to the latest
attempts to actualise the same dream in Milwaukee and
Schenectady, the experiment is tried with undying hope. As a rule, the farther
oft in time and geography, for the location of Utopia, the better for the illusion,
even as the pot of gold lies under the rainbow that keeps moving with us. The
medieval Buddhists placed their Pure Land of Bliss in inaccessible Thibet,
while Spaniards chased shadows in the valleys of the unmapped Mississippi and
the Missouri.
In the eighteenth century, deists, sceptics and other
enemies of revelation made of China a weapon of polemics. To beat those who
held to historic Christianity, they pictured the Chinese as a nation of
scholars. Their idea was, to show that the civilisation of Europe was not based
on the Bible. “Behold a nation more learned than ours,” they cried, “in which
Jesus and Isaiah are names unheard of.”
When knowledge of the actual facts revealed the truth
that not ten per cent of the Chinese people can read a book, though a much
larger proportion may know more or less of the characters, this fancy picture
of China faded, and the whole argument thus based fell to pieces like cracked
crockery. Of the issue of the Spaniard’s dreams laid in golden America, with
its fountains of youth, the Seven Cities of Cibola, the Antilles, El Dorado, or
the Gilded Man, etc., we who live on the continent where the census figures and
Geological Reports are regularly printed and Professor Bandelier lives, know
the reality, for our eyes have seen it.
So there have been rocket-like tourists in Soul, who,
leaping to conclusions from seeing thousands of white-robed “literary men” in
the capital, have exploded in the home newspapers showers of panegyric and
clouds of mis-impressions. These, as brilliant and as permanent to their
readers as the air-cascades of fire, or the two-minute dazzle of green stars,
are as deluding as the dust or rocketsticks, do some
harm. In the capital there are indeed thousands, possibly a myriad of “literary
men”—including hangers-on, or “spongers,” but who and what are they? What is a
literary man in Cho-sen?
Until recently, with us, “the scholar in politics” was
supposed to be a rarity. Not till 1857, was there a professorship of American
history in any college in the United States, while even the study of the
general story of the world’s development was hardly a serious part of the
student’s curriculum. Even the idea of a knowledge of history being a necessary
preparation for politics was, to say the least, not a popular notion.
In Korea, however, the routine of studies, learning
and personal culture was vitally associated with government employment. “Party
politics” meant simply partisanship and spoils. Such a thing as literary
culture for its own sake was not wholly absent, but it was very rare. The aim,
from the beginning, was pelf and power. The path of learning was supposed to
carry one far on the high road to fortune and to royal favour.
Hence, while there were private schools, in hundreds
of towns and villages in Korea, there was no such thing as a system of popular
education. Men who failed to pass the examinations or to secure office usually
acted as the teachers. Only a few mats, a bundle of switches, a set of the more
elementary Chinese classics, with inkstones, brushpens,
and coarse paper copy-books were needed for teacher and scholar. The first
thing learned was the sound of the characters, each pupil bawling it out to
himself, while absorbing knowledge, so that a class at work reminded one of
bedlam. One could hear a school long before he came to it. To learn to recognise, pronounce and write the ideographs formed the
first process in education. To construe into sentences and read the text, and
then to translate into Korean was the order of study. Recitation, discussion,
explanation, appreciation of the texts came later. An advanced course meant the
writing of verses, poetry, or rather the metrical models of style. Then
followed the writing of essays, almost wholly literary. Literary ability meant
the elegant use of other men’s thoughts and words of two thousand or more years
ago. A “good” essay was appraised according to the skill of its composer in
making a mosaic of choice passages, or quotable felicities, culled from the
ancient Chinese masters. Anything like originality was scouted as impiety. In a
word, Chinese models were exclusively and slavishly followed.
In our modern days, when literary ventriloquism is
almost a fad, and men born in Christendom try to voice the “Oriental’s”
feelings by writing such books as “Letters from a Chinese Mandarin,” for
example, an expert quickly detects the goat’s hair on the hand of the
supplanter, of the would-be Oriental Esau, who seeks the blessing of success.
The absence of this trick of literary marqueterie or
Chinese mosaic work, to say nothing of the alien cast of thought indicating a
mind not stretched on the Confucian rack, betrays in every case the foreign
writer.
In Korea, a few students after graduation kept up
their own study, advanced further in the Chinese literature and scanned also
the commentaries and general literature. They met also congenial friends in
discussing and writing on themes that showed literary, economic, or political
expansion of ideas and application to contemporary problems. Learned sages or
professors were invited to preside over their deliberations and not a few of
these elderly persons won fame in this way. This custom of assembly, in temples
or places famed for natural scenery, for the purpose of poetry-writing, or
debate on grave themes in ethics and philosophy, is an old one. It was in such
a company, gathered for literary dalliance, during ten days in the winter of
1777, that Christianity, through tracts brought from Peking, was first made
known in Korea and the Roman Catholic Church in the peninsula took its
beginnings.
So far the immaterial side. From the early part of the
fifteenth century, the civil service examinations were established in Korea
and became an “institution” both in the national and provincial capitals. At
stated times, from all over the land, young and old men came up to the capital
to try their fortune. All roads lead to Soul and, in them, the single student,
the couple or the trio, from hamlet or village, or the delegation of a score or
more from the towns, with their attendants, made the roads lively, varying the
monotony of the constant string of bulls, ponies, pedlars and packhorses. They filled the inns on the way and added to the bustle of the
capital. As a rule they formed a hilarious and often boisterous crowd. The
larger companies had banners inscribed with their names or that of the places
whence they came. These, when grouped, or standing alone, above the great
assemblage of thousands, added to the picturesqueness of the scene. Sometimes
royalty opened in person the ceremonies of the Quagga, or public examinations,
which were held in the enclosure back of the palace, the king standing with the
group of official examiners on a platform raised above the crowd and screened
by an awning from the sun’s rays.
The themes were then given out, and, after separating,
the contestants wrote their essays, which, when completed and tied in a certain
way, were thrown into a common receptacle, from which the judges took them, and
after reading, made public their award. The disappointed ones marched home very
much as they had come, but upon the victors, honours,
not always welcome, were showered. They were treated to rough horse-play, which
was meant in compliment. Mounted on a pony, escorted by hilarious friends and
musicians, the baccalaureate made his calls on patrons, relatives and high
officers. For a few hours the candidate floated on a sea of glory. Then
followed the “hazing,” “ragging,” or “initiation” and forms of misery, which
the human animal so delights in inflicting upon his fellows. Daubs of ink on
the candidate’s face were followed by handfuls of rice flour thrown on the
blackamoor. The victim’s purse and patience were alike taxed heavily. At home,
one’s native birthplace was alive with flags and signs of joy and, usually, the honours without the horrors, were showered upon the
candidate who had brought luck and fame to the village.
Despite all that can be said of the Confucian ethics
and ancient stock of ideas, centuries of experience have proved that they are
hardly of the sort necessary to equip a man for social life in the world’s
family, or to organise and carry on a modern state,
or to make what, in decency or accuracy, can be called a home, where both
halves of the race are held in equal honour. The
Civil Service Examinations in Korea, as well as in China, failed to produce men
able to cope with the new problems suddenly thrust upon the nation, while in
typical personal conduct, the strict Confucian was usually a petty tyrant at
home, a bribe-taker and venial pedlar of justice at
the yamen, besides being a terror to the industrious and a devastator of the
savings of the well-to-do. Such an erudite ignoramus, while in office, was
usually the patron of low women for his own lust and sorceresses for his
superstition. In short, he was a pillar in the whole system, of demonology and
injustice, that made either national safety or prosperity impossible. Added to
this, the government officer was apt to carry his assumption of personal
dignity to an extreme of theatrical absurdity, that to a foreigner made opera
bouffe seem tame.
The education which the American pioneers, led by
Appenzeller, incarnated, was antipodal. It might not, in all respects, show at
once any subtle harmony with the Korean temperament, but it began instantly to
supply a crying need and to minister to the mental, social and political
diseases of the nation. It taught the pupil to think. It transferred the
emphasis of training from the memory to the judgment. It transformed sight into
insight. It taught pupils to inquire into causes and master in practice the eternal
law of cause and effect. It put a premium on manliness and chivalry. It did not
encourage the bully to domineer at home over women, children and a few
half-starved servants. It honoured industry and set
value, in both rewards and honours, upon honest toil,
even with the hands. Its inevitable result must be in time to pull down the
entire system of popular demonolatry and to curtail and bring to ridicule the
whole yang-ban principle of privilege, including the slavery of women and the
degrading ancestor worship, as well as that great edifice of corruption and
indirection called the Government, which meant ruling the people without
public law—working them for what it was worth—a one-man system that cursed
twelve millions of people.
Yet the “institution” of Civil Service examinations
fell by its own weight, and long before foreign ideas of education could attack
or undermine it. Corruption, bribery, forgery and favouritism had so weakened it into decay, that it was ready to pass away, as soon as
treaties were made. It was as rotten and moribund as was Japan’s feudalism in
the age of Perry and Harris.
Appenzeller saw the passing away of the system of
Literary Examinations, the change in aristocratic learning and its abolition as
a monopoly and the new spirit of democracy taught in the republic of God
ushered in through the gospel.
It is now time to pass from this view of the Korean
world of letters to see how the missionaries changed monopoly into democracy
and to note how a consecrated servant of Christ mastered the tongue and writing
of the people, before whom he was to spread the feast and to whom he was to
break the bread of life, with voice and pen. In place of young men crammed with
Chinese erudition of ages gone he saw hundreds of teachers equipped for modem
life trained under his own eye in the Hall for the Rearing of Useful Men, while
tens of thousands of alert youth and inquiring adults were informed concerning
the world and humanity and stimulated to take nobler part in the uplift both of
their own people and the race, for whose salvation Jesus gave his life.
The year 1888 was checkered with events odd and
strange. A. started on another of those many tours on horseback, by which in
time he visited every one of the thirteen provinces and scores of the (360)
magistracies. The foundations of the great French Roman Catholic Cathedral in
Seul were laid, and when, in addition to the imposing area, it was known at
Court that this, to be not only the finest, but also the loftiest building in
the capital, would actually overtop and overlook the palace, the alarm and terror
became pitiable. In Asiatic countries, including Japan, in which Chinese ideas
rule, it is considered abominable to have the imperial ruler’s dwelling looked
down upon. The Korean Government had already given notice that no “storied”
dwellings must be erected near the palace in the foreign quarter.
Like grizzly bears on a railway track, scowling and
growling at the coming locomotive, the officials at Court prevailed upon the
King to issue an order to stop all singing in the schools and to recall Messrs.
Appenzeller and Underwood from their travels to the North. Nevertheless the
cathedral was erected and dedicated and the work of civilisation and the
gospel went on. In time, even the church tunes sounded like real music.
Almost as comical as this hysteria concerning
cathedral and itinerants, was the “war” caused by the alleged connection in the
minds of the superstitious of Seul—some 200,000 of them—in 1888, between
photographs and baby’s eyes. It caused the foreigners in the city more anxiety
than either the Chinese or Russian wars, inasmuch as a mob is far worse than an
army. As neither nitrate of silver nor the application of its chemical
properties, as developed by Daguerre or Draper, were then known in Seul, the old
Chinese superstition that “those that look out of the windows,” or the
“pupils,” seen in the brighteyes of babies or
children, must be the “medicine” used to produce photographs, burst into
explosion. So excited did the populace become and so well grounded was the fear
of the violence, of the mob, that had previously fired legation buildings,
murdered scores of Japanese, and left their corpses unburied in the streets
for dogs to devour, that American, British, French, and German marines were
hurried from the war ships at Chemulpo to the
capital. This cooled oft the mischief makers. The sleepless nights and anxious
days of the missionaries ended and the “baby war” passed into history.
XVII
Mastering the Language
THE mind of a people is in its speech. Its literature
is the photograph of its thought and a mirror of its life. The true missionary
quickly perceives that, until he knows the native’s inner thoughts and can
express these and his own, in the language of the land, he is as Samson shorn.
He cannot employ his own God-given powers, but is like one blind and grinding
vainly in the prison house. When able both to think and to talk in the new
vernacular, he realises both deliverance and vision.
The outburst of praise in the psalm “The Lord looseth the prisoner. The Lord openeth the eyes of the
blind’’ has then new meaning to him, for he feels its truth. To be able to
interpret with the people and to the people’s eyes and ears in catching their
sounds, in reading their writing and in correlating their words and action,
makes him a master teacher. If to this, he has had some training in pedagogy,
or is a natural instructor, his usefulness is doubled. Not every scholar can
teach, even though he have as many letters, of degrees awarded, after his name
as a kite-tail has bobs.
What from first to last most troubled the man from the
democratic Occident and the freedom of America was the elaborate and perplexing
system of honourifics. Such a hedge of terminology
revealed at once that principle of subordination which rules society in “the
three countries”—moderate in China, exaggerated in Korea, and carried to the
extreme of absurdity in Japan. Even in the family there is no pure simple word
for brother or sister, but only for older or younger in subordination. Much of
Occidental literature, folklore and romance is unintelligible to a Korean,
because of this apparent absence of social gradations. Instead of being founded
on love and affection, on a basis of equality that may be called horizontal,
the social structure in Chinese Asia is built on perpendicular lines. It is the
structure of government and law, the creature of edicts and regulations, the
crust of custom, rather than a true union of love and mutual affection. There
is no home, as Christendom understands that term. Even the words “brother” and
“sister” have by no means the sanctions, the depth, and the train of
associations that they have in Christendom. What can “mother” mean, when the
head of the house keeps a harem?
It is certain that the chief cause of the large mental
freedom, intellectual fertility and general progress of European races lies in
the fact that early in their history they dropped ancestor worship, leaving
that archaic institution to savages and the semi-civilised.
There is no greater clog to the mental and spiritual advancement of that part
of Asia governed by Chinese ideas, even Japan, than ancestor worship. It
strangles before birth the very idea of home. In practice, it degrades a whole
sex, fetters thought and keeps the eyes of the mind ever set backward instead
of forward.
In Korea, as in Japan, one must have his language not
only correct in the choice of vocabulary, but in the use of terminations, for
these raise in honour or sink to dishonour,
the individual addressed. These verbal branding irons are continually found
necessary. In order to insult a person, to use “low talk,” to deride, it is not
necessary to heave curses or call bad names—though the Korean is amazingly rich
in vile and opprobious terms. All that need be done,
to beat your victim with a club of words, is to depress your terminology to the
level of the ditch. So, also, if one would honour by
his address those who are, or whom he esteems to be above him, if he would pat
on the back, throw bouquets, applaud, encore, bestow wreaths, set crowns and
award gold medals, jewelled decorations or academic
degrees, as it were, he has only to lengthen out his words at their tails. Honour and shame, as verbally bestowed in Korea, are
complimentary or caudal affairs. The same rule of address to the living applies
with greater force to the ancestors of the person addressed, for speech is even
more potent for blessing or cursing, if directed to the dead. This is because
the Korean mind still lingers in the graveyard and the fear of ghosts is the
chronic insanity of eastern Asia.
Of course the common people employ dialect, idiom, and
pronunciation in a style far removed from those made use of by the scholar, or
person of culture. It is often noticed that though American children of
foreign parents born in Asia pick up unconsciously and artlessly speak, without
visible effort, the lingo of the country—sometimes to the envy and despair of
their studious parents, yet they rarely, unless they afterwards become critical
students, master the refined and standard language. Having learned the
colloquial from their illiterate nurses, or servants, they are apt to use, as
adults, the idioms abhorred by polite natives and thus miss the true language
of a gentleman. There are Nehemiahs even in Korea,
who say of some foreigners, “Their children spake half in the speech of Ashdod.” When during his interview with the king, when a
refugee at the Russian Legation, in 1896, the second-born American boy and the
first in the Methodist household in Korea, talked to His Majesty in the artless
prattle picked up from his amah, the real man under the kingly robes was amused
and delighted. No such “low talk” directly addressed before the “dragon
countenance” had ever reached to the Favourite of
Heaven’s royal ears. In the palace, every sentence addressed to royalty had
taken on sky-rocket tendencies, while, grovelling on
the floor, interpreters perspired and trembled with fear. In “Fifteen Years
Among the Topknots,” the witty author gives some amusing instances of her
hoisting or lowering of verbal commodities intended to be polite or otherwise,
in the windmill of Korean speech.
In preaching, and public prayer, however, it became a
serious matter when one attempted to balance himself on the particular rung of
the colloquial ladder, according as he dealt with things earthly or heavenly,
high or low. Angels in vision might lightly ascend or descend, while poor Jacob
lay in fear. It was wonderfully like wrestling with the unknown, thus to win
the secret of power. Even though many a pilgrim, when he greeted the dawn and
came into the light of common day, might limp and halt on his thigh, yet his
was the sensation of victory won. In a foreign land, no grander sense of power
can come to the Christian lover of souls, than when he is able to talk
privately to men to win them to his Saviour, or in
public discourse can present the unsearchable riches of Christ to perishing
men in their mother tongue.
Probably all the pioneer missionaries, set down
suddenly on a pathless jungle of speech, in their first groping and grapple
with the language, cherished lexicographical ambitions. “Oh for a
dictionary!” was their yearning as they began, on note books, the backs of old
letters, on their cuffs, or the most accessible stationery of any sort, on any
level space that was at hand, their word-lists. Often one felt like a Columbus
or an Archimedes, in discovering moods, tenses and idioms. Happily Bishop Ridel,
the French Missionary, had blazed a path through the forest, but each one had,
in large measure, to discover the terms which he or she needed. Much work, that
reminded one of the work of the pumping station, was necessary to secure words
often raised from the depths of agonising experiences. Yet though many word lists were made out, few ever grew into
lexicons, those of Underwood and Gale being the best known.
Unfortunately also, this new land, as yet one of
unknown possibilities in biblical translation, was not an Eden undefiled. The
trail of the Chinese serpent was over all. Strictly speaking, no serious
literature of a distinctly Korean character existed. Everything except
folk-songs and tales and a few romances for women and children, was expressed
in the Chinese character and cast in the mould of
Chinese thought. “Learning,” or “education,” applied to Korean, had no meaning.
The language was in a primitive condition. No great native writers or poets had
made use of their own speech. In the two book-shops known in Soul, only Chinese
books were sold. No printed matter in Korean could be found, for anything in
the native script was beneath the notice of an “educated man”—save the mark!
Such a person, besotted with Chinese learning, was often ignorant of his own
country’s alphabet, or written language.
No where, more than in Korea, is one-half of the world
ignorant of how the other half lives. If one wished to learn what the people
read, he must go into the squatter’s booths, that then littered and narrowed
the main street, or in the shops where the odds and ends of a pedlar’s stock were sold. There, among the miscellaneous
assortment of things found in a “general store,” such as hats, hat covers,
crockery, earthen jars, oiled paper, inkstones, brush-pens, and everyday
articles, one might find the song-books, novelettes, almanacs, and other
evidences of a popular literature. The novels were usually in the form of
yellow, paper- covered books, nine by seven and a half inches in size, with
twenty-four leaves or forty-eight pages stitched together with red thread, the
text being in the pure Korean idiom and in the running script of the Enmun, or native alphabet. In the two samples in my
library, which I am describing, Chinese characters, except those used to number
the page, are absent. No name of author, publisher, or place of publication is
given in these uninviting booklets. Their grayish paper is of the coarsest,
cheapest, and meanest appearance, while holes, blotches, and bits of straw in
the tissue further disfigure them. Notwithstanding the three portly volumes of
Mr. Edward Courant’s Bibliographic Coreenne, which
tell of the literary work of Korean scholars, who employed the Chinese
characters, and even after the toilsome researches of Mr. Aston, Professor
Hulbert Dr. Gale and others, one’s report on the state of the Korean language
and literature, as existing for the people, is not much more encouraging.
In America, the lower Hudson, the original river, has
been drowned out by the incoming ocean. In like manner, the stream of Korean
written speech has been lost in the flood of Chinese. More than once I have
talked with Korean literary men, urging them to cultivate their own mother
tongue and have even tried hard to shame them into following the example of
writers of English. In vain! It was like the “east wind in a donkey’s ears.”
The ear flaps of their mind bent to the storm. They were safely immune, inert
and unashamed, for they considered the subject of cultivating their vernacular
beneath their notice. As if, like delicate flowers that had been planted under
thick trees which shut out life-giving sunlight, the shadow of great China had
been too long over the blossoms of the native imagination. If De Quincey’s
dictum, that next to the flag of his native country, a scholar should be loyal
to his own language, be true, then it seems little wonder that Korean
sovereignty was lost and that Japanese may yet become the official language of
Cho-sen.
Nevertheless, to the rapturous surprise of the
missionaries, there lay, as in a cave, an invaluable treasure awaiting them. No
Ali Baba, with the filched secret of “Open Sesame,” was more thrilled by the
discovery of gold and jewels, than were Underwood and Appenzeller over the
trover of the Enmun alphabet. Centuries before, this
beautiful phonetic system, alphabet and syllabary in one, had been elaborated;
but, as with the Dutch inventions, which Czar Peter the Great brought from
Holland, which lay buried for centuries in the rubbish room of a museum, in the
boxes in which they were first put, so was it with the Enmun.
First “carried to Paradise on the stairways of surprise,” the gospel heralds
descended to employ this script in their familiar epistles, tracts, books, and
finally in it they enshrined the living Word of God. There are many reasons
which furnish the composite answer why Korea, as compared with Japan, for
example, has been so quickly evangelised—unto the
measure of today—but not the least ingredient in the answer is that the gospel
message, the good news of God, came to the Korean common people in the idiom
and writing most familiar. Korean scholars of privilege and condition might
denounce this Enmun as the “dirty writing” because so
easy to learn, but missionaries made this despised earthen vessel the
receptacle of a heavenly treasure.
It is true that both the Enmun and spoken idiom have their limitations and cannot, without some admixture of
Chinese words, be used in works of erudition, or become the vehicle of science
and learning. In this respect, the Korean is no different from our own speech
of centuries ago, or of Japanese today. Even in England, orthography had no
meaning during the age of the manuscript book and even long after the days of
printing; as, witness, in colonial America, it lay in chaos. If Korean spelling
and punctuation were formless and void, until the missionaries came, yet even
after supposed reformation and the making of standards, they had their own
trials. It is no flattery to the foreign scholars to assert that, in the main,
Korea belonged in the circle of countries without its own literature, until the
heralds of the gospel came to create it. Then the translated Bible, besides
quickening the Korean mind and heart, called into life not only an unknown
world of thought, but by setting a new standard of speech and writing induced
the beginnings of a true national literature.
To the mastery and daily use of Korean script
Appenzeller set himself from the first, so that within a year, the use of it
under his pen and its employment as moulds of his
thought were as familiar to him as his own daily speech. He honoured the Enmun.
Steadfastly ever, throughout all details and minutiae
of work, A. pressed forward like an athlete in mastery also, of the spoken
language. He would possess this potency of speech, as the heartopener, for
the individual and assembly; for bringing home to the conscience the message of
the moral law and saving grace; for the burden of the printed page; and,
crowning all, the living word of God in the language of the people. That
enterprise of New Testament translation was like “building a railway through
the national intellect,” or digging a Panama Canal—“linking two great oceans
the ocean of God’s boundless love with the immeasurable expanse of human need.”
What the labour means let one who has tried it tell.
The board of Bible Translators for Korea, formed in 1887, as pictured in Dr.
Underwood’s book, “The Call of Korea,” shows in 1907 three Korean native
scholars, and the Rev. Drs. W. D. Reynolds, H. G. Underwood, J. S. Gale, and
George Heber Jones. A. was then in his Father’s home. The author of “Korea in Transition”
and for years the loving comrade of Appenzeller, modestly and without
exaggeration thus pictures the task:
“What a huge undertaking it is no one knows who has
not tried it. Sixty stories of a life insurance building in New York City is
not as big an undertaking. It takes about ten years to do it. If we think of
all the digging necessary as a foundation on which to work, of every shovelful
of paragraphs, of what each word means, sifted and weighed and valued and
recorded, with malaria and weariness all round about, it reminds one of digging
the Panama Canal.”
To Appenzeller were assigned Matthew, Mark and First
and Second Corinthians. A. saw God in history. He was glad to put Matthew’s
good news of the kingdom and Mark’s, “the earliest gospel” and book of the
wondrous deeds of the Master, into Korean, and then follow with the greatest
pair of “tracts for the times” which the apostle of the Gentiles wrote.
Yet, it whitened his hair to do it. The pioneer
translator has to begin with blasting and excavation, make his own tools and
discover or invent idioms and equivalents. The end crowned the work. On
September 9, 1900, a service of thanksgiving was held in the First Church, in
Soul, for the completion of the New Testament in Korean. While the Boxer riots
were convulsing China and some of the refugees were present, the American
minister, Dr. H. N. Allen, in a fitting address, presented to each of the
translators a specially bound volume. Appenzeller’s copy has in it the
autographs of his fellow workmen in the glorious task.
XVIII
In Time of Pestilence
PLAGUE, pestilence, and famine visited old Korea with
a regularity that suggested the order of the heavenly bodies. The balance
between food and population seemed to be kept up by Nature’s besom of
destruction. Dirt and vermin, more than war, kept down the numbers of her
imaginary “twenty” millions.
When foreigners, accustomed to soap, baths,
ventilation, and the apparatus and habits which had in view clean bodies and
houses, entered the land in 1885, they wondered how any Koreans were left alive
on the earth. In the balance of nature, the parasites, real and imaginary, that
prey on human society, seemed to tip the scale. Everywhere the greedy ghosts
seemed to have all their wants amply provided for, and to monopolise the best land, food, and things beautiful in the landscape, while the living
were deprived of the right allowance of oxygen, water, covering, shelter and
the reservation of cuticle for one’s own private use.
The theory of the alien from Christendom, upon which
he acted, taught him that the human body, like a house, was to be occupied only
by its proper tenant, and that it ought to receive its daily supplies of air,
water, light, space and cleansing material, in order to be kept at the highest effciency. In further development of this theory, so
absurd to the average native, on y those educated persons, trained in a
knowledge of anatomy and the right ways of healing and surgery founded on
ascertained and demonstrated science, should be allowed to tamper with the body
or put human life at risk. In a word, the habits of daily life and its
processes of maintenance and repair must be according to the laws of cause and
effect. Yet these were notions at which the native laughed, unless he were
allowed to divide his faith between the alien and the native practitioner and
to mix his own nostrums with the foreign doctor’s medicine.
Nevertheless the proud intruder (in native terms, the
man from over the sea) in Korea must remember that all these ideas, based on
soap, insect powder and a hygienic conscience, are quite modem, even in Europe
and America. His far-off Celtic or Teutonic ancestors knew them not. Only in
recent time has the profession of a physician been recognised as either scientific or honourable. The trained nurse
is younger than Mrs. Gamp. It took long ages to raise
the healing art above the level of the barber’s and to extricate it from
folklore, tradition, witchcraft, superstition and weird notions. To this day,
the word pharmacist means, literally, a poisoner. Any one who makes research
deeper than after-dinner speeches on Forefathers’
Day, and finds out what Pilgrims and Puritans
believed, apart from orthodoxy, will not mock at the Korean. As for public
hygiene, that is, hygiene made a matter of oversight and enforcement by the
Government—such an idea was unknown even a century ago. The use of charms,
amulets, donkey hoofs, rabbits’ paws, witchlore, fictitious miracles,
processions and parade of saints’ images and of the effigy of the virgin, with
litanies and vows, instead of cleaning, scrubbing, whitewash and fumigation
were the rule, rather than the dictates of reason and science. Holland was one
of the first countries to war on dirt, and from the first, Protestantism meant
more soap.
As to medical science, Old Korea, like Old Japan, was
the land of thick darkness. Pretty much every fool in the land—and there were
plenty of them— played monkey tricks with men’s vitals, for nearly all adults
considered themselves doctors. Knowing nothing about anatomy, they went to
puncturing and scarifying the body with all the valour of ignorance. Rusty needles thrust into the tissues, hot coins laid on the
skin, decoctions and plasters of unmentionable filth, to heal sores, were in
vogue. The causes of disease were not sought in dirt, filthy air, vermin,
gluttony, undrained streets, contaminated water supply, or infected air or
bedding but in spirits, demons, and all the tomfoolery and delirium tremens of
morbid fancy, and, finally, rats. On the vulgar theory of witchcraft or
possession by demons, so grossly held by the Koreans, just as it was by our
own benighted fathers, the lowest class of vile women and meanest of cunning
men were paid to terrify and make a hell on earth of the house of the sick one.
When in 1886 the cholera visited Soul and for six
weeks desolated the crowded city, Appenzeller had before his eyes a true
revelation of paganism in its most brutal forms. Hundreds died daily, but as no
burials were allowed within the city walls, long processions of bearers of the
dead, sometimes fifteen score a day, passed along and out beyond the gates,
which were open night and day. Cholera was called “the rat disease.” The theory
held by the natives was that the rodents entered the body and by running up and
down the legs got into the vitals and caused frightful cramps in the lower part
of the body. Hence, to cure the rat malady, they hung up on doors and walls the
picture of a cat on paper, or, during the cramps, they rubbed the patient’s
abdomen with a cat skin!
Meanwhile tons of green fruits and vegetable stuff
were devoured daily. People took cucumbers and ate them raw, skin, seeds, and
all. A. saw one man devour ten such “cholera pills,” one after the other; this
fellow, like millions of his countrymen, seeing in such gluttony no connection
between cause and effect.
Only the opening of the windows of heaven, flooding
the ditches, flushing out the city and washing away the poison left in the
air, undrained yards and streets, checked the pestilence by September and
before the advent of frost. In the midst of the worst, the heat was almost
prostrating.
This is what A. saw during the continuance of the
pest. On the very first appearance of symptoms of the disease, slave women were
ejected by their masters and poor people put out on the street by their
landlords or families. Usually the slaves were dumped and left to die. In the
case of others, rude straw shacks were run up and the victims left with a
little rice and a jar of water to take their chances. Sixty shacks were counted
just outside the West Gate, and the city wall was lined inside with these yellow
gourds of the night. ‘One or two hundred corpses were borne nightly through one
portal. The sounds of pain and woe, of grief and distraction, sounded like one
prolonged wail and were heard night and day in their own homes by the
foreigners of whom few or none died during the epidemic.
In walking out one day A. found a poor slave girl
alone and in her last agonies. He hired watchers and paid for her burial.
In the second visitation, in 1895, after the war with
China, the Christian missionaries and the Japanese united their energies to
check the plague and save lives. They brought pressure upon the Government in
Soul and secured regulations against “the enormous and insane consumption of
green apples, melons, and cucumbers.” Traffic in these vegetable horrors was
forbidden, penalties were fixed and notices of the prohibition put up in many
places. Ten thousand dollars were appropriated from the Imperial treasury to
erect a temporary emergency hospital—an old barracks being used—and to enforce
the laws, but most of this money was swallowed up in “practical politics.” In
the mirror of history, one may read one of the causes why Japan took over
Korea. It was because of irreformable corruption in the Government. The money
appropriated was in large part “eaten up” by the native grafters. Right under
the notices prohibiting the sale of “cholera pills,” a lively trade in the
green goods went on, even the policemen enjoying the feast of cucumbers and
unripe apples.
Since the Japanese took the country under their
charge, they compel semi-annual house-cleaning. In time of epidemic, with
fumigation, a corps of men armoured in antiseptic
clothing and protected as to the nose and ears, with sprinklers, brooms and
microbe-killers, the cities are made pest-proof. Instead of thousands dying
daily, as in 1887, Soul, in 1909, lost only a few hundreds during the epidemic.
Mrs. Underwood gives a graphic account of the work
done in the rudely equipped hospital of 1895 —only the floor for beds and logs,
or blocks of wood, for pillows. Of 173 patients brought in, many already dying
or in collapse, a third died, but of those not far gone most were saved. That
any cures were made seemed wonderful in the eyes of the natives, and the fame
of the foreign physicians, who spent night and day in trying to save common
people, went out into the country at large. Many a heart was thus made ready
for the Divine Guest, when the good news of God—the spring of the foreigner’s
love for the Koreans—was told afar.
Hearty thanks were vouchsafed from the Government,
through the minister of Foreign Affairs.
The surface observations of twentieth century foreign
newspaper correspondents, magazine writers, travellers,
etc., who sally out doors in Soul, after a comfortable breakfast at the
luxurious hotel, and who judge of life as they see it during tourist hours, are
not worth much, except as condiments in the newspaper dish of hash, or as
material for spicy chat and the sensational talks at home. Before Christ came
to Korea, in the person of his servants, the missionaries, by whom, or through
their friends, hospitals have been erected, it was the common custom “to put
servants, dependants, or strangers at once on the
street, if affected with any infectious disease, and it was the commonest
occurrence to find poor people lying by the roadside, either exposed to the
bitterest blasts of winter or the blazing heat of mid-summer. Sometimes a friend
or a relative had erected a rude thatch over the sufferer. Sometimes a whole
family together occupied such a hut, the dead and the dying lying together.”
The above is the testimony of Mrs. Underwood, herself
a physician, but A.’s letters and the journals of other observers, some of them
of the eighteenth century, make many a mention of the same state of things as
normal in Old Korea. Japanese and foreign witness on the same points is
abundant. I myself saw a similar state of affairs in feudal Japan. In her new
life, stimulated by the example and urgency of the foreign missionary
physicians like Hepburn and Simmons, of fifty years ago and others, Japan has
not only since reared a thousand hospitals on her old territory, but in Formosa
and Cho-sen has erected some superb houses of
healing. Today, the Japanese, who have a genius for uniting what is good (we
cannot, as yet, say the best) in both Oriental and Occidental civilisation, are
introducing in Korea not only public hygiene, but are making the hospital as
normal a part of civic life as is the court and the school. Yet the spring of
all this beneficent activity lies in the words of the Great Physician—“heal the
sick.” The first great, inspiring example in Korea was given by Christ-filled
men who obeyed, with those who sent them, the Redeemer’s command.
XIX
School and Church
IN studying the printed biographies of different men
and in perusing their autograph diaries kept day by day, as well as in
surveying the complete lives of men we have known, in the full perspective of
years, after their tale on earth has been told, one is struck with the vast
differences, both in their physical make-up and in their subjective view of
the universe and of their place in it. Although so diverse in body and mind,
owing to variety of heredity and training, they are much alike in their ability,
through God’s help and a determined will, to achieve great results. Unlike in
manner, appearance, method, and cast of mind as they may be, the good done to
their fellow men is permanent. Full consecration to the will of God makes men,
though of contrasting qualities, equally Christ-like, enabling both the timid
man and the natural stalwart to be brave as lions. It is not only of nations,
but of the diverse elements blended in one soul that we may say they are “One
in Christ.” In studying both our inmost selves and men living on varying levels
of physical vigour and mental acuteness, we penetrate
the meaning of the psalmist’s prayer “Unite my heart to fear thy name.”
The lives of some missionaries, pioneers in the
world’s work, like Hepburn of Japan, for example, are commentaries on the
famous prescription, to secure longevity, which was written by the witty Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes. It is this—have some incurable disease; so that, while
the doctors are sounding, pounding, measuring, prescribing for and warning the
patient, he would, meanwhile, take care of himself. Hepburn, though frail from
youth and a semi-invalid most of his life, died at ninety-six, not of any disease,
but rather because, as President John Adams once said of himself: “He lived in
a house that was worn out, and the Landlord had refused to make further
repairs.” Timid as a child in seeing difficulties and shrinking at first from
encountering them, Hepburn was yet as bold as a lion when confronting what lay
in the path of duty.
Almost at antipodes from such a saint as Hepbum of
Japan, was Appenzeller of Korea, who lived in a superbly built house
constructed by the Almighty, through generations of hardy mountaineers,
farmers, and dwellers in the open air. To him was given, from his fathers, on
earth and in Heaven, exuberance of health. His outlook was ever cheerful. He
scarcely ever felt a pang or an ache, though often, through overexertion and
persistent toil, knowing what weariness was. How that superb frame was worn
almost to a shadow, in later years, belongs near the end of our story.
Appenzeller saw realities, but he also read most
clearly Jehovah’s promises; and, having a vast fund of physical vigour, not only felt that he was co-working with God and
that the Almighty was working in and with him, he showed this assured
conviction in a constantly cheerful mien. “We love Korea, because God is with
us,” he wrote. There is a mighty difference in the various autographs and
diaries of Hepburn of Japan, for example, and Appenzeller of Korea. Both
children of God and walking closely with their Father, they differed at a
hundred points in theology, outlook and method. In theory, they were at the
poles, in Christlikeness they were as twins.
The Hebrews call the “anointed ones,” that is,
prophets of comfort, “sons of oil,” and the opening word of the “Great
Unnamed,” who, in Israel’s darkest hour, Efted high
above all others the voice of prophecy, was, “Comfort ye, comfort ye my
people.”
A. belonged in the brotherhood of the sons of oil, and
the reservoir that supplied him, being divine, was rich and unfailing. He was a
preacher of consolation. Hence he was always in demand in times of trouble and
bereavement. Of him, the prophet’s words were true, “Thy name shall be called
‘Sought out.’ ” It was especially when funeral sermons were in order that the
sorrowful loved to hear his voice. Yet in his discourse, the doleful note was
absent. Beside the tender sympathetic heart to heart talk, which he gave to the
mourning ones, the tenor of his remarks suggested a Hallelujah Chorus rather
than a penitential psalm. As far as nadir is from zenith, was his idea of death
from that of the bereaved Korean, who wears sackcloth for three years. A. ever
saw “the stars shine through his cypress trees,” nor did he fear the ghosts or
devils which enslaved the Korean.
In strange situations on land or sea, on a rocking
ship, or in a house, or auditorium surrounded and supported by all the
proprieties, A. was always heard with joy. The sorrowing went forth with
strength newly gained. Yet words did not exhaust his sympathy. His helping hand
always supplemented his comforting words. Whether it was one of the waifs and
strays of humanity in a strange land— a stranded American sailor, a native in
distress, or a sick slave cast out like so much rubbish, A. was ever at hand to
supply cheer or to help in the last ministrations of decency and humanity.
Especially was this trait of his notable, when pestilence walked through the
land or cholera raged in the capital.
In the full sense of the word A. was envoy and pioneer
of civilisation. He believed in no religion of theory only, or in any attempt
to interrupt Christianity in terms of the spirit alone, apart from the body and
the soul. He, like the great apostle to the nations, held to the tripartite
nature of man. In both his orthodoxy and what was better, his orthopraxis, each
term of the three in man, “body, soul, and spirit,” as enumerated by the
apostle, must be equally nourished and ministered unto. He could not understand
how a Christian could starve his spiritual nature by yielding too freely to the
calls of the appetite, or by dallying with the allurements of the passions. On
the other hand, to profess, or to attempt culture of the spirit, apart from the
body, in a word, to eliminate from man his soul—the sheath of the spirit and
director of the body—was absurdity and meant unsoundness in Scripture doctrine.
It was because A. was an all-round man that he was
able, in the time of first need, say from 1885 to 1890, to be a factotum, a man
of all work. He was a pathfinder and a road-breaker into many an uninvaded
realm, over which seemed to stand a Macedonian, crying, “Come over and help
us.” To him, “first aid to the injured” meant instant help to the present need
before his eyes, whether expected or unexpected, in professional routine or out
of it.
His first problems were of rock blasting or soil
upturning. The time had not yet come for concentrated work in one line, or for specialities, such as preaching in the vernacular,
Bible translation, commentary making, the creation of a Christian literature,
the governing of Christian churches, the teaching of theology as a science, the
details of manipulation and adjustment in the settlement of a thousand
questions that were to arise later as problems of growth. During the days that
must elapse before his speech in Korean could be fluent, and while inwardly
preparing for outward aggressiveness, he utilised his
spare moments in work, which by its manifold variety meant refreshment. He
edited and published both a Christian weekly periodical, The Korean Christian
Advocate, and also the monthly Korean Repository, which was “a journal of
civilisation.” For years he was president of the Korean Religious Tract
Society. He introduced the social features of the best European and American
life. As a wise master builder, he laid broad foundations, upon which others
should uprear noble structures. Let us look at some of these industries
planned, advised, carried out or co-operated with, by the man who obeyed the
Scripture mandate, “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to
do, do it with thy might.”
During his seventeen years of life in Korea,
Appenzeller, a true citizen of the world, saw many great events, met scores of
authors, travellers and men of light and leading from
many lands and of diverse civilisations—soldiers,
bishops, diplomatists, and, not least, fellow pioneers and “beginners of a
better time.” In one chapter, we can but note but a few names and only glance
at a few of the most striking of the events and essay, in part, their
interpretation. With all these, Appenzeller grew and broadened with his
experiences. “When he was fresh from the Seminary and had not yet rubbed up
against the world and men,” says Dr. H. N. Allen, “he seemed rather narrow, but
that wore off. ... In later years, however, he said to me that he had come to realise that certain things impossible for himself were practised by men whom he knew to be as worthy Christians as
himself, and he had come to the point of trying not to sit in judgment upon the
acts of others, when such acts should be rather a matter between the other’s
conscience and himself. I honoured Appenzeller for
this evidence of a broadening and increasingly charitable view. At the same
time, he remained to the end a most ardent Methodist of the John Wesley type.”
From the first, A. got on well with the Japanese, and
this was one secret of his wide and ever growing influence; and yet I imagine
he could have been “help meet ” to any and all good men; for the simple reason
that he was a Christ filled man and not sectarian or bigot. “We love Korea,
because God is with us here,” he wrote. Among the men first met in Soul, at the
Legation of Japan, was Mr. Takahira, who during four
years had been secretary in Washington and had heard both Robert Ingersoll and
Henry Ward Beecher. He thought Bob looked upon religion as something very
funny, but believed that his frivolity would tell ultimately against any thing
like permanent influence. He was more profoundly influenced with Beecher’s
earnestness and power as an orator and as doing a lasting work. In later years,
Mr. Takahira, as ambassador at Washington, and with
Komura, whom A. had also known in Soul (both of them pupils of the biographer),
faced the Russian envoys at Portsmouth and signed the treaty that ended the war
of 1904-1905. In both arms and diplomacy, the Japanese came out victors. With
the other ministers and consuls of Japan, Appenzeller was ever-friendly and
co-operative.
In his early letters A. paid a high tribute to
Lieutenant Foulke, U. S. N., then in charge of the Legation—“a man who has done
more to raise America in the eyes of the Koreans, than anyone else.” This
brilliant young naval officer had explored almost every one of the provinces
and his reports to the Department are most valuable materials for history and
rich in information. To the biographer, he gave his MS. journal of travels,
which shows primitive Korea in its rawest state. Foulke often called at the missionary’s
home, and, as he saw royalty often, it was he who first told the king of
Appenzeller’s presence and work. Foulke’s was a word fitly spoken and led to
noble results. Appenzeller had already opened a school to teach English and
thus began to lay the foundations of Christian education in Korea. The king
thereupon, in 1886, gave the school a name, a royal tablet, furnishing what
was at first so much needed to make it popular with the Koreans. Thus, “under
Government auspices,” the school named Pai Chai, or Hall for the Rearing of
Useful Men, began its grand career. The blue official tablet was placed over
the entrance to the school enclosure, into which hundreds of native students
have come, so that Pai Chai is known through the peninsula.
The next year, 1887, the fine brick building, erected
at the expense of the Methodist Board and the “gift of the American people to
Korea,” was dedicated. It was a long, low, one-storied edifice, the first brick
building in the country. Of necessity, it could not be lofty, for anything high
was feared in the palace. All ideas of Korean propriety would have been
violated had it been higher than the squatty native structures in use from king
to coolie. Later on, some financial support was furnished by the Government,
lasting until 1902. The architect was a Japanese, Mr. T. Yoshizawa.
Memorable were the words of the Bishop at the
ceremonies of dedication—“This building is a gift of good will and
brotherliness from the United States to Korea.”
Yes! The mark of America on Asia is not the mark of
Europe—conquest, aggression and financial exploitation. It is the mark of the
college, dispensary, hospital, school and church, of the teacher, the honourable merchant, the consecrated missionary. Americans
have ever believed that Asiatics exist, not to be
conquered and made vassals, but to be healed, taught, helped, and treated as
men. Such a creed and policy was put into practice over a century ago. May it
expand and deepen:
The first public religious service in Korean was held
at the Bethel Chapel, in the southern part of the city on Easter Sunday, April
8, 1887, when A. baptised his first convert, a woman,
and the Lord’s Supper was celebrated. He had already begun his direct
evangelical work in the baptism of a Japanese Christian. By Christmas time, a
church was formed, in which believers of three nationalities were members. Dr.
W. B. Scranton in 1904 thus recalls the scene.
“Brother Appenzeller had bought a native house in the
heart of the city... for our first formal Christian service with the Koreans.
It was put in charge of a convert. One room in its inner court had been set
aside as our first Korean sanctuary. It was newly papered and cleaned, but
otherwise not furnished, except for a low table, on which were neatly set the
elements for our first Holy Communion with our native church. Brother
Appenzeller and I, with four or five baptised Koreans, alone composed this first memorable congregation. It was Christmas
morning and he preached his carefully prepared sermon in Korean, from the text
he loved, ‘And thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people
from their sins.’
“This was a solemn time with us. We worshipped in
secret and in stealth, but we had the first fruits there and the power of the
promise, ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world’.”
At this service, the two Mrs. Scranton, mother and
wife, and Mrs. Appenzeller were also present.
Appenzeller sowed beside all waters. On the city
street, engaging the passerby in conversation; in the country, by taking to the
people; in the school and church, by personal appeal to individuals and to
audiences in public discourse. The converts came at first one by one; then by
twos and threes; then by families and villages. The dispensary and hospital
were feeders to the church. Often in the experiences of pain and weakness,
offset by the kindly attention of skilled healers, many a native, in returning
health, yes, many a hundred of them, found the House of God and the Gate of
Heaven.
So when the church, not of brick or stone, but of
souls responsive to the Spirit’s call was formed, a garment being needed, the
edifice was planned. The architecture was that which every where may be
considered typical of a Christian house of worship. The brick walls and
pointed roof were surmounted with a square tower. It was situated in Chung
Dong, in the heart of the city. The corner stone was laid with becoming
solemnity and joy, September 9, 1895. The architect was a Japanese and the cost
was $8048.29. It was first occupied October 3, 1897 (and completed in 1898).
Services were held henceforth regularly and even at this writing (in 1912) it
is a hive of spiritual industry with over a thousand members. As the scene of
Appenzeller’s labours, as a winner of souls, it
stands as a noble monument in the history of Korean Christianity.
These were the years of war, tumults, the palace
murders, the flight of the king to the Russian legation and his return, and
the coming and going of soldiers as legation guards, while the map of Asia was
being altered. Nevertheless, the work for that kingdom, which is everlasting
and to survive all others, went steadily on. No plots, riots, politics,
battles, commotion, dangers from mobs, invading armies, Chinese or Japanese,
Boxers or Tong Haks deterred for one moment this son
and servant of Christ and the Church. It was ever “Forward” and “Excelsior”
with him, while the church moved on; and as he loved to sing:
“Mid toil and tribulation
And tumult of her war
She waits the consumation
Of peace forevermore.”
As to the general appearance of this first church
edifice in Korea, built in foreign style, Dr. H. N. Allen writes:
“He (Appenzeller) had set himself the task of erecting
a suitable church building right across from the U. S. Legation. He succeeded
too and the fine home-like brick edifice, with its short comer tower is a great
addition to and improvement of the foreign quarter. It stands, as do the fine
brick buildings of the Methodist School (Pai Chai) and the Methodist Printing
Press, which crowns the hill opposite our Legation, as monuments to this man’s vigourous efforts and tireless energy.”
XX
On First Furlough—Home
AFTER seven years of continuous and varied toil in a
strange land, the time had come for recuperation and a visit home. True economy
of force makes it wise for the missionary, as well as the official and the
teacher, to observe a sabbatic rest, in years as well
as in days. The British Government, which with civil servants, has had the
largest experience of any in the world, has found that for the highest human
efficiency, one year’s rest after every seven of work is imperative.
A. was a man of superb powers at their maturity, but
for years he had been, as one of the visiting bishops said, “doing three men’s
work,” and this, with the malarial climate and the hard conditions of a
pioneer, had told on his physical frame. Instead of weighing, in 1885,
possibly two hundred pounds, he tipped the scales in 1892, at one hundred and
forty, having lost sixty pounds avoirdupois.
The local physician strenuously advised change and the
Mission Board ordered him home. His passport dated August 7, 1889, described
him thus: age, 31 years; stature, 5 ft. 11,1/2 ins.; forehead full; eyes, gray;
nose, Grecian; mouth, medium size; chin, round; hair, brown; complexion, clear;
face, clean shaven.
In reality however, his change of place was to be but
a change of work. Except some brief pleasure in travel, he must toil in the
service of the churches at home. Of all causes or enterprises, that of the
world’s evangelisation needs constant nourishment and
stimulus, and no substitute equal in power has yet been found for the living
worker in the field, especially if he knows what to say and how to say it. In
foreign missions, information and inspiration must be constant and unfailing
from the front, for those who at home gladly hear. In the economy of missions,
a “school of expression” might well be maintained in which returned
missionaries should be “coached” for the most effective “presentation of the
cause.” “Time is money” and sometimes worth even more than fashionable
pleasures. How seize and improve it to hungry hearers? All accounts agree that
when at home on furlough A. knew what to say and how to say it.
Moreover reinforcements were needed, and A. was to act
as recruiting officer. This meant slow, tedious work. There is no lack of
volunteers after the pioneers have done their work and the forlorn hope has
become the victorious vanguard. In the day of small things, however,
enlistments are few.
This time the “triumphant Pennsylvanian” went not with
his wife only, but with three children whom God had given him. One of these was
a son, whom he did not name Gershom (Exodus II:22), but Henry, after himself.
For the time his house in Soul was dismantled of his own peculiar treasures and
handed over to the occupancy of others.
When all was ready to start, the total depravity of
human nature, to which that of the bland Korean was no exception, was
illustrated and the unity of the human race demonstrated; for, is not the
common carrier of man and freight, all over the world, the same? Witness the
necessity of the Interstate Commerce Commission in America! In Seul, on the
early morning of June, 1892, the bearers, man and beast, previously engaged
were on hand, the pack-horses loaded, the palanquins, or covered chairs, ready
and filled with their occupants. By all logic, the cavalcade should start
promptly, to catch the river steamer to Chemulpo;
when, there happened one of those vexatious delays which rise from nothing else
than from a cantankerousness that was in no way “Oriental” or “Asiatic;” but,
though suggestive of a mule, very human. It gave A. one of his many
opportunities for studying man’s nature, not in books, but as expressed in
two-legged realities. He had previously justly and fairly made his bargain with
the head man who was to take charge of the gang and pay all. Mrs. Missionary
wondered why they did not start. She was tired of holding the baby. When
argument, urging, expostulation and eloquence had failed an application of
force, limited, which is so useful when other means fail, was necessary. Taking
one or two of the noisiest of the orators by the collar and swinging them round
like a top, but in the direction of their goal, A. shouted “go on!” Thereupon,
with promptness and agility, which showed the sweet reasonableness of the
Korean, the party started off in good spirits on a trot. The river steamboat
for Chemulpo was reached. They boarded the larger
steamer for Kobe, Japan, and thence were transferred to the ocean liner,
Empress of China, bound for San Francisco. The Appenzellers found some well-known people among their fellow-passengers including Mrs. Bradley of Boston,
the generous lover of art, Mr. and Mrs. Rudyard Kipling, and the Hon. Hugh
Fraser, British plenipotentiary to Tokyo and his accomplished wife, the sister
of Marion Crawford, and, later, the author of several charming works of fact
and fiction, one of which, her “Letters from Japan,” furnishes us with the best
picture of life at the Mikado’s Court. Like Miss Bacon’s “Japanese Girls and
Women,” it is even now a classic. Mrs. Fraser showed herself exceedingly kind
to every one of the delegation from Korea.
The voyage from Korea was far from mere routine. Near
Japan the sea became very rough, and fish and seaweed were flung upon the
ship’s bridge. A funeral took place on the deep. The usual sights, of the ocean
looking like a millpond one day and on the next heaving its waves skyward in
wrath, the flying fish, the spouting whales, the phosphorescence, the ever
sociable sea gulls, the oddities of the Chinese passengers and the varied
peculiarities of other specimens of human nature varied the monotony of sea life
from first to last.
At Yokohama A. called on Captain Frank Brinkley, at
the office of The Japan Mail, and enjoyed meeting this accomplished soldier,
archaeologist and scholar and seeing the plant of the journal, which for a
half century has done so much to present Japan favourably to the world, and whose correspondent in Korea A. had been for seven years.
The Mail was sent to A. during his stay at home, on furlough, so that he kept
informed of the world movement in the Far East.
While at home, after a month under his father’s roof,
A. was busy, not only intellectually, in reading some of the great books that
had been published during the time of his labours in
the East, socially in visits to his friends and relatives, but also actively in
the service of the church. He presented the claims of the Korean field in his
native place, in his college city, and in many other places, in the Middle
States chiefly, though he was also one month in New England. He hoped to rouse
active interest and more expansive enterprise in some of the more apathetic of
the churches. In view of the later wonders of grace in Korea and the great
success of the Methodist mission, the lack of interest, two decades ago, seems
as incredible as it was mysterious.
A. visited Dickinson College, which, founded by
Presbyterians in 1783, came under Methodist control in 1833.
In Yokohama, a few months before, Professor Sharpe of
Kyoto, on first meeting A. declared that he saw his Swiss descent in his eyes,
and A. met two students named Appenzeller in Dickinson College and heard of
others of like name in Pennsylvania and the West. A study of the directories
of American cities showed that some were favoured with a number of citizens of this Swiss name, while others, Chicago, for
example had few or none.
While at Lancaster, January 18, 1893, A. made a note
of the books he had read and of those which he proposed reading. This list
shows particularly that he was becoming more and more immersed in themes
pertaining to the mother-continent, and in studying the works of the master
writers on the subject of comparative religion. While A. was a man of strongest
faith—faith proved and demonstrated by his consecration to arduous duty and
illustrated in manifold works, he had too much sympathy with humanity, and the
grace of God was too rich in him, to be a mere destroyer of other men’s
religion, as some of the weaker brethren and sisters of less stalwart faith are
occasionally apt to be.
It is so easy to be a bigot and an abolitionist of the
religion of “the heathen”—a word that does not occur in the original
scriptures, where the term, “nations,” or Gentiles, from gens, a nation, is
most unhappily translated by an expression implying contempt, instead of the
sympathy, which Jesus ever showed. Not once did the Saviour of mankind use the term. It is a sign of Satan, rather than of Christ, to
extinguish even a dim taper—to “quench the smoking flax,” in the inquiring soul
of a man who is without the Christian’s faith. The light by which he is guided,
however poor, should be fanned to flame by the breath of the Spirit, rather
than put out by the Pharisee in Christian’s livery. It is better and far more
Jesus-like to feel with and understand the pagan so as to fulfil in him, by the
help of the Father, whose love is unknown to his blinded child, those hopes
and yearnings which the lowest and most ignorant of men cherish. No better way
of preparation in mental discipline, to meet the minds of thinking men of
Asia—the continent of thought—can be found than that followed by, and
commanded of our Master, who taught the spiritual husbandman to abide in
patience, even when he knew that the enemy had sown tares with the wheat. If
Jesus so taught, surely the disciple should not strive to be above his Lord.
A. having been a true student and knowing church
history well was not so shallow as not to forsee that, after its first season of Christian babyhood, and the feeding of its
little ones with the pure milk of the Word, there must inevitably come to the
church of Christ in Korea a time of growth to adulthood. Then, with teeth grown
and stomach stronger, even Korean Christians would demand something more solid
than spoon meat, even that which needed to be cut, chewed and digested, in
order to make strong men and stalwart Christians. Having neither jealousy nor
fear for the future, this undershepherd and teacher
of men wished to be well prepared both to lead and to feed. Of him, others
wrote, “Semper paratus.” A. was a minute man in the
war that has no discharge.
While at home A.’s tour of the churches extended into
the Eastern States. After speaking for his old chum, Wadsworth, in the M.E.
Church at Phoenix, R. I., he came to Boston and called at the biographer’s
house, next to the Shawmut Congregational Church, on Tremont Street, who
unfortunately was away from home. The latter had written to A., when in Soul
to greet and encourage him, and A. had sent photographs of his pupils and
himself, which were made use of in an address at Northfield, Mass, while in attendance
upon Mr. Moody’s convention, when the claims of Korea upon American Christians
were urged upon that body of believers from many states and lands.
After spending from late July, 1892, until the end of
June, 1893, in the home land, preparations were made to return, the plan being
to stop two or three days in Chicago. In this year 1893 Korea was represented
for the first time in the United States, or indeed in any foreign country
except in Japan (over a thousand years before) by an exhibition of her products
and the presence of enough of her people to give Americans some idea of Korean
costume and deportment. It is true that the embassy of 1882, sent to ratify the
Shufeldt treaty, consisting of eleven persons had been seen in several of the
large cities of the United States, and that in Washington, at the National
Museum there was already a notable collection of fancy and useful Korean
curiosities, arranged in the most effective manner by Dr. Walter Hough.
Appenzeller had made a collection of Korean articles of all sorts for the
Leland Stanford University, expending the $500 allowed him most judiciously,
just before leaving on furlough.
Now, in 1893, under the energetic direction of Dr.
Horace N. Allen, who accompanied the embassy to Chicago and Washington, there
were, besides two white-robed envoys, ten musicians from the Soul Court. The
'latter had been sent against Dr. Allen’s advice, he knowing that his
countrymen were not able to appreciate their rendering of Korean music,
however ancient and classical. The men of drum and trumpet were quickly
dispatched homeward, because no assurance had been given by either the
Government or the Exposition authorities that their expenses would be met if
they remained. However, a very creditable display of things Korean was seen in
the White City. A. was happy to find one of his former pupils in charge, who
gave much light and information to inquirers concerning the things that looked
so odd and strange—even to the cloyed eyes of visitors, to whom so full a
honeycomb of sweets and curiosities was gathered in the Columbian Exposition.
While A. was absent in America, the mission kept
expanding. Dr. Scranton who had acted as overseer was later appointed by
Bishop Mallalieu superintendent. This left Appenzeller on his return in 1901,
more free for evangelistic tours and the great tasks of putting the New
Testament into Korean, of teaching Christian theology, and of training up
Korean preachers. It was A.’s firm belief that Korea must ultimately be evangelised by a native ministry. Christianity must doff
its foreign regimentals. It was in Appenzeller’s heart, also, not only to dream
dreams and lay plans, but to work for nothing less than a great Christian
university for Korea. Once more in his old home in Soul, activities were begun
again, but with a new set of problems— the problems of increasing success.
During 1892, stations were opened at the two seaports, Chemulpo on the west and Wonsan on the east coast, and in the historic city of Ping
Yang.
Yet the political situation was alarming. The Tong Haks, or champions of Oriental culture, were rising in that
armed opposition to the Government having hatred and harm to all foreigners and
especially to Christianity in view, which was to bring on war between China and
Japan. Medical work was opened at Wonsan by Dr. McGill and Dr. and Mrs. Hall
began healing for body and soul in what was then “the Sodom of Korea”—Ping
Yang.
At first the men in this city “had no use” for the
foreigners, because they set their faces like a flint and their hands like ice
lumps against the whole system of society that depended for amusement on
dancing girls and the accompanying drinking bouts. The missionaries were
undaunted, however, and though their converts were imprisoned and beaten, both
persevered.
Then came the war. A host of ignorant and licentious
Chinese soldiery, part army and part horde, possessed this city of eighty
thousand souls. They looted houses, stole property and assaulted women. The
public schools of Japan in battle array “faced a lie in arms”—the dogma of
China’s universal sovereignty that made chaff of solemn treaties. The Mikado’s
star-capped soldiers struck the Chinese mob and scattered it to the winds. The
prestige of China in Korea was broken forever.
Coming too soon into the poison-laden air of the city,
then a shell of its former self, Dr. Hall gave up his life. In 1895, Dr. W.
Arthur Noble took charge of the work, and, reinforced by others, an amazing
work of grace followed, of which skilful pens have
told and will tell. Before Appenzeller laid down his work and passed into the
immediate presence of his Master, there were in Ping Yang scores of churches,
with thousands of enrolled members, as many inquirers and bible students and
homes renewed in the spirit of Jesus. “What hath God wrought!”
XXI
A Pioneer of Civilisation
AS soon as inquirers began to flock to him, A. saw the
need of a Christian literature, in both Chinese and English, as well as
Korean, to minister to these pilgrims of the spirit. There were Japanese also,
in and out of the church, who wanted food for the mind. Most educated Koreans
were able to read the script of the Central Empire and bright youths were
beginning to master English. So, making a modest beginning, he opened on May 4,
1894, at the time when Morning Calm land puts on her robe of flowers, the first
bookstore for Christian and foreign literature in Korea. From within a few
yards of where had stood the old edicts denouncing death to foreigners and a
curse on treaty-makers, the new light was soon streaming out over the land. How
different the spirit of the messages “If you see a foreigner (man from over
the sea) kill him; he who lets him go by is a traitor to his country” was one.
The other was “Have we not all one Father?” Soon, enlarging the equipment of
the printing press, first started by Dr. Ohlinger, A. added a book bindery,
developing the history of a wonderful agent of Christian civilisation and
means of diffusion and knowledge and,enlightenment of
the Korean intellect—the Methodist Printing and Publishing House, from which
issued later the Korean Repository and the Korea Review. This monthly magazine,
maintained from 1892 to 1906 (except during 1893 and 1894),helped to dissipate
the thick darkness of ignorance regarding Korea, in which most benighted
Americans and Europeans, with the exception of a few interested souls, rather
prided themselves, many of them not knowing just where Korean land lay, or realising that her twelve millions of people were neither
Chinese nor Japanese, but had a civilisation of their own. The Korean
Repository, started by Rev. F. Ohlinger and his wife, was carried on for one
year. When revived in 1895, A. became its editor, and, under this name and
management, it was published until the end of 1898, when Professor Homer C.
Hulbert continued it with signal ability, as the Korean Review.
A. wrote most of the editorials, which, as might be
expected, are expressed in clear and straightforward style. In this particular
line of work, he had very little assistance. He preferred to write the leaders
himself and be responsible for the editorial column, until he was afterwards
joined by Rev. George Heber Jones, whose contributions were models of vigour, wit and clearness. More than once, the Korean
“Government”—that festering mass of corruption and indirection—afraid of being
roused into honesty, real reform and actual government for the good of the
people, goaded the United States legation into suggesting abridgment of
American liberties; but, firmly and with
imperturbable good nature, A. kept holding the lighted candle. His magazine
was not for the suppression but for the publication of both fact and truth.
Later, when in October, 1896, a Korean Minister of Education issued a fiercely
polemic book entitled “The Warp and Woof of Confucianism,” even the foreign
envoys joined in a unanimous protest against the offensive and insulting screed
of the very erudite and very ignorant bigot.
When it was thought best to have an Asiatic Society
and bring together those most interested in making scholarly researches into
Korean history, language, law, archaeology, architecture, religion,
folklore, art, symbolism, manners and customs—in a word to try and understand
the people with whom resident foreigners were trading, or whom they were trying
to convert, to heal, to help altruistically or to exploit selfishly—a few
choice spirits began the work. It eventuated that only “a remnant” persevered. Like
most societies which yield no revenue and little or no social prestige—and
unlike those formed long after the real work or the war is over and the battle
won, like our patriotic leagues that foster aristocracy and furnish
opportunities for cards, dress, refreshments or social display—this Korean
Asiatic Society, after the first glow of enthusiasm cooled, had a struggle to
live. It required too much toil, personal sacrifice and special abilities, and
the workers were too few. It was revived in 1912.
Though a branch of the Royal (or London) Society of
Great Britain, nearly all the contributors of papers were Americans. Lack of
taste, ability, or industry, or the absorption of the foreign denizens in what
are supposed to be “more serious” duties, with the natural preferences in favour of personal comfort to the unselfish hard work
required of individuals expected to prepare papers, doomed the society to an
early attack of coma, if not of death, though resurrection is still possible.
The great political overturnings in the country and
Government may have had something to do with the disaster. Conspicuous among
the missionaries who found time to be both a scholar and a gospel herald, was
Eli Barr Landis, M.D., in charge of the medical work of the Church of England Mission,
a Pennsylvanian born at Lancaster, December 18, 1865, and a former Mennonite,
who left several posthumous papers of great value and his valuable library to
the Society. He was an indefatigable student of all things Korean. He conducted
both a hospital and an orphanage. His untimely decease on April 16, 1898, was a
sad loss to his mission and to Korea. His name belongs among the great
Pennsylvanians and the unselfish lovers of Korea.
Nevertheless, during its short but active life three
creditable volumes of Proceedings were issued. From the first A. was ready to
do his part in nourishing the infant. Besides beginning and working hard for a
collection of books on Far Eastern subjects for the Society, he acted as
librarian and secretary of the organisation.
One sad feature of life in the seaport of Asia and
tending to retard the coming of Christ’s kingdom, is the lack of sympathy
between the commercial and miscellaneous population and the missionary
community. This unaffected indifference or hostility in their own countrymen
and the novel feeling of belonging to “a despised class,” is, to many
missionaries, the heaviest of crosses to bear. There is also too much mean
gossip, and many hard things are said about each other by people who are apt to
misunderstand, or fail in mutual appreciation. The local newspapers, also, are
ready to serve up too spicy a dish of tittle-tattle, to print the
correspondence of spiteful and disgruntled critics of Christianity, and to open
their columns as sewers to renegades and pagans of all sorts, who have gained
fluency with the pen. With the English taught them by the missionaries,
ungrateful pupils can show how contemptibly small they can make themselves.
It is wholly unnecessary that this social chasm should
exist, even though much of it may be explained by the different motives of
life, and objects for which the missionary and the commercial classes live
abroad. Such a state of affairs, however, is as harmful as it is unfortunate,
when degraded human nature, both of pagans and nominal Christians, takes
advantage of the pitiful situation.
On the other hand, it has been abundantly demonstrated
that broad-minded men and Christians who measure up, in manhood, altruism,
humility and patience, to the full standard of the Master, are able to neutralise this mutual antipathy. This they do, by bringing
all men together on the common basis of their hopes and fears, wants and needs.
The great missionary apostle, truest of gentlemen—confessing himself debtor
both to the Greeks and the barbarians—consorted with all classes of men. It is
mutual parvanimity, rather than magnanimity, that
divides the professional “religious” and the average layman, making the one man
think himself exalted above the others and giving him apparently the attitude
of a Pharisee toward a Publican. That the “hired converter” so often becomes a
target for the gossip of the club, which reckons him an outcast, from the point
of view of the hong, or trader’s counter, may not be
wholly the fault of the man of the world.
One who has been in both classes—a missionary in two
countries and a man of ability in affairs— has happily spoken on this point.
Dr. H. N. Allen, a diplomatist in Korea, a skilful physician, a lover of all sorts of men, without regard to rank, creed or
confession, wrote a racy book, “Things Korean.” Possibly, on p. 177, though no
names are mentioned, we may see that Appenzeller was one of the men in mind.
“Merit counts. Let a gentlemanly missionary come to
this community, possessed of some talent that makes him a desirable
acquisition, whether it be a good voice for singing, the ability to make music
upon some instrument, or skill in some good vigorous game of athletics; let him
even be a good story-teller, or be simply endowed with good sense and good
nature, backed by learning, and he will be taken up gladly and find real human
sympathy, even if this may not extend to his work for the natives, in just the
comprehensive manner he might wish.
“Further, such a man may find that an important side
issue of his work will likely be the giving of sympathy to these
fellow-countrymen, who have their own trials and discouragements in the new
land, and in so doing he may gradually win them to the ideals left behind with
the distant home.
“A missionary of this description, and I have known
such, who has something to give to the community and who is willing to give it,
will not be ostracised or lack for sympathy and the
companionship of his kind. He will on the contrary be welcomed and be made a
part of that little band, and it will be for him to say just how much or how
many of the attentions open to him he shall or may accept.
“There are missionary names of good men, some of whom
are now long dead, which are revered in the communities of which they were
members, and to whom more than one prosperous and successful business man of
substance and position in the community looks with deep regard as to one who
had given him real help in climbing out of the rut of personal gain and
creature comfort, or what may have passed for pleasure.”
Now A. was such a lover of his fellow-men and of
mankind in general and could see so much good in each human soul, that he
counted it a joy to shepherd any needy sheep, black, brown, or white. “Before
all nations is humanity.” First of all a spiritual leader, he could also
promote whatever was innocent and delightful. A. was not only a Methodist, a
Christian, and an American, but being a true follower of the Master, he was, as
he needs must be, in conscience, a world citizen. For strangers in a strange land,
he saw the need of a social union, where men and women of all ideas, creeds and
convictions could meet as gentlemen and ladies, not only to enjoy each other’s
company, but for mutual stimulus to maintain the good and to seek the better
things. To argue that earnest Christian workers needed avocation, as well as
vocation, would be wasting platitudes. He knew too well by experience, what
spelling and derivation witnessed, that recreation was recreation. So he led
in the formation of the Soul Social Union, which had a reading room with the
home periodicals on file, and facilities for chat and tea, as well as for
tennis and other outdoor games. It might be necessary, when at home among
benighted people who imagine that missionaries must always be on their knees
praying, or handing around tracts, to excuse and explain why fun, exercise and
variety were needed, but surely not to the thoughtful. Those who change their
skies, but not their steadfast minds do not lose their practical common sense.
The wisdom that conserves energy is the best.
Apart from all other considerations, the yearnings for
one’s own kind, race, and civilisation are very strong, whether in Lapland
among the Esquimaux, or with the Japanese, Chinese and Koreans in lands afar,
or Americans away from their kin. “Home Sweet Home” is a universal sentiment.
After spending long hours with people so diverse from one’s own kind, often in
wearisome or nervewearing restraint, in teaching or labours manifold, the need of social relaxation among those
whose forms of speech and ways of life are like one’s own, is imperative. This
A. knew, and so helped to provide the balm and tonic.
Civilised mankind in cities has conquered in large measure the realm of darkness,
prolonging the day, adding to the pleasures of life and by municipal
illumination making public thoroughfares safer than could an army of soldiers
or policemen. In America, Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of the
four-sided, or all round glass street lamps. Now cities vie with each other in
the brilliancy of their main avenues, making a night garden that blooms with
flowers of light. Until recent years, the cities of Chinese Asia were dark,
except when the queen of the heavens shed her light on a cloudless night,
though law compelled everyone who went abroad to carry a lantern. It was a
great day when, on March 4, 1891, A. walked forth and “saw a lamp post with a
glass for the first time in Soul.” The posts were six feet high and near the
old Mulberry Palace. In time, first the palace and then Korea’s capital had
electric lights installed by a firm of Americans.
On first settling in a city, which the home-bred
natives thought the wonder of the world, it seemed that the very air must be
filtered before inhaling. This was not merely because of the smoke that twice a
day darkened the capital, but because of the foul exhalations from unsewered
streets, oozy and lumped with garbage, and from the poison of the pestilence
that walked abroad. Nevertheless while the air might be endurable, the water
was a thousand times worse. Wells and drains were close to each other, and rarely
was the curb sufficient to prevent either the flow or seepage of surface water
from mingling with what was drunk. It was quite common to see groups of women
washing clothes at one part of a stream, while a few feet below, in the same
water, women were sousing vegetables to be eaten, either raw or cooked. It was
necessary for Christians, who wished to avoid slow suicide, to boil and filter
their daily beverage. At first and after years of patient labour in maintaining private filtration plants, the fastidious aliens in Soul
received the blessing of mountain water brought in pipes by an American firm in
sufficient quantities to serve all purposes even to fighting the fires that
rage frequently. Good beef, carefully inspected, was furnished by a Japanese
butcher, for, according to general Korean custom, the flesh of cows and oxen
dying of disease were at once cut up and sold. The Korean method of killing was
revolting in the extreme and a native butcher shop was a horrible place to look
at. The Korean butcher was a social outcast and the visible proofs of it were
seen, in a land most famous of all on earth for its headgear, in their not
being allowed to wear hats. In time, however, the butcher’s status improved so
that when permitted to cover his head with honour his
was a real liberty cap. Common sense in Korea, however, having at last
virtually decreed the abolition of the top-knot, the forehead-binding, lofty
and wide-brimmed hat goes with it, and under the new rules of public hygiene,
the man who supplies flesh food to humanity bestows more attention to the
quality of his meat than to fashions of head clothing. New Korea buys hats,
caps, leather shoes and foreign clothing (with adornments and jewelry) by the
ton.
To sum up—of that type of a nation-builder and
rejuvenator of society, as an exponent of that Christianity which makes over
both the man and the commonwealth, A. was a superb type. At first, he was
founder of a school, superintendent of a denominational mission, editor of a
religious newspaper, president of a union tract society, organiser of a printing and publishing plant, manager of a bookbindery and bookshop,
librarian of an Asiatic Society, treasurer of the Foreign Cemetery Association
and general promoter of whatever made better men and women. In short, he was
one of the leaders of the forces of civilisation and among those who, in the
van of progress, were founders of pretty much everything in Korea for the
benefit of foreigners, as truly as he was among the first leaders in
evangelical work for the natives. When, however, the time was ripe for
concentration, he showed himself above all things the preacher of the good news
of God and translator of the Bible. He knew when to disperse abroad and when to
hold his hand to the plough.
Whether travel, at home, in school, on the street, in
the translating room or in the market, A. made a good companion. With native or
foreigner, wherever he was, there were fun, cheer, and comradeship. On his
last night on earth, he and an American miner struck up a warm friendship on
shipboard. Not a few, alien or home-born, were drawn to him because of his
genial mirth. Hard work, sticking to contracts, doing his duty—these were
necessities. He held himself and others to them. Cowardice, shirking, failure,
or laziness, he would not tolerate in man or woman. Yet, when the Commandments
had been kept and the tale of bricks and straw duly made, there followed from
his lips, or proffered hand, encouragement, thanks, appreciation, reward, a
merry jest, as the case might be. He lubricated the machinery of human
intercourse, over the counter, at the wharf, on the street, or in the office,
with the oil of merriment. This flowed as naturally from this lover of man and
servant of God as the illuminant, from the wells of his native Pennsylvania,
bubbled up.
XXII
The World of the Imaginary
WE have before glanced at the supposed activities of
Korean demons in ordinary times and when their victims are alive. Yet these
malignant spirits, figments of a diseased imagination, are by no means confined
to the little things or affairs of life, nor are they only earth- air- or
water-born. As soon as man’s breath leaves his body, they multiply their
terrors to the living beyond those of Fates or Furies. Whatever these spirits,
when embodied in human life, may have wrought, their potency is intensified
when vagrant souls get loose and roam at large. As the living are but a small
fraction, in comparison with the vast majority of the dead, the burden of what
is malignant or avenging upon the living is something almost inconceivable. The
spirits take refuge in animals, or in canny or in uncanny places, to afflict
those left behind. They are liable to work mischief at any time in the form of
disease, insanity, disgrace, poverty, ruin, or death in its most horrible
forms. The night is the time of their greatest activity. When the cocks crow,
men that have been terror-stricken in the darkness, put on a cheerful face.
Though occasionally reported as visible, the ghosts and spirits disappear,
becoming quiescent, at the first streak of day.
So long as the spirits are located, they may be
propitiated, or their malignant schemes circumvented, but until they have
found a resting place, they are apt to strike and afflict with unusual terrors.
Thus it happens that in Korean, as in most ancient religion, that which is left
undone brings relatively far more calamity than any conformity to custom can
ward oft. If a village is stricken with plague, pestilence or famine, it is
because some rule, ordained by the ancients, has been disobeyed or forgotten,
or some jot or tittle of ritual in propitiation to the mountain spirits has
been overlooked. By means of this crude philosophy, the woes that afflict
humanity, the pain and disease, the disappearance of children, the loss of what
is valued, are accounted for. In an age of science, we explain small-pox,
cholera, typhus, and other morbid conditions by the law of cause and effect,
which research has revealed. The Korean pagan, as did our own benighted
ancestors, takes a simpler view. He ascribes every phenomenon in the human
body, the weather, the whole course of nature, and indeed whatever is visible
or invisible, to the spirits.
One has to call up all the imaginary creatures of his
own fairy land, that were once realities to his Teutonic fathers, who once
worshipped them as gods, or propitiated them as servants of the unseen powers,
to know what are the demons, goblins, elves, dragons, the earth gods, hill
gods, “mountain uncles” and other denizens of Korean earth, air, and water.
Some of the native names of their imaginary visitants are interesting. Most
famous is Tok-gabi, who exceeds all others of his kind in doing mischievous stunts,
or in playing lively pranks. He is the will-of-the-wisp in the swamp, the
mountain fire, or the phosphorescence of decaying wood. He throws sand against
the paper windows. He tumbles the pot-lid inside the cooking-pot. He dances on
the kitchen shelves, rattles the dishes, and even clips off top-knots. Then
there is the Queechin, and many others of the same
ilk, whose names are better in the dictionaries than on these pages, which
eschew as far as possible all outlandish names and words.
One of the first effects of science and comparative
literature will be to reduce these imaginary beings to the grade of harmless
fairies, and the beliefs founded on them to the infusorial dust of ages. The
same process has already been wrought in our own mental history and by God’s
grace will be accomplished in Korea. True Christian literature will banish all
gods and all plurality of deity, in order that He only may reign Who is alone
both to save and to destroy.
A. was powerfully impressed with the entreaty of Paul
to his fellow soldiers of Christ to “take on the whole armour of God,” since the contest was not with flesh and blood, but with unseen forces
of evil. One of the first notices from the king in the palace (in which were
250 clowns, 300 archers, 300 criers, and a mob of eunuchs, 1000 dancing girls
and miscellaneous hangers-on, numbering several thousand, all leeches sucking
the blood of the body politic)was to foreigners not to be frightened at the
noise of guns on New Year’s eve, when the populace drove off evil spirits by
“burning” gunpowder.
Ephesians and Koreans were alike in their minds, for
with them, both the air, heights, and depths were full of demons and every sort
of malevolent creature that diseased fancy could spawn. Without seeking to
master the metaphysics of the situation, Appenzeller’s first and last idea was
to start and keep the demons on the run.
When his labourers were
digging the foundations for the Pai Chai school in Soul, they were in abject
fear of the ghosts and spirits that lurked in the soil. A foreign tree, fir or
elm, said to have been planted during the Japanese invasion of 1592, which had
stood on the site of the school was blown down in 1885. As a powerful spirit
lived in this tree, no one dared to take away or burn the wood; but after A.
bought the ground the ghost left. Among other things found to scare folks was
the stone tablet inscribed to some ancient person. Around this, the natives
gathered with awe. A., who had come to give freedom to the minds of men, had
the trover respectably cleaned and then kept it as a historical relic. Aghast
at his neglect, or defiance of the ghosts, they expected to see the possessor
hurt, or plagued, for not reburying the token, and thus calming the spirits of
the dead. A.’s smile and wit quieted their fears, and succeeding days and years
helped to improve the climate of belief, as prosperity followed. In a word,
ghosts and demons alike made way for truth and education.
Millions of these stone tablets lie buried in Korean
soil. Although those of wood quickly decay, yet from the point of view of the
market, Korean mortuary pottery and sacrificial utensils are sufficient in
quantity and accessibility to tempt marauders, while from the view of art, they
are sufficiently attractive and tasteful to excite cupidity. Almost all
ancestral tablets are buried after five years.
Korean folklore, besides lacking the beauty of the
Greek, or even, for the most part the fairy features of the Japanese, has for
its chief burden the mischief of the spirits, or the deviltry of things unseen.
There is no fairy godmother in the Korean tales, little of the forest lore, and
few of the attractive features which show how much of life’s phenomena were
in old time explained by the pre-ancient dominance of woman as the ruler of the
home. Buddhism lightens the general burden of the degradation of woman, but as
a rule in the pragmatic view of the Confucianistic stories, she is low and of little worth. Out of the Shamanistic world have
issued the greater number of the popular beliefs; and against these, as if they
were high walls, the foreign teachers in Korea were continually running. These
native notions hindered progress and enterprise as if they were rocks in the
road, or landslides in the path. How to rout, scatter, banish, or dissipate
them into harmless fun or dream stuff was A.’s study and care.
When in July, 1889, it came to allotting the
boundaries of the foreign cemetery and the burial of Christian dead, a
hostile army of occupation, outnumbering any that Genghis Khan or Napoleon
ever gathered, stood ready to contest the right of the aliens to disturb either
the soil, or the demons that seemed to own it. In the first place, how dare
these foreign people use land and make graves, without consulting and paying
roundly, the geomancers and witches who were to placate the spirits? In the
second place, since legions of demons lived in the ground, air, and water, many
would certainly get loose and make trouble for the Koreans who lived in the
houses near by. To crown all, after a wall had been built to enclose the
cemetery, it was noted that close to the gateway was a demon shrine, one of
thousands in the land. The superstitious people in the neighbourhood imagined that to bring the corpses of foreigners in through the gate would
provoke the ire of the spirits, and they therefor violently insisted that the
wall on the opposite side should be broken and the bodies brought in through
this breach. After the land had been allotted and the work of grading and
improvement begun, under Appenzeller’s personal direction, such popular
excitement was created that it was feared the work could not continue.
Appenzeller was chosen treasurer and general manager
of the Cemetery Corporation, whose final regulations were made in June 1894.
Although it seemed at first absurd to yield to popular madness, yet since this
was the first land granted by the king to aliens outside the city walls, it
might be wiser to make a compromise, for the present.
Meanwhile the corpses were carried through a breach in
the wall on the other side, and in patience A. waited until something should
turn up, by which the spirits and the popular superstitions alike should be
given a quietus forever, and the people of the neighbourhood sleep in peace, untroubled by ghosts, demons, or other phantasms.
It may, or may not, have been about this time, that
the general sense of trust in A.’s wit and ability to find the path out of a
tangle of difficulties was most amusingly illustrated. One of the biographer’s
many informants, on three continents, was in the Club room, when he “overheard
some non-devout foreign residents, who were at billiards’’ discussing some
difficult problem of enterprise. One of them closed the debate by saying,
“strike hard and trust in Appenzeller.” They knew that what was not initiated
by the American legation or for commercial purposes would, most likely, be led
by the Pennsylvanian.
No country is more famous for its skilled grave
thieves and expert desecrators of tombs than is Korea, for no custom is more
common, than that of seeking revenge on the living by molesting the resting
places of the dead. It seemed for a time as if the idea of a Christian
cemetery, as a quiet place of beauty, sacred from all intrusion, properly
enclosed and adorned with appropriate entrancearchitecture, with the dead
carried to their resting place, not by drunken roughs of the lowest sort, but
by devout men was hopeless, when happily a solution was unexpectedly found in
gunpowder. The jungle of superstitions and swarms of deviltry that threatened
the peace of Christians was broken by Russian rifles.
One of the Czar’s sailors died in Soul, and Mr. Waeber the Russian envoy inquired of Appenzeller as to
orders to be given to the officer in charge of the firing squad. The American
advised him to enter through the gate and scatter the demons. Stiffened in his
determination by Appenzeller, despite the mob, the Russian lieutenant flatly
refused to have the brave tar’s body carried around to the only entrance which
the demon-doctors approved of, and had it borne to the proper gate. Then
ordering the bearers of the bier to set down the corpse at the spot where the
future imposing gateway was to be built, he had the rifles of the firing squad
point up the slope of the hills—that is, in the face of the host of devils, and
then gave the order for the (three) volleys. The hills gave back the echo, the
welkin reverberated, the spirits fled, and the victory was won. From that day,
it being believed that the demons had been shot away, the pathway of enterprise
in the further development and adornment of the cemetery was one of peace. The
demon-shrine has long since fallen into ruin, while on this bluff overlooking
the glorious Han River, in a fair garden flowers bloomed as the protest of the
resurrection hope against the might and mystery of death, stones of record and
the emblems of the resurrection rose in multiplying evidences, as the numbers
of those increased whom loved ones gave back to God, as pledges of their faith
in the Father’s House of Many Mansions, and in Him as
“Good when he gives, supremely good
Nor less when he denies.”
XXIII Yoke-Fellows in the Gospel
TO secure the best results in the kingdom of God, a
good missionary must be of a cooperative disposition. The tendencies to
independent enterprise in the mission field are great, and the temptations to
develop oddities in personal peculiarities is in some persons still greater.
These often lead to inconsequence and waste of effort. Many a man’s life of labour on Asian soil is as a river that, after a course of
hundreds of miles, loses itself in desert sands.
Cranks and theorists have not been wanting even in the
Korean field. Some stories, as amusing on one side, as they are painful on the
other, could be told of men and women who have cast aside the results of
experience and tried to “hustle the East.” In attempting to force unduly the
processes of spiritual growth, they have flouted the dictates both of the Saviour and of common sense in spuming co-operation and
brotherhood. A. met such persons and good humouredly heard their arguments, or quietly warned them of their folly, or rebuked their
hot-headed impudence, while safeguarding, as far as might be, his own flocks
from the possible ravages of those who flouted alike the bishop’s consecration,
the “dirty hands” of the presbytery, or the “slavery” of the mission boards.
With those, however, who came as true yoke-fellows to bear and share the
burdens of toil, A.’s hearty welcome and sympathetic spirit were confessed by
all. Not only with Christians of his own land, culture or speech, but with the
natives also, was this spirit of co-operation manifest.
One of the best class of testimonies to the value of
his life and work comes from the Koreans themselves, since the name of
Appenzeller is known throughout the peninsula. Many have gladly borne witness
that he first “broke open their hearts.” Full of suspicion and strange notions
at first, they were disarmed and melted by frankness and A.’s evident
willingness to be co-operative, rather than patronising or magisterial. The walls of restraint were levelled and they yielded their
hearts in sincerity to their foreign teacher. “It was a great step towards
wiping out racial prejudice and bringing a reign of mutual Christian trust,
born of a keener insight into our common hopes and a participation therein.” In
this great and Christ- like work, not only Dr. Scranton, but the one—greatest
when without titles—whom all, of any creed or nation, call “Brother Jones,” was
notably co-operative.
Naturally the broad and far reaching plans of the
pioneers to occupy not only the capital, but the whole country, could be but
slowly realised. The great Methodist Church North had
many other missions to maintain and Korea was still only as a seashell to most
Americans. The two chief seaports, Chemulpo and
Fusan, must be first held as citadels, for here the best and the worst of the
nation and of the outside world would come. Here the strongest forces of good
and evil would meet in grapple. Nevertheless, in this situation of the Korean
away from home, there was hope. The very fact that the native was far from his
village graveyard and local demons made his heart the more accessible to the
new religion. In all ancestor-worship-ridden countries, the pagan, when
separated from the ancestral graves and ghostly influences, is all the more
sensitive, as he is free to the gospel call.
To the petition in 1886 for two new men, Rev. George
Heber Jones from Mohawk, N. Y. and Rev. Franklin Ohlinger, transferred from
China, had responded. These, with perhaps a few others, may be reckoned among
the pioneers. Grand was the procession of those who came to give health and
salvation, as well the body as the soul. It was the Lord who gave the word,
“heal the sick,” but the women as well as the men published it and literally
made the Christ-word life and health to the Koreans. Of those natives, who at
this date, 1912, have been healed or helped, the number is not short of half a
million. Shining are the names of the healers—Scranton, the leader, McGill,
Hall, Busteed, Folwell, and Sherman, all male physicians sent out by the
Methodist Mission Board; besides those prophetesses of health, Drs. Meta
Howard, Rosetta Sherwood (Mrs. Hall), Mary M. Cutler, Lillian Harris, and Emma Emsberger, of the Woman’s Board. These from afar were
joined by, or “nursed at thy side,” oh Methodist Church! Mrs. Esther Kim Pak.
This first Korean physician trained in western science and methods in Soul was
the daughter of a native gentleman first employed by Appenzeller in his home,
and she was a pupil in Mrs. Scranton’s school for girls. She secured her
education, chiefly through the energy and devotion of Mrs. Hall, at the Johns
Hopkins University. Then after serving her own people, she joined “the noble
army of martyrs” in this land, once the den of typhus and malaria, but now made
wholesome by science and through sacrifice.
For, an oblation as noble as the patriot’s for his
country, when his blood reddens his native soil, was this sacrifice of
America’s best manhood and womanhood for Korea. One by one the physicians laid
down their lives. Five out of the eleven died. Esther Pak, Wm. J. Hall, Lillian
Harris, sleep in the soil, Drs. Busteed and Sherman, worn out returned home to
die. With these, and with his helpers in the school, or at the printing press,
W. Arthur Noble, George C. Cobb, Homer B. Hulbert, and D. A. Bunker, and last
but not least, the veteran S. A. Beck, Appenzeller was true yokefellow,
shirking no labours or burdens, but ever effectually
working in hearty cooperation.
The American Methodists may not only be humbly
thankful to God for sending them so noble a personality to begin woman’s work
for women as Mrs. Scranton, mother of the physician, but also for her able and
efficient helpers and successors. These have laboured in the Pear Flower School (Ewa Hak-tang), so named by the King of Korea, and
since 1900, housed in a fine brick building. Here have taught, and given to
hundreds of Korean girls the only education they ever received, Miss Louisa C.
Rothweiler, Margaret J. Bengel (Mrs. George Heber Jones), Mary Harris (Mrs.
Folwell), Josephine O. Paine, Lulu E. Frey (Mrs. Hugh Miller), and Mary R.
Hillman. In another line of most needed education, the raising up of trained
woman nurses, Miss Edmunds has been the leader. Perhaps nearest to A. in
pioneering and manifold labours, stood Dr. Scranton;
in educational tasks, Mr. D. A. Bunker; in direct evangelistic work, Mr. Jones;
in literary succession and expansion, Mr. Hulbert; in comradeship, from first
to last, Dr. Horace G. Underwood, and in Bible translation, Dr. J. S. Gale. It
has been given to some of these men, within twenty-five years, to greet, in
some Korean families, four generations of Christians—silver-haired saints and
children in the covenant. In books written by Dr. G. H. Jones, J. S. Gale and
H. C. Underwood one will find fuller lists of Appenzeller’s colleagues and
fellow-workers.
A. felt that the printing press, founded by Dr.
Ohlinger, was his own favourite, though adopted
child. He had watched over it tenderly from the beginning, but having seen it
grow to stalwart proportions, under the daily care of Mr. S. A. Beck, he was
glad to hand it over to one who could fulfil handsomely both the executive and
the scholarly requirements. Homer B. Hulbert, a graduate of Dartmouth College
and Union Theological Seminary of New York city, and long in educational
service in Korea, conducted the Trilingual Press, until its output included
over a million pages annually. He also edited with signal ability the Korean
Repository, wrote the History of Korea, compiled textbooks and, as the friend
of the country and people, sent out a stream of light that has helped mightily
the gospel cause and millions of Koreans. In “The Vanguard,” Beck, the master
of the press is veiled under the name of “Gilbert,” and the “power-house” is
thus pictured.
“By dint of American enterprise, the hum and roar of a
pressroom was heard in the quiet abode of the ancients, where Foster and
Gilbert were. Out of this sweat chamber, besmeared with oil and soot and manned
by bronze orientals, came forth pages, thousands of
them white as snow... In Korean they spoke a new thought to this waiting
people. With Gilbert (Rev. H. G. Underwood) and Foster to translate and
Willis (Rev. S. A. Moffett) to organise a carrying
combine, they [tracts, Bible portions, booklets in Korean] were pushed to the
farthest limits of the land. Away up on the Yalu, they were to be found
papering the walls, sometimes upside down and inside out; but, never mind, send
on more, on to distant Russia and away east into the little hamlets by the Sea
of Japan. The shriekings of the press have grown, not
ceased, and sandalled feet, bearing the message, kick up the dust on all the
mountain highways... The great machines that began with almost nothing, rolled
their million pages.”
Thus by preaching, teaching, translating, journeys oft
on foot and horseback, personal interviews with inquiring souls, was the gospel
seed sown and the way made ready for the shoutings of
triumph, which today are raised from a half million throats out of the depths
of happy hearts cleansed by the spirit. Who thought when the doors of the
Hermit Nation swung ajar, that in one generation, over two hundred thousand
souls would be enrolled in a church that paid its own way and fed daily on the
Word of God? Laus Deo!
His multifarious labours were beginning to tell upon Appenzeller, changing his brown hair to grey and
giving him the look of a man growing old fast. He had made it a principle, as
he wrote in his diary, of asking from his bishop no favours,
or appointments, but only hard work. In 1898, a short season of rest became
imperative and A. made a sea trip, with a companion, north to Vladivostok,
Russian Siberia, on the Japanese steamer Sagami Maru. As they steamed up the
Bay of Peter the Great, the war ship Deutschland was seen carrying Prince Henry
of Germany homeward, he having just finished a visit to this Russian
fortress-city, whose name means Dominion of the East. It was once fondly
expected in St. Petersburg that Russia should here defy her enemies on land
and sea, defend herself from possible aggression, and thence move forward to
humble Japan, control China and dominate eastern Asia.
A. was astonished at the strength of the apparently
impregnable fortress commanding the harbour, and at
the solidity of the brick and stone structures in the city. He met Alexieff, then virtually the Russian dictator of the
region, who afterwards was the chief instrument in causing the awful bloodshed
and waste of the Russo-Japanese war. His secretary, an American officer in
Russian service, named Stephen A. Garfield, had known also our president of the
same name. At Soul, one of the ablest and most congenial Russians was Mr. Waeber, with whom A. was on terms of intimacy. Many men
able to judge believe there would have been no Russo-Japanese war, had Waeber been kept by the Czar at Soul.
In travelling round Vladivostok, A. found that the
Chinese had control of the harbour boat business;
that the Koreans, with many of whom he talked, held the junk trade; while the
Russians monopolised land traffic and whatever moved
on wheels. A. and his companion mounted a drosky and the big horse rushed and
galloped around at a lively rate. The Americans visited the chief buildings,
reared mostly by the labour of Chinese artisans. A.
met one of his former pupils, who had an American father and a Chinese mother.
In the museum and library, he saw a Russian-Korean phrase book of 1874 and was
interested in looking over the collection of works on the peninsular country
and language.
This visit to Russia had but one effect on
Appenzeller. It was to confirm and strengthen his faith in the civilisation of
those countries founded on public schools, general education, self-government,
free religion and self-control; as against the systems of society, government
and church built on arbitrary one-man power, with priests, soldiers and
bureaucracy as their instruments. More than ever, he gloried in being an
American.
XXIV
Second Visit Home
THE manifold labours pressing
upon one who, as pioneer and steadfast worker, was one of the most active in a
great mission, which, as to numbers, was but poorly manned, had begun to tell
fearfully upon the stalwart Pennsylvanian. In 1904, Dr. W. B. Scranton wrote:
“The Appenzeller some of us knew twenty years ago and
the Appenzeller who left our midst recently were indeed one man in natural
qualities and persistence of characteristics, but in general physical
appearance quite dissimilar... his whole life force going out into the work
which occupied and even consumed him. When he went from us, it was as another
man. He was bent in form, worn in features and an old man, though only in
middle life.”
Suffering from insomnia and troubled with a half score
of “Job’s comforters,” even when making in the interest of missionary expansion
a journey of sixteen hundred miles through the provinces, Appenzeller submitted
to medical survey, and under domestic compulsion, actually spent a day in bed.
It was unique in his life. Within five years, his avoirdupois had fallen from
180 to 131 pounds. He was condemned as unfit for longer continuous work at the
old rate and ordered home. Happily at this time, with private aid from his wife
A. was enabled to go home by way of Europe.
When the Korean emperor heard that the friend of his
realm was about to leave for a season, he sent his regrets at not seeing A. in
person, and at having his people lose the benefit of his presence. He despatched a messenger to wish a safe journey and to
present A. with tokens of the imperial appreciation. The inventory of gifts
was this: ten fans, a so-called “jade” tobacco box, with a lid, made of
polished green stone, two rolls of purple and pink and green and red quilted
silk, three screens, and several window shades of split bamboo of finest
quality.
With his household, on this second furlough, taken
after the translation of the New Testament had been completed, A. embarked at Chemulpo, September 28 at 5 p.m., 1900, on the Japanese
steamer, Owari Maru. Out at sea, October 1st, he wrote “My spiritual birthday,
twenty-four years” of life in Christ. In Japan, they stopped while at
Shimonoseki from October 3, 1900, at the Silver Wave Hotel, which was crowded
with guests. The landlord was a wide-awake business man and a Christian. He
spoke English and had a wife who had been educated in Tokyo. During the four or
five days’ stay, Japan being the paradise of children, the second daughters’
birthdays was celebrated, castera (Castile) or sponge
cake and chestnuts being the chief delicacies.
At Fukuoka, A. found his fellow student at Drew
Seminary, Rev. H. B. Johnson, with a girls’ school and Methodist Church in
promising operation. The journey to Nagasaki did not take A. and his party
into Higo, nor did he see the Kisogawa, the rapid
rushing river, but was made by railway, in seven hours, through a region of
valleys and terraced hills covered with rice fields and thickly dotted with
towns and villages. The rice tillage and landscape, in both southern Japan and
Korea closely resemble each other.
At Shanghai, China, October 12th, after $1,200,000
worth of silk had been put on board, the steamer started to skirt the shores of
two continents. Happily they had Miss Scidmore’s Guide Book which enabled them
to enjoy their brief visits on shore, at Hong Kong and the port cities of the
Straits, with economy, ease, and comfort. The usual stops at Singapore,
Columbo, Aden, and Suez were made, the incidents of travel being much like
those that have been familiar to travellers for
decades. This experience opened to the man who was interested in all humanity,
new varieties of the human race ashore and new phases of life on ship board,
above and below. He felt more than ever that the problems of the gospel are
not geographical, but human.
It cost the steamer company $7,000 gold, to pass
through the Suez Canal, the tax on each passenger and each ton of freight
being nine francs.
A strict limit upon sight seeing was to be held to,
while in Europe, and only Naples, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Milan could be
glanced at. After these, the goal was Berne, Switzerland, where A. had
determined to inquire into ancestral geography and genealogy. He found many
names of Appenzellers in the city directory and had a long talk with Miss
Karoline, a mature lady, daughter of a minister, who had died at the age of
eighty-four. She was well informed on the subject. A gentleman of fifty-two,
with his wife and daughter, also welcomed the American bearer of the same name.
A. was told that when the Black Plague visited Switzerland in 1608, hundreds of
the Appenzell people had left their canton and settled in Zurich and other
Swiss cities. Many were teachers, or had in some way been connected with
education, served the church, or made a name in science.
At Lausanne they spent four days, receiving a warm
welcome from Mrs. Scranton, who was away from Korea for the education of the
children. Stops were made at Heidelberg, Bingen and Cologne. They saw not only
the mighty minster, with its spires crowned with their carved finials like
flowers of devotion blossoming in the sky, but looked upon and heard the crowds
cheering for Paul Kruger, late President of the Transvaal Republic, whose sun
had already set. In Belgium, at Liege, once the little episcopal city-state
during nearly a thousand years, but now a vast manufactory, they rested over
night. Next day, admiring the low but beautiful Walloon country, whence came
the first home-making settlers of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, they
arrived in Paris at 1 p.m. A. was not particularly well pleased with the
capital of France, whose social features, as illustrated so glaringly by the
demi-monde, are so ethically uninviting, but in London he felt at home.
Besides seeing the great sights, they worshipped in Wesley’s chapel, where the
full ritual of the Established Church was used. It was with deep emotion that
A. stood in Wesley’s pulpit and also saw the tombs, of Clarke, the commentator;
Watson, author of The Institutes, and of the Wesleys,
both the poet and the church-builder. At this time of novel and rich
experiences, A.’s diary is full of ejaculatory prayers, such as “ Spirit of our
Fathers descend mightily upon us!” He went to St. James’ Hall and heard Rev.
Hugh Price Hughes. In Westminster Abbey, he tried to listen to a sermon by
Canon Gore, but was too tired. The words of the preacher were lost, but the
thronging memories of the mighty monster and the great cloud of witnesses
standing in marble before him, preached the grander sermon. On the 10th of December
they embarked on the Campania for home and landed in New York, December 22d.
At once the duties of the recruiting officer began,
for A. was to persuade his great Church to send the reinforcements so sorely
needed. To those who had known him in the full tide of health and vigour, that prematurely wasted form was its own appeal for
more sympathy and help in the vast field. Yet in preaching and appeal, A.’s
unction was never more manifest, as he illustrated Paul’s word, “Though our
outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” Others were
impressed with the fact so insisted on by Ruskin, and noted by Dr. Scranton,
“that the soul which is active and forceful grows daily, wearing away the
tenement of clay, until it shines through its cerements, manifesting that
irresistible, unquenchable, immortal force within us.”
Some of his old friends scarcely recognised the man from Korea, for he seemed only a shadow of his former self. Instead of
the robust figure and head, of classic profile, ornamented with thick brown
curls, and the rosy face, all suggesting tremendous reserve of physical
resources, there were now grey hair and features that seemed indeed, superb
through the inward moulding of deep spiritual
experiences, but which told of anxiety and care. The bright eyes that always
looked under appearances to find reality, seemed to bum with a deeper
penetration of the need of human souls and the awful seriousness of eternal
truth.
“It was evident to me,” said his classmate, Robert
Watts, “that the Korean climate was too severe for him. I urged him to take
work in his Conference, the Philadelphia; but he replied ‘I have given myself
to Korea and a few years more or less do not so much matter. I am more needed
there than at home. I shall in all probability go to Heaven from the Hermit
Kingdom. It is no less near there than in America.’ He was with me again, when
I was presiding elder of the Wilmington district, in the Wilmington Conference.
He spent a Sabbath with me, speaking three times to the great delight of the
people, many of whom had never seen a missionary and none of whom had seen one
from the Hermit Kingdom. It was still more evident to me that A. was exhausting
his vitality and I again urged him to ask for release. He put his arm around
me, in his old familiar way, as he had a habit of doing in dear old Drew, and
said, ‘No, old man, I cannot do that. My heart, my interests, for the rest of
my life, are bound up in Korea. What would my native workers do without me?’
There spoke a man in Christ Jesus.”
From Rochester, under date of December 12, 1892, the
Rev. J. L. Gracey, in his beautiful penmanship, had written to A. asking for
the manuscript of a history, to the extent of ten thousand words, of the
Methodist Mission in Korea, there being nothing as yet to supply this want. Had
this request been made ten years later, A. would probably have been willing to
undertake the task. In what, however, was only the seventh year of the life of
the Methodist Mission in Korea (apart from the medical work of Dr. Scranton and
the woman’s work by Mrs. Scranton) such a duty would require a modest man to
tell too much about himself. So, although he felt how much people at home
needed exact information and true enlightenment, A. declined the task.
Another decade had elapsed, however, and while at home
during his second furlough, he gave what was among the last things coming from
his pen, a MS. which, when melted down into print, formed an exceedingly vivid
and informing pamphlet of 38 pages, entitled “The Korean Mission of the
Methodist Episcopal Church.” It was published posthumously in a neat booklet of
nearly six by five inches, with an attractive cover, an excellent portrait of
the author, and a number of good halftone pictures. It was sold for a
half-dime, and has been widely circulated, both in the old and in the new and
revised edition, issued in 1911, with a supplementary chapter from the pen of
Rev. George Heber Jones, by the Open Door Emergency Commission, No. 150 Fifth
Avenue, New York city.
On June 15, 1901, after many previous talks with his
father and relatives A. read a paper at the reunion of the Appenzeller
families. (The 15th reunion was held in 1911.) Industry, religion, and
fearlessness seemed to be traits of the stock. On September 4th, father and son
walked from the homestead to Souderton, to see about having the sketch printed.
The same evening, about 9 o’clock A. said goodbye to all, and started for
Korea. The old man, now a lonely widower and grieving for his son, died of apoplexy
four days afterward. He had contracted by exposure, when thinly clothed and in
his slippers, to the night air, but the news of President McKinley’s
assassination aided in the shock and fatal weakness. His son learned the news
when in Korea.
In a supplementary note to his genealogical paper, A.
pays a noble tribute to his father as a man of sterling piety, but of few
words. His idea of training sons was to be ever ready for loving guidance, but,
beyond the point of infancy, to let them find their own way as far as possible.
“This was the wisest of all his good teaching to me,” writes A. “It developed
slowly but surely the principle of self-reliance in me.” In a word, the
far-seeing parent followed both the Divine example and the biblical teaching,
so often illustrated by examples in the Old Testament and taught in the pearl
of parables in the New. The precepts inculcated on the Pennsylvania farm were
carried out in Korea. No more self-reliant church exists than that in Morning
Calm. Nisi Dominus Frustra!
Appenzeller enjoyed his second furlough of only nine
months in the home land and was almost constantly busy. Then he heard again the
call of Korea and his flock there, and, sad as it must be, for the father and
husband to leave his wife and the four children in school, at Philadelphia
first and then at Lancaster, A. made up his mind to return alone to the Orient.
He felt that it was God’s will that he should, as speedily as possible, be back
on the ground. The time had come for the reapers to follow the ploughmen.
Happily before leaving, he was able, when in Souderton, near his native place,
to have a very spirited photograph taken of himself and his household, showing
a most interesting group of six. It was the last time he sat before the camera
at home. The intense earnestness of the man is revealed, with his clearcut
features, in a face that is in itself a protest against unbelief in the
immortality of the soul, and in a pair of hands—truly revelatory of character
and temper, such as Rembrandt might have delighted to paint—expressing at once
refinement, strength, delicacy, and tenacity. The picture is worthy of study.
Often a portrait is a biography.
On his way to “the Orient”—which is all West to an
American—he took in Buffalo. At the PanAmerican Exposition, he heard President McKinley speak, on September 5th, before the
great multitude of his fellow patriots and one traitor.
Here the biographer must pause to call attention to
what seems to him a noteworthy coincidence. Our subject was on his way to
Korea, and we were both together at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, on
that same day, September 4, 1901, but unknown to each other. On the 5th while
standing in the section assigned to the Geological Exhibit of New Jersey, and
recalling five years of student life at New Brunswick, the work of “New
Jersey’s first citizen,” Dr. George H. Cook, head of the Geological Survey, and
many a long tramp over the hills of the mountainous north of the state, a
fellow ex-soldier of the Grand Army of the Republic, recognised by the bronze button in his coat lapel, came near and conversation began. I
called attention to the apparent resemblance to the profile of a human face
shown on the map in the curve of the Delaware River, which forms the
northwestern boundary of New Jersey. Our chat drifted on, until both talkers
found themselves floating on the high tide of patriotism. The veteran, waxing
warm in his enthusiasm, cried out “Where, in all the world, could the chief
ruler of a great nation move about freely, without a strong military escort to
protect him?” He referred to the entrance, the day before of President and
Mrs. McKinley— whom the biographer had known as young Miss Saxton, when in
Europe in 1869, and whom he had not seen since. She sat beside her husband and
the two rode in to see the wonders of falling water, electricity and the
products of the American continent.
Alas for even American pride! Another day passed. The
bullet of the assassin, educated too well by our yellow newspapers, found its
billet in the body of that great president whom A. so much admired. Our chief
magistrate had seemed in glorious incarnation, the embodiment of the wisdom of
an ideal figure, like that in Japanese mythology, named . the Thought-Includer,
who could take all the wise cogitations and arguments, pro and con, contributed
by many others and then, combining them with his own, mark out a sure and
impeccable policy of action.
Sunday the 8th was spent at Colorado Springs. After
Leadville, the Rockies crossed and Salt Lake City left in memory, A. found
himself on board the steamer Empress of China—one of a body of threescore and
five persons among the passengers who were bound on an errand similar to his
own, besides others. One lady was going out to Korea to be the bride of a
missionary. A. recalled the happy day of the first Christian wedding in Soul,
when Rev. D. A. Bunker and Miss Ellers, physicians to the Queen, both missionaries,
were married.
October is the classic month for the westward hegira
of missionaries to “the Orient.” Leaving at 4 p.m., they passed an English ship
whose musicians played “Home Sweet Home,” the response from the American ship
being “Auld Lang Syne.” A.’s two roommates were Capt. William Pack of
Philadelphia, formerly of the Thirty-first
Michigan Infantry, who was returning to Manila as a
civil officer in educational work. The other passenger was a Mr. Gallagher, a
mine operator in Idaho. Although these three men did not hold an identical
theory of the universe, they got along finely as comrades, not only “in the
same boat,” but in the same state-room. The trio is pictured pleasantly, in
Chapter VII of The Days of June (Life Story of June Nicholson, missionary) by
May Culler White, one of Revell’s publications. This etching, of the sunny missionary
and his two chums, if not with absolutely correct details of fact, is spirited.
On Sundays, A. conducted divine service and on ordinary days read Oliver
Goldsmith’s works and diagnosed the heart-disease of China—gambling, the
symptoms of which were abundant in the steerage.
On the way over A. sat at the captain’s table and
greatly enjoyed the passage and his shipmates, most of them bright and
cultivated people. Whatever be the infirmities and human frailties of
missionaries, they are, as a class, the most highly educated, as hard facts,
statistics and impeccable records of colleges and special schools attest, and
they usually make most delightful company to any who has a vital respect for
the Redeemer’s last command. They may be deficient in a supply of small talk
and rather too rich in thoughts of high purposes and grand aims to suit the
average tourist, moneymaker, or traveller on the
world’s common highway, where the multitude, filled with commonplace ideals and
ambitions, walk; but the scholar, man of culture, lover of his fellow-men, or
inquirer after knowledge must be either narrow, “wooden,” or. ultra-fastidious,
who cannot enjoy the missionary.
Since July 7, 1898, Hawaii had been under the Stars
and Stripes as an integral part of the United States. At Honolulu—now the
ethnic laboratory of the American Republic—a reception was given, by their
fellow-labourers in the gospel on shore, to the
travelling missionaries. A. had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Gulick, the father
of a wonderful family of educators, both sons and daughters, and also Dr. Hiram
Bingham, who had been forty-five years in Hawaii. He had an enjoyable talk
with a Judge of the Supreme Court, to whom he gave many points concerning Korea
and the situation in the Far East.
Sixteen and a half years before, on the steamer
Arabic, A. had passed Midway Island, “the northernmost islet of the Hawaiian
group,” extending about 1800 miles N. by W. of Honolulu. Both times, the
steamer moving slowly, approached safely so near to the shore that a pebble
could easily have been tossed from the deck to the beach. The same wild and
beautiful sea waves seemed to be dashing over its desolate shores.
Midway between the two continents, oldest and youngest
in history, this low atoll, over eighteen miles in circumference, encloses
within its circle four smaller islands. These, from three to forty-three feet
high, covered with coarse grass and bushes, are populous chiefly with sea
swallows, there being no human habitations, except the employees of the cable
company. Here, a few years before, a ship-wrecked crew had lived for fourteen
months, until those who had not died of scurvy were rescued. The ship glided
over a submarine peak, which rising from the ocean floor was twenty-two
hundred feet high, yet nearly five hundred feet below the surface. Between the
group of mountain pinnacles, forming Hawaii and the island of Guam, lies the
great abyss, one of the deepest in the world, nearly thirty thousand feet
beneath the ocean ripples.
Some theorists in world-making insist that at this
point the earth exploded and threw out material that now forms the lunar planet
leaving behind a great deep. The matter becoming round, according to universal
law, now makes monthly journeys round the earth. In prose, we call this young
satellite the moon; in poetry,
“That orbed maiden, with white fire laden.”
Korea was calling and Christ’s tireless servant who
had put Matthew and Mark and Paul’s letters to the church at Corinth, into the
language of his flock, now longed, like a trained athlete, to wrestle with the
Hebrew and give the people the whole Bible, in that tongue, wherein “God spake unto the fathers by the prophets.” On April 16, 1902,
he wrote home that the translation committee was to sit unintermittently from October 1st to April 3d, “I am about to buckle down to it for a pull of
several years.” It was not till 1912 that the completed Bible was literally in
the hands of the native Church. Gloria Dei!
XXV
“He Saved Others”
ON arriving in Korea again, A. plunged immediately
into the midst of his work, picking up quickly the many threads of interest.
The Methodist field had now so enlarged that it had to be divided into southern
and northern Korea, and A. was appointed presiding elder of the South Korea
District.
In the Methodist system of organised church life, with its bishops, elders and deacons, the inspectors, or bishops
do not form or belong to an order, but fulfil an office. They are true
overseers, serving during the time for which they are appointed. A dozen or
more bishops had visited Korea during Appenzeller’s period of service, for the
American Methodists are especially careful in the oversight of their stations
in foreign lands. These honoured servants of the
Church were always warmly welcomed and frequently entertained in the
Appenzeller home. At the annual meeting of the mission, held in the spring of
1902, Bishop Moore had ordained two local preachers to be deacons in the
service of the churches. One of these, Kim Chang Sik had had an experience of
imprisonment and torture in Ping Yang and was worthy of his name, Kim, or Iron.
His consecrated life, his holy zeal and his tireless labours among his countrymen have been an inspiration to
native and foreigner alike. The second, Kim Ki Pom, of the same great clan, had
begun and developed his new soul life in Chemulpo.
A glance at the enrolment of Christians in 1902 shows
how greatly the work had developed within the fifteen years from the time of
the initial baptism. The Quarterly Conference was now twelve years old. A
summary of what God had wrought showed that there were three presiding elders
over as many districts; 1,296 members; 4,559 probationers; 14 local preachers;
47 Sunday schools and 47 churches. The contributions of the native Christians
amounted to $1600 in gold, a sum which in America, all things considered, would
certainly mean $10,000.
About this time a sad experience befell Appenzeller,
which undoubtedly, in the providence of God, hastened the termination of his
career on earth. This was the era of railway building in Korea. A concession
had been given to a French syndicate to build an iron road from the capital to
the Chinese frontier, and the work was begun with considerable ceremony on the
8th of February, 1902. At this time a railway from Soul to Fusan was being
built by the Japanese who were preparing for the impending war with Russia.
Even common labourers were on the alert, or nervous
about Russian spies, and ever since the visit of the Czar to Japan, any man of
prominence in a pith helmet was rated as a Russian general. Thousands of these labourers, many of the very worst sort, and others,
ex-swordsmen or soldiers, now poor and glad to earn good wages, had been
brought over from Japan to assist in the work, though most of the heavy labour was done by Koreans. As yet only the loose earth
embankments and the preliminary rough tasks of digging and grading could be
seen.
Bishop David Hastings Moore, who had been in Korea the
year before, returned in May, 1902. To one of the village churches at Muchinae, near Soul within Appenzeller’s district, the
bishop and the presiding elder, with some friends started on Sunday, June 1, to
the service. In the party were also Rev. W. C. Swearer, Miss Melvin, and Miss
Moore. The ladies and the bishop were in a jinrikisha, Swearer and Appenzeller
were on bicycles.
Let not the reader think of an edifice of brick or
stone, but rather one of wood, earth, mortar and thatch, in Korean style.
Against the background of the everlasting mountains rose this modest house of
worship, able to hold a few score people and set within an area marked off with
the usual wall or fence of broom com and mud. A few feet forward, from the
front gate, was reared an arch or portal of greenery, while flying on a pole
near by was the church flag—the white banner of the red cross and underneath it
the Korean national ensign. Hard by the chapel was the humble parsonage, in
which the pastor and his family were to live. On this day, hundreds of
white-robed people had gathered with their little ones to welcome the coming of
their American friends, who were to preside over the joyful ceremonies.
Nevertheless the guests did not arrive, nor were two of them in very
presentable condition when they turned back to the capital, being more
appropriately patients for a hospital than speakers at a festal, Sabbath
gathering.
What had happened is told in full in the Korean
Repository for June, 1902, which also contains a striking memoir of
Appenzeller, by Rev. W. C. Swearer and the story of a midnight disaster at sea.
Laying aside all feeling in the matter, the outstanding facts are as follows.
Keeping in mind the Japanese fear of Russian spies and their traditional ideas
as to pith helmits, one may find a reason for and
interpretation of what happened.
At one point, on the way to the village of Muchinae, the road crossed and recrossed the embankment
of the Soul-Fusan railway. When the party reached the first point of
intersection, they all kept on the regular road, except A. and the Korean, Mr.
Mun. These as they were somewhat in the rear, walked along the hundred yards or
so of the railway embankment. There was no sign of warning, or notice not to
walk thereon. The main party had crossed the embankment and A. and his Korean
friend had nearly reached the end of their short cut, when a Japanese labourer, from a camp near by, came running along. He made
at once for the jinrikisha, in which the bishop rode, and seizing it, prevented
the whole party from proceeding. Mr. Swearer, who was in advance, returned to
see what was the matter. Mr. Appenzeller asked the labourer to desist, saying that they were not aware that they were trespassing, and that
hereafter they would take good care that all kept to the main road. This he
repeated several times, attempting to smooth matters over by an apology, but
the slow-brained, or ultrasuspicious fellow refused to let go, and neither
gave any reason, nor suggested any alternative.
Time was pressing and punctuality lay on their
conscience. Instead of waiting until the man’s dull wits could act, the Bishop,
who may have thought the offender one of his own servants, gave the fellow’s
knuckles a rap with his walking stick, “as a little reminder that a party of
perfectly inoffensive citizens cannot be held up by any half-naked coolie on a
public highway for in indefinite period.” So wrote the editor of the Korean
Review.
This might have passed in China, where the Chinese
have long been accustomed to such discipline from foreigners. The Japanese,
however, are of another fibre. This blow, however
slight, was taken as a declaration of war, and the labourer,
screaming to his fellows in camp, just beyond a little hill, leaped to the side
of the road, seized a stone as large as his two fists and hurled it with all
his might. Happily the stone hit only the pith helmet of the bishop and did no
harm. Then Appenzeller, Swearer and the Korean stepped in between the Japanese
and the bishop to defend the latter. Two or three other labourers rushed up armed with clubs and Appenzeller, struck hard, was the first to fall.
He rose again and he and Mr. Swearer tried to hold the Japanese in check, while
at the same time moving down the road as rapidly as possible. One of the
Japanese ran to a pile of sticks near by and picked up one as an ugly weapon.
As Mr. Swearer looked round, to glance at the struggling party he had left, he
was struck a murderous blow on the forehead, which felled him to the ground,
tore off the skin, which fell over his eyes and cut a deep wound. He struggled
to his feet again, with the blood streaming down his face, and saw Appenzeller
also covered with blood, holding off the Japanese as best he could.
By this time, however, the conscience of the Japanese labourers awoke. Evidently they realised that these were not Russians but Americans. As they came to themselves, they
saw the seriousness of the situation in which they had placed themselves and at
once drew back. The American party washed the blood away at the nearest water
and then wended its way back to Soul, where the wounds of the injured were
dressed. An excellent photograph shows two men with damaged faces, but still
resolute to remain in Korea to do the people good. In recounting the exact
facts, the large hearted bishop declared that he laid up nothing against Japan
for this folly of a few labourers.
The matter was promptly reported to the American
Legation. Dr. Allen acted immediately, and the Japanese quickly made arrest of
the culprits and instituted a trial. Of the three labourers,
two were sentenced to two months and one to one month imprisonment, with hard labour.
Not having heard all sides of the question and knowing
nothing as an eye-witness, the writer withholds judgment or comment. Yet
evidently, this is one of many instances in which Japanese justice has been
almost as much of a farce as when in American consular courts in Japan, or
even in America, notably in Boston, at trials attended by the writer, Japanese
have sought to get justice of Americans.
The necessity of Appenzeller’s remaining in Soul as an
eyewitness, to give testimony at the trial, delayed his attendance at the
meeting of the Bible Translation Committee, which was set for the first week in
June at Mokpo, in South Korea, where was a flourishing mission of the American
Presbyterian Church, South. Instead of going in the ship he had intended to
sail with Drs. Underwood and Gale, he engaged a berth, for June n, 1902, on the
Osaka Navigation Company’s steamer Kumagawa, of 558
tons. The first-class passengers on the boat were Mr. J. F. Bowlby, an American
miner from Unsan, Korea, in poor health, returning to
his home in Indiana, two or three Japanese gentlemen and Appenzeller, who took
with him also Mr. Cho his native secretary or assistant and a little Korean
girl from Miss Doty’s Presbyterian school in Soul, who was to return to her
home in Mokpo, in A.’s care.
Of the two or three printed accounts of this voyage
and disaster, one, touched with imagination, is that given in “The Vanguard.”
“That night McKecheren dropped a letter to Foster.... ‘Come and see what God is doing here and we’ll
go back together and be inspired afresh for our part of the task (of Bible
translation). His voice and Foster’s might never be heard, but here were the
results of their labours [on the New Testament in
Korean, and its universal study by the native Christians] going on.
“When McKecheren’s letter
reached Foster, he at once set his house in order for a trip knowing that there
must be something worth seeing to call forth so enthusiastic an expression
from a canny Scotchman.
“Steamers of from four to seven hundred tons, manned
partly by Japanese and partly by Koreans made two or three trips a week
starting from Chemulpo. He would take one of these
and join the friends who had gone before him and add his hallelujah. How
glorious the day!
“Foster rejoiced at the evidence of the white man’s
energy [shown at Chemulpo] for he believed fully that
in the wake of the Gospel would come all the triumphs of civilisation. The
trader, the merchant, the engineer, the miner, were messengers of good,
provided they recognised God and the rights of their
fellow-men. He was glad, glad of the age he lived in, glad to behold the
peaceful scene, blessed with evidences of contentment and prosperity.
“He pulled out to his steamer and saw the captain
sitting cross-legged reading a book. They would not sail for two hours yet,
perhaps not for longer, he would see. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when
the anchor was weighed and the ship pulled out of harbour.
In a few hours he would be across this sleepy sea and into scenes of life and
animation, that would gladden his heart and reward him for the arduous labours of many a translation day.”
We may explain that the Osaka Steamship Company had in
its fleet several steamers named after the gawa, or
rivers of Japan, among them the Kiso, a stream in the main island flowing down
from the “Alps” in central Japan. I have often seen it in its proud flood. The
other, the Kuma, in Kiushiu, so famous for its rapids, is one of the swiftest
streams in the Empire. The name of the latter, when linked to a sinking
steamer, was to live up to its reputation. After each name, Kisogawa and Kumagawa, was the lucky word Maru, signifying
precious, stout, or stalwart, or valuable, much as we say stanch, or “the good
ship,” so and so.
Dr. H. N. Allen writes of the day before the voyage:
“I asked Appenzeller to repeat the Lord’s Prayer in Korean, together with some
other matters in the native tongue for my phonograph. I thus made an excellent
record of his splendid voice in the very tongue into which he had assisted to
translate these masterpieces. I brought this record home and sent it to his
widow. Mr. Appenzeller spent the night with us at our summer home at Chemulpo, prior to taking the steamer to the South. On his first coming to Soul [in 1885] he and his wife were guests at our home.
It is therefore a strange coincidence that our house at Chemulpo should have been the last stopping place for him on land in Korea.”
“Night closed dark,” continues “The Vanguard,” “but
the sea was steady and the churning of the screw ceased not. He would go below
and turn in. Suddenly there was a mighty jar, the sound of cracking steel and
splintering wood and then an awful silence. Who can tell the flashes of those
few moments that shoot in their long streamers across the mind? There were mad shoutings and frantic footfalls on deck. They had been
rammed by another ship. [The Kisogawa, 675 tons, of
the same line.] Someone had blundered and their boat was going down into the
deep. There was no help, no hand stretched out, no rope to hold of; ropes and
spars and engines and anchor chains, everything was going. Underneath this most
hopeful of men, whose face had known no shadow and whose life was thanksgiving
and joy, the earth and its supports were giving way. Over went the ill-fated
steamer, a rushing, gurgling sound, some ripples under.the shadow and it was quiet. A day or two later when Willis and McKecheren were in the midst of examinations there came a
messenger in hot haste with a telegram. ‘Wreck on the Yellow Sea. Foster among
the missing’. The loss of Foster changed the conditions of work in the capital
and McKecheren had to leave at once. The needs were
increased and their best worker had fallen.”
More exact and detailed are the descriptions of Mr.
Bowlby, and Dr. H. N. Allen. The survivor, as stated in The Korea Review, says
that about ten o’clock that night he and Mr. Appenzeller, having made friends
with each other, partook of a light supper of tea and biscuit and then retired
to their state-room. Mr. Bowlby undressed and got into his berth but did not go
to sleep. His state-room was immediately opposite that of Mr. Appenzeller and
he could see the latter sitting in his state-room reading. No whistle was
blowing and the ship was apparently on her course. There was, however, a mist
gathering, which soon deepened in a fog. The tide was running rapidly to mount
thirty feet high, but the water was calm. The sea here is about 150 feet deep.
Not far away was the small island of Osayto, and the
entrance to Kunsen was near by. In a word, it was not distant from the scene
of the wrecks of the French frigates La Gloire and La Victorieuse in 1847.
A few minutes elapsed when, without the least warning,
there came a terrific crash, which brought Mr. Bowlby to his feet instantly.
The Kumagawa had been struck by the Kisogawa, twenty feet from her bow, and began at once to
sink. Mr. Appenzeller cried out “What’s the matter?” In about ninety seconds
after the collision Mr. Bowlby had partly dressed and was making for the
companionway, with Mr. Appenzeller immediately in front of him. He saw two
Koreans coming out of their cabins (the Secretary and the little girl?) but
thinks they never reached the deck.
The whole forward half of the deck was already
submerged and the stem was lifted high out of the water. Mr. Appenzeller, who
seemed to be labouring under great excitement,
apparently made no attempt to get away from the ship, but Mr. Bowlby leaped aft
and climbed upon the rail. As the boat settled, he looked round and saw Mr.
Appenzeller up to his waist in water and groping vainly for something to take
hold of. The ship went down at an angle of about forty-five degrees.
Mr. Bowlby’s watch, which he had on at the time of the
collision stopped at half-past ten, so that the wreck must have occurred only a
few minutes before this time.
He was drawn down, he believes, about fifteen feet
until he felt a shock, which came from the bursting of the boilers. Rising to
the surface, Mr. Bowlby, though an expert swimmer, was sucked down in the
eddies repeatedly and once struck in the back by a piece of timber; but, on
coming to the surface again, he could see the lights of the Kisogawa Maru, which had rammed the Kumagawa Maru, about two
hundred yards away. He heard cries of help from the direction of the wreck. By
means of an upturned lifeboat which floated near, with a large part of its
bottom ripped off, he was able to remain above water about three-quarters of
an hour, until taken up by the rescue boats from the Kisogawa.
The water was so deep that the steamer was unable to anchor, but she kept
steaming in the vicinity of the wreck, trying to find other survivors, until 1
p.m. next day, recovering on a tangled wreckage, but one body, that of a
Korean, and then headed for Chemulpo, eighty-six
miles northward. The total loss of life, with the sinking of the Kumagawa Maru, was, besides Appenzeller, 4 Japanese and 14
Korean passengers, and 8 of the crew. To remain fifteen hours in trying,
perchance, to save even one life, rears a noble milestone in Japan’s value
set on human life, as compared with what I saw in the interior in 1871, when
life was as cheap as dirt.
Mr. Bowlby had lost all but his life in the
foundering of the Kumagawa. When the news was
telegraphed to the American mines in Unsan, his
comrades, with characteristic generosity, raised and sent him by telegraph $300
gold and on the 16th he sailed for America.
Why Appenzeller, even though dressed, delayed to reach
the deck, and thus lost the precious minute or two, in which he might have
saved his own life, is fully explained by his self-sacrificing spirit. It was
in attempting to get to his Korean secretary and to the little Korean girl
under his care, hoping to call and arouse them, and in not taking sufficient
precautions for his own safety, that he lost his life.
“Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay
down his life for his friends.”
The news was cabled to New York, but the officers of
the Mission Board waited in hope, during several days, before announcing the
reality to Appenzeller’s family, trusting that some word of his reaching the
shore might be received, but none came.
Not in a single grave, in that sleeping place in
Korea’s soil, by the banks of her noblest river, which he had so lovingly
toiled to beautify, but in
“The many-peopled grave down in the free
Untrodden cemeteries of the sea,”
Henry Gerhart Appenzeller sleeps. He entered Heaven
“with a soul in his arms.”
In boyhood’s days, as we recall, one of DeWitt
Talmage’s favourite hymns, at the Communion Service,
where the dear ones gone were remembered, was this:
“From the roaring surge they come
From the darksome depths of woe
Peril, weariness and shame
Marked their chosen lot
below.
“ Sinking in the ocean brine,
Jesus caught them from the flood.
Lo! how bright their garments shine
Blanched in their Redeemer’s blood.”
XXVI
The Whitening Harvest
I EXPECT, if God spares my life, to visit every
province of Korea, to preach the gospel to the tiger-hunters of the North and
the rice farmers of the South,” wrote Appenzeller the pioneer, in the eighties.
With him vision and service were ever hand in hand. In part his dream was actualised, dining his life on earth; but in the fulness of
the glory of today, Appenzeller never participated. It pleased God to bury the
workman but to let the work go on. Others reaped where the pioneer went forth
with precious seed.
Into this alluring field of promise, in one of the
oldest of nations, labourers from the youngest of
commonwealths soon entered. It was not alone Mother England that sent her
individual sons and daughters. The heritage and momentum of faith and prayer in
the old country moved her children in the daughter nations. Out of Canada
and Australia, once colonies but now leaders among selfgoverning nations, bands of consecrated Christian men and women crossed the sea to Korea.
They came to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, preach the gospel and to
illustrate in joyful obedience, the Saviour’s own
story of the divine gift for human need, and to heed his permanent reminder and
command—“freely ye have received, freely give.” Thus the younger peoples of the
earth, vieing with and excelling even the Koreans in
their fundamental sanctions of filial piety—youth serving age—ministered in
Christ’s name. The exultant joy, in which young Canada and youthful Australia,
moved with the sweet compulsion of love to their Divine Master, hastened to
serve in “Christ’s new-born nation,” fulfilled, in spirit at least, some of the
grandest prophecies penned on the deathless pages of Isaiah.
Yet not to these channels, wrought in English-speaking commonwealth so far apart, was the river of abounding grace and
brotherly sympathy confined. One would suppose that the people of the southern
states of the American Union had had themselves, during the past half century,
enough reverses, sorrows, burdens and discouragements to bear, without caring
for poor Korea. Yet what were the cost of the spikenard, the breaking of the
flask, the sacrifice of perfume and of the precious ointment poured forth, compared
with the joy of grateful obedience and loving service? All the past history of
the South, to one intimately acquainted with her spirit, reveals a spicy odour of romance, chivalry and generous impulse, which a
Northerner, however he may love his own granite hills, and glacier-chiselled lakes and valleys, must admire. After a hundred
noble manifestations of progress, in social, political, literary, and
industrial lines of achievement by the Old and the New South, how superb was
the elan with which our fellow-Americans from the region of palms and cotton
sprang to the new opportunity! The Son of Man went forth to war, but the
Southerner was among the first to follow in his train—even beyond seas to
Korea.
Happily for the missionary conquest of Morning Calm,
Christianity has not been presented to the Koreans in too many forms, either of
doctrine, or polity, or with excess of ethnic oddities. Surely the personal
peculiarities of the foreigners themselves ought to suffice for the puzzling
of the natives. We count it a happy omen that the whole field is occupied, in
the main, by Christians whose subordinate names of Methodist, Presbyterian,
and Anglican include the enterprises from the several countries. By mapping out
the whole area of the seventeen provinces of Cho-sen,
work has been accomplished with no overlapping and with commendable economy.
Surely this decade of years, since the pioneer sank
from sight, has been Korea’s most glorious era. The astonishing change has been
wrought
“By the dear might of Him who walked the wave,
and, to God be all the glory. The sorcerers and
demon-worshippers have been for the most part made to disappear, or to dwell
with the moles and bats. The idols are not yet utterly abolished, and the devilshrine still stands; but, where there were hosts,
these are now but relics and survivals. In their place has risen the church,
the school, the dispensary, the hospital, the preaching station. New Christian
villages by the score and worshipping congregations by the hundred tell of
whole regions redeemed. Verily there is a new landscape in Korea, as well as a
new spirit in the people.
As for Soul, the capital, it is hard to keep up with
the changes wrought even within the year 1911. With modem hats, shoes, clothes
and coiffure, young Korea is assimilating his life, outwardly, at least, with
the rest of humanity in that part of the world in which minutes and seconds
have value. Modem edifices often imposing and beautiful dot the city. In place
of the old fire-signals on the mountain tops, are telegraphs and telephones.
Rows of trees beautify streets, avenues and hillsides. From within, the Korean
has a new outlook upon the universe and human history, and both men and women
share in the new hope which changes many hearts and faces. City, houses, and
people, within and without, tell of Korea’s new era, when the ruling ideas
governing human life are Christian.
The general course of the movement of the Holy Spirit
has been hinted at in the verses at the end of this chapter, but the missionary
situation in 1912, as we lay down our pen, is thus set forth by Mr. Hamilton
Holt, editor of The Independent, New York, who has just returned from a visit
to Korea.
“The missionaries are still doing the most for
education. Christianity is flourishing. There are now about 205 foreign
missionaries in Korea, mostly American Presbyterians and Methodists. There are
807 Christian churches and over 200,000 professing Christians. The churches
have besides the foreign missionaries about 400 native pastors. They have also
attached to them 350 schools giving instruction to 15,000 Korean boys and
girls; also 15 hospitals.
“The Japanese Government has been so impressed by the
work of the Y. M. C. A. at Soul [the splendid edifice erected by Mr. John
Wanamaker] that it has given it $5,000 a year, the only sum thus far donated
for any benevolent purpose.”
Surely in view of the past, all who love and pray for
Korea may thank God and take courage.
“The day is short
The work is great
The Master is pressing.”
XXVII. The Wind of the Spirit
No wind or gale vexed Korean seas,
While signal lamps were burning;
’Twas misty when night’s fog came down,
With crashing ships o’ertuming.
But lo! at mom the new day dawned
The isles and hills revealing;
A gentle breeze rose o’er the land,
From blooms the perfume stealing.
So, when the Spirit, breath of God,
Blew o’er Great Morning Splendour,
New savours sweet—life unto
life—
Revealed the gifts God sent her.
Here lay a valley of dry bones,
As of the slain long waited;
And yet, perchance, might come the day
Of souls anew created.
For not impossible that God—
The dead his voice once hearing—
Might clothe these bones with flesh and blood,
Once more to life uprearing.
The dream so strange to sight came real.
Behold an army living
Ask of the way the Christ had trod,
Their best to him now giving!
Thus startled, to behold the host
The toilers had awaited,
Fresh signs of power they sought anew
That strength with grace be mated.
And wise were they who not on storm
Of war, or statecraft’s rending
That tore down thrones, or set up force
On sword or spear depending!
No! gentle was the word of grace,
Christ’s heralds kept proclaining,
Of peace and pardon in the soul,
All earthly glories shaming.
Not for a kingdom based on might,
To pass with time’s swift fleeting,
But everlasting as the Rock
Of Ages, undepleting.
No mighty sound or cannon’s smoke,
Or tempest’s breath, or thunder!
’Twas but the still small voice, the Christ’s
Made Morning Calm to wonder.
Yes, Spirit-born, these gales of God,
A nation great now sweeping,
Taught sons of hope love’s way to ask,
And lift the Christian’s greeting—
‘Abba Father’! we turn no more
To idols that enslave us,
But cleansed in soul, raise holy prayer
To Him alone who saves us.”
And to this plea, the Lord of Life,
E’en e’er they cry, does hearken,—
“The pathway to your Father’s love
With guilty fears ne’er darken.
“Behold my servant, mine elect,
Who not with strife or crying,
Bids you his yoke now gladly take
His burdens not denying.”
Oh Korea! bruised reed so long,
Deep in oppression’s mire;
Uprear thy head and wave thy fronds
In sunlit beauty higher!
Thy smoking flax, though smould’ring long,
Now bursts in flame, illuming
The path where pilgrims catch the gleam
From Heaven’s fair towers looming.
Let law or flag be what it may,
Thy sons of expectation,
Like Israel old, when Christ-redeemed
Pray now for every nation.
Yes hermit once, now Spirit-filled
The Korean, erst secluded,
Yearns now that nations all be blessed,
In God’s great love included.
Sleep, servant of the living God,
Thy labours o’er; now
resting,
Thy works do follow, richly seen—
Korea her Christ confessing.
The Word of God, on which thou toil’dst,
Shines now the land o’er streaming;
The nation’s face, the homes once dark,
Suffused with joy are beaming.
What thou in faith’s clear vision saw,
Seems now in sure fulfilling,
All Cho-sen glad her Master
hails,
Low at his feet sits willing.
To bear, to suffer, to obey,
In love’s sweet obligation,
Forgiven much, she feels the debt;
Behold Christ’s new-born nation!
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