THE LIFE STORY OF HENRY G. APPENZELLER A.D.1858-1902

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,

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

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 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

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.”

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

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

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.”

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.

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!

READING HALL THE DOORS OF WISDOM 2024

INTRODUCTION TO THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE ACCORDING THE GENESIS

OPENING OF THE UNIVERSAL TESTAMENT OF CHRIST

THE HEART OF MARY. LIFE AND TIMES OF THE HOLY FAMILY

A MODERN PIONEER IN KOREA