Aug. 1.
To-day is un important anniversary in the annals of Protestant missionary endeavour in China, for one hundred years ago Dr. Robert Morrison, 1.t.D. born in 1782, died at the age of 52 years. The son of Scottish parents, at Buller's Green near Morpeth, Northumberland, the Jad, who was to become the pioneer missionary in China, received an elementary education after which he appears to have been apprenticed to his father as 'a last-maker, and to have devoted his spare time to the study: of theology. At the age of 21 he was received into the Independent Academy at Hoxton, and the following year offered his services to the London Missionary Society, after which, following a short study of the Chinese langu appointed to Canton in 18 rest of his career will be found in special article elsewhere in this issue, It is not easy in these days to picture the conditions in which the young enthusiast had to work. Easy enough to picture the Factory fat Canton as an enlarged prison the inmates of which had little opportunity of communication with the outside, and Morrison, because of the work he wished todo, rela tively still less. He felt himself a burden on his Society and it was a good stroke of fortune that led to his appointment as translator to the East India Company, which gave with an opportunity of doing the work which will establish his name for all time as one of those who performed great, services the spreading of the knowledge of the Gospels. Seven years after his arrival in Canton he had published Chinese grammar and the transation of the New Testament into Chinese. These were the first fruits of his decision that the best means of proselytizing China was by the dissemination of the scriptures in the language of the country. It was the work of a rear enthusiasm coupled with undoubted genius, for, when the opportunities of acquiring a knowledge of the language then compared with the facilities which are now offered are taken into consideration, it must be reaized that the task he had undertaken was attended with difficulties the full nature of which is not readily to be appreciated in these days, The man's energy must have been enormous, for three years after the publication of the New Testament in Chinese there appeared "A View of China for Philological Purposes." That was in 1817. The next year a translation of the Old Testament was issued in col-
Jaboration with William Milne, and three years after that the "Chinese Dictionary", a monumental work in six quarto volumes, prepared by himself, was published by the East India Company, who demonstrate their estimation of his work by sinking £12,000 in its publication, But Morrison's work did not end here. Simultaneously he was pushing the work for the evangelization of China. In 1821, he had established an Anglo-Chinese Col lege at Malacca for the "reciprocal cultivation of Chinese and European literature," training evangel ists who could proceed to the mainland and do work for the furtherance of Christianity with a greater degree of safety than Mor-risen himself could have done. Not that it is to believed he would not have done 0, but because he rea lized early enough the necessity of instructing a body of men in the religion and their despatch into China itself, thereby obtaining in the long run quicker results than could have been expected to accrue from his own single effort. Tt was indeed the safest possible indication thet this man realized the necessity for an organized spreading of the Christian knowledge and the establishment of a rudimentary staff of teachers who could multiply many times the results that would have been obtained from a very circumscribed individual effort. What is of even more importance was his understanding of the best methods of appeal to the Chinese. He was indeed not only the pioneer of the missionary as such, but early in his career China, added to the enormous debt which foreigners and Chinese owe him for his literary research, by setting up a dispensary manned by Chinese "who had learned the \main principles of European treat-{ment and thus marked himself out as the forerunner of modern medical missions.
Great oaks do indeed from little acorns grow. It was a far cry from the humble last-maker's shop, wherein a young man dreamed of the theology to which his mind was ever {urned, to the factory at Canton, to the translated Scriptures, to Chinese Dictionary, a college and eventually the modest dispensary where men's bodies were aided as likewise their souls. And yet in petro it is a picture of the subse quent development of Protestant missions in China. His dictionary paved the way for the enormous amount of research which has since been done in the Chinese language, his-college established principles for the spread of the Gospel which wave since been fully recognized and acted upon on an appropriately larger scale, and his dispensary aught to those who came. after him the great need of paying attention to temporal wants as well as spiritual. It is an astonishing fact that at a time when the foreigner was most hated and despised, as he was in those old Factory days, and not entirely without cause, there was a man working quietly not only to obtain an understanding of the Chinese in which s0 many of his fellow Europeans were s0 lamentably lacking, but was doing much to see that ultimately the Chinese should arrive at a better "appreciation of the stranger within their gates. Not only that, he was preparing the way for the bringing of inestimable treasure from the West into the last fastness of the East, preparing the means of bringing further enlightenment into the country, one which at that time would have none of it. He had to combat the prejudices of centuries, to make a breach in the walls of self-satisfied complacency which even now have not yet completely crumbled, and provide the means for those who came after him to continue from where he left off when he was cal-
Ted elsewhere at the end of what nowadays would be considered a comparatively short life, Much has happened since Morrison quietly pursued his way towards well defined ends in those old days, not all of it to foreign or Chinese credit, but it can be safely said that China is the better for the life work of such 'a man, who so substantially proved himself a servant of his God and his fellows.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.