Chapter XL · PERSECUTION AND MARTYRDOM—1801–1834.

The first attempt of a foreign missionary to enter the hermit kingdom from the west was made in February, 1791. Jean dos Remedios, a Portuguese priest from Macao, offered himself, was accepted, and left Peking for the Border Gate with some Chinese guides. After a twenty days’ journey in midwinter, he arrived on the frontier, and there awaited the precarious chances of recognition, according to certain signs agreed upon. For ten days he scanned the faces of the noisy crowd, hoping every moment to light upon friends, but in vain. The Christians, kept at home by the violence of the persecution, feared to venture to the border. The fair closed, the embassy crossed the Yalu River, while the foreigner and his Chinese guides returned to Peking. There the disappointed priest soon after died.

About the same time, the Bishop of Peking addressed a letter to the Pope detailing the origin, development, and condition of the new-born church in Corea.

Hearing no word from the Corean Christians during the next two years, it was determined to send succor. For this perilous mission, a young Chinese priest named Jacques Tsiu, twenty-four years old, of good bodily strength and pronounced piety, whose visage closely resembled a Corean’s, was selected. Fortified with extraordinary ecclesiastical powers, he left Peking in February, 1794, and in twenty days arrived on the neutral ground. There he met the Christians, who urged him to wait nearly a year, on account of the vigilance of the sentinels. This he did among his fellow Christians in Shing-king, and on the night of December 23, 1794, crossed the Yalu, reached Seoul in safety, and at once began his labors. All went on well till June, when, through a treacherous visitor, the official spies were put upon his track. In spite of his removal to another place, three Christians—two who had guided him to Seoul, and one an interpreter, who in sublime self-sacrifice tried to pass himself off as the Chinaman—were seized and tortured. With arms and legs dislocated, and knees crushed, they refused to betray their brother in the faith, and were put to death in prison, June 18. The three headless and battered trunks were flung in the Han River, which for the first, but not for the last time was streaked with martyr blood.

Meanwhile, the Chinese priest was at first hidden for many days under a wood-pile by a Christian lady, who, having gained over her mother-in-law, sheltered him in her house, where, protected by the law which forbids a noble’s dwelling to be invaded, he remained three years. In September, 1796, he wrote a letter in Latin to the Bishop of Peking, and the native Christians writing in Chinese, the copies on silk were sewed into the garments of two believers, who, having bought positions as servants in the embassy, arrived in Peking, January 28, 1797. Among other things Jacques proposed that the King of Portugal should send an embassy to the King of Chō-sen to obtain a treaty of friendship, and allow the residence of physicians, astronomers, and scientific men in Corea.

House and Garden of a Noble.

The Chinese priest was outlawed by the government, in a public proclamation. On reading this, the brave man left the house of the noble lady in which he had been sheltered, and refusing to endanger longer the lives of his friends, voluntarily surrendered himself, and received the death-stroke, May 31, 1801, at the age of thirty-two. His hostess, Colombe, thrown in prison herself, while awaiting death wrote out his life and works on the silk skirt of her dress. At her execution the noble lady begged that she might not be stripped of her clothes, as were other malefactors, but die in her robes. Her request was granted, and with the grace of the English Lady Jane Grey, she laid her head on the block. Four other women, formerly attendants in the palace, and an artist, who for painting Christian subjects was condemned, were beheaded by the official butchers, who made the “Little Western Gate” of Seoul—where a Christian church may yet be built—a Golgotha. The policy of the government was shown in making away with the Christians of rank and education, who might be able to direct affairs in the absence of the foreign priests, and in letting the poor and humble go free.

It now devolved upon the king of Chō-sen to explain to his suzerain the execution of a Chinese subject. In a letter full of Confucian orthodoxy, he declares that Chō-sen from the time of Ki Tsze, had admitted no other dogmas than those taught by the sages of China—“all other doctrine is strange to the Little Kingdom.” He describes the Christians as “the monstrous, barbarous, and infamous” “sect of brigands” “who live like brutes and birds of the vilest sort,” and who in their plot, “have interlaced themselves as a serpent and knotted themselves together like a cord.” The plan to conquer “the Little Kingdom at the corner of the earth” by myriads of men and vessels from Europe is detailed, with an apology for the execution of Jacques, not as a Chinese subject, but as chief conspirator. Dallet suggests that, in answer to this letter, the Dragon Monarch read the king a tart lecture, and hinted that a rich stream of silver would soothe his ruffled scales. “China had not been China had she lost so fair an occasion to fleece her cowering vassal.”

A fresh edict, made up of the usual fixed ammunition of Corean rhetoric, was fulminated against “the evil sect,” January 25, 1802. The result was to advertise the outlawed faith in every corner of the realm. Nevertheless, the condition of the Christians scattered in the mountains and northern forests, or suffering poverty, hunger, and cold at home, was deplorable, under the stress of political as well as religious hatred.

Out of the modern catacombs of Roman Christianity, the Corean converts addressed two letters, dated December 9 and 18, 1811, to the Pope—“the Very High, Very Great Father, Chief of the whole Church”—in which they invited help, not only of a spiritual nature, but aid in ships and envoys to treat with their king. They were willing even to leave their native land and colonize the islands in the sea, for the sake of worship and conscience. Signed with fictitious names, copied on silk, and sewn in the clothing of the messenger, they reached Peking and Rome, but the bishop of neither city could afford succor. His Holiness was then a prisoner at Fontainebleau, and the Roman propaganda was nearly at a standstill. With a goodly supply of medals and crosses, the messenger returned, and the church in Corea enjoyed peace, and new converts were made until 1815, when a non-political persecution broke out for a while in Kang-wen and Kiung-sang.

The year 1834 closed the first half century of Corean Christianity.

In this chapter, the moral weakness of Roman Catholic methods of evangelization in Corea, and elsewhere in Asia, has been revealed. It must be remembered that the Corean converts were taught to believe not only in the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Pope, but also in the righteousness of his claim to temporal power as the Vicar of Heaven. Untaught in the Scriptures of the New Testament, and doubtless ignorant of the words of Jesus—“My kingdom is not of this world; if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight”—the Coreans suspected no blasphemy in the papal claim. Seeing the Pope’s political power upheld by the powerful European nations then under Bourbon rule, the Corean Christians, following the ethics of their teachers, played the part of traitors to their country; they not only deceived the magistrates, and violated their country’s laws, but, as the letter of Alexander Wang shows, actually invited armed invasion. Hence from the first Christianity was associated in patriotic minds with treason and robbery. The French missionary as the forerunner of the French soldier and invader, the priest as the pilot of the gunboat, were not mere imaginings, but, as the subsequent narrative shows, strict logic and actual fact. It is the narrative of friends, not foes, that, later, shows us a bishop acting as spy and pilot on a French man-of-war, a priest as guide to a buccaneering raid; and, after the story of papal Christianity, the inevitable “French expedition.”