Larger Strategy

“We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,

And sitting by desolate streams;—

World-losers and world-forsakers,

On whom the pale moon gleams:

Yet we are the movers and shakers

Of the world forever, it seems.”

— O’SHAUGHNESSY

The missionaries at Foochow had been studying the map. They had also been reading the newspapers, such as there were,—and newspapers published in China, in English, of course, were infinitely better, even then, than books on China for putting one in touch with the situation.

The books on China of that day were still mostly fairy tales. Maps were not greatly improved over those in which “Chinese Tartary” used to be shown as bordered by a fringe of griffins and dragons.

East and West were still East and West. The Mandarin at Bonnieburn getting his first lesson about the terrestrial globe on the missionary’s teacup, was hardly more in need of light than missionary secretaries in New York, when the question was the location of a new mission in China.

But the secretaries were men of loyalty and faith. When our Foochow Mission, like many other mission in that time of opportunity, urged an advance, our secretaries set about finding the means to make it.

The opportunity had come with the opening of Peking and the Yangtze Valley in consequence of the Arrow War in 1858 and the treaties of 1860. Mr. Sites had been sent out in view of this very opportunity. But the American war for the Union had intervened and neither men nor money could be had for new work. The year after the war ended, two new men were appointed to our mission.

They were the last to come out by sailing vessel, around the Cape. By the same token they were the last, perhaps, to be received with that lavish joy which marks the child’s anticipation of successive Christmases at an age when Christmases are few and far between. Letters sent home, at the time, record in naïve detail every incident and aspect of the new arrivals.

“We were engaged in the services of our quarterly meeting,”—so runs one letter,—“and had just enjoyed an excellent love-feast; four Chinese had been admitted to baptism and to the fellowship of the Christian Church; a missionary had preached and the members of the church were engaged in joyfully celebrating the Lord’s Supper, when our beloved Brother Sites entered the church and passed up the aisle, followed by a strange gentleman. All eyes were fastened on the stranger and at the first interlude in the services we had the delightful privilege of welcoming our long-expected, long-prayed-for Brother Hart.

“Brother Wheeler’s arrival was also attended with the most propitious circumstances. The members of the Mission had met at the usual time and place, for their monthly business session, and had deliberated in love and harmony concerning the interests of our work, had been unanimous in every decision made and had closed the meeting feeling ‘How good and how pleasant a thing it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.’ Just as we separated, Brother Wheeler and his family entered our Mission compound, and with gratitude we welcomed them to their new home in this Eastern land. The Chinese Christians gave him a joyful greeting, and he was deeply moved as he listened that evening to our Chinese brethren heartily singing the good old tunes of his native land.”

Mr. Sites strongly favored the policy of sending only men with some experience in a mission field to open new work. It was understood that these two men, after a sufficient period of apprenticeship at Foochow, should be sent to begin the new missions. Accordingly, Hart was appointed to Central China in 1867 and Wheeler to Peking in 1869.

No spies returning from Canaan ever brought back bigger bunches of promise than our emissary to Central China after his first prospecting tour in the Yangtze Valley. He had gone up the coast to Shanghai, about four hundred and fifty miles, thence up the great river, passing the cities of Chinkiang, Wuhu, Nanking and Kiukiang, all of which cities we now occupy. He was full of enthusiasm as he pictured to us the great valley of the Yangtze, with its fertile plains, and described the immense commercial importance of the Grand Canal,—something we knew of only from the studies of our school days.

He had selected as a starting point for the work the busy port of Kiukiang, on the southernmost bend of the Yangtze near Poyang Lake. He and Mr. Sites, with the zest of a new adventure, began at once estimating the miles southward from Poyang Lake to the borders of Fuhkien, and planning for the time when a Methodist chapel should be planted in every important city, one every twenty miles, until Foochow and Kiukiang should clasp hands in a union love-feast, perchance in our new-found outpost, the City of Lingering Peace.

A barrier of unpromising highlands between the upper Min and the Yangtze basin has delayed the realization of that particular dream. But larger things than were then dreamed have come to pass. When the Methodist Church in China met in quadrennial conference at Foochow last year, there came to the mother mission representatives of five prosperous missions, embracing a church membership of some forty thousand. These delegates came from Peking and a dozen other cities of North China, scattered along hundreds of miles of railway in two provinces; from the whole basin of the Yangtze, between Kiukiang and Shanghai; from Hinghua on the south, where the work which was being pioneered in 1867 had long since expanded into a Conference of its own; and last but perhaps most flourishing field of all, from the Empire Province of West China beyond the Yangtze gorges, fifteen hundred miles from the sea.

A Drowsy Village of the Hinghwa Region

Expansion in China was only an incident in world movements of which China was already a storm centre. Great things were doing in those days in the binding together of East and West. The Atlantic cable; the Suez canal; the Union Pacific railway; restoration and transformation in Japan; the Burlingame mission, which was the first real effort to make China acquainted with the West at home,—these were only a few of the signs of the times. For us at Foochow perhaps the most interesting item of all was the beginning of the Pacific Mail steamship service in 1867.

To get our mail in six weeks was too good to be true! “How wonderful”—writes the missionary to a college friend—“to think of this great steamship, a vast floating palace, crossing the wide Pacific Ocean! Home is one-half nearer than it was a year ago. Can you believe that London and Paris are getting their latest news from us by way of Japan, San Francisco and New York? ‘Fact is stranger than fiction.’ And why may we not hope to see along with these wondrous inventions and scientific achievements a corresponding increase of Christian effort to carry the gospel of peace to all the nations of the earth? Not in the slow and indifferent manner of the past, but with a zeal and energy corresponding to the spirit of the times in all material progress. Look no more toward the ‘Far East’ over seas and oceans, beyond kingdoms and empires, and fancy China to be a remote, strange, unwieldy, unapproachable nation. Life your eyes and look directly into the face of this new, mighty, next-door neighbor, with but a single ocean intervening! I pray that the Church may now arise in the strength of our God and do valiantly in the redemption of China. Why has God allowed Protestant Christian nations to open up in this day the golden treasures of California and Australia? Why, but that these nations may be His messengers of mercy to heathen lands; accomplishing the Saviour’s petition, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.’”

Now if extension was good in China, why should it not extend also to Japan? Might not a Christianized Japan even prove the salvation of China? Japan had now been linked up by steam with both America and China. It was time for American Methodism to be co-operating with other Christian agencies already engaged in the evangelization of the Island Empire.

So reasoned the little band of missionaries at Foochow. In 1871 they wrote home thus:—

“The present breaking up of their ancient social and political systems, with the eager desire of the Japanese to adopt the civilization of Christian nations, indicates that now is the golden opportunity for the Church to sow ‘the seed of the kingdom’ in the minds of the people. At the same time it admonishes us that failure on our part, at this favorable juncture, will greatly increase the difficulty of evangelizing Japan, and prove a serious hindrance to the progress of Christ’s kingdom in the earth.”

The three secretaries promptly replied, indorsing the project.

“It is a matter of first importance,” wrote Durbin and Harris.

“It is our guilt that we undertake nothing,” wrote Terry. And they undertook Japan.

Maclay, who had made the address on the night when Nathan Sites heard his “call,” was now sent from Foochow to open our work in Japan. He afterward became the founder also of our mission in Korea. Thus he ranks with William Butler as a pioneer of three mission fields of Methodism.

In less than the span of a generation of the Methodist Church of Japan, uniting three great Methodist communions, has become an independent organization, with a native Bishop. To-day, in the light of recent history in Eastern Asia, a history of war, of diplomacy, of student migration and of dazzling changes in ancient customs, we can begin to see how Japan is involved in China’s destiny. To those who foresaw the issue in all its larger outlines forty years ago, shall we not accord the meed of vision and of statesmanship?

(Taken from Sarah Moore Sites’ book An Epic to the East, on the life of her husband Nathan Sites. The Book was published in 1912.)