The Jesuits held a high position in the early days of the Tartar rule. This was due to the pre-eminent abilities of their leader, Johann Adam Schall, a man of good family, native of Cologne. This great priest was born in A.D. 1591, and entered the Society of Jesus at Rome in 1611. There he became a student of theology and mathematics, and left for China in 1622. His great learning won for him such renown that he was sent for by the Emperor in 1631, installed at Peking as court astronomer, and charged with the revision of the Chinese calendar. Needless to say this position was not won without exciting great jealousy among the native men of science, who attacked him fiercely, both openly and in secret. But his correct calculation of an eclipse, as to which they were hopelessly wrong, defeated all their intrigues, and he was more than ever in favour with the Emperor Chung Ch’êng (the last of the Mings), who, in dread of the Tartars, caused him, much against his will, to start a cannon foundry, rewarding him with a pompous autograph inscription in praise of his science and virtue. When at last the Tartars became masters of Peking, Schall, though in continual danger himself, was able to give effectual protection to the Christian converts. It cannot fail to strike us with amazement that, like the Vicar of Bray, when matters settled down, Schall should have enjoyed even more favour under the Tartar Emperor Shun Chih than he had done under his Ming predecessor; and when, at that sovereign’s death in 1662, he actually was holding the post of tutor to the young Emperor Káng Hsi, who became one of the most famous monarchs that ever ruled in China, it seemed as if nothing could arrest the progress of Jesuit influence.
But the supreme power was for a time in the hands of four regents who were opposed to the Christians, and a memorial was presented to court denouncing the new sect as dangerous to the state. The Dominicans and Franciscans, of whom I shall speak presently, had, during a quarter of a century and more, been working in opposition to the Jesuits, and the internal dissensions of the sects gave their enemies an opportunity of which they were not slow to avail themselves. The memorial, a remarkable document, calls attention to the strife between the orders as to the worship of Ti̔en (Heaven) and Shang Ti (God), which dissensions as to the principle of doctrine show the true aspirations of the rival sects to be political; and in this connection the memorialists call attention to the schisms and civil war to which Christianity gave rise in Japan, evils which could not fail to occur sooner or later in China if the missionaries were allowed to remain there. The regents, nothing loth, yielded to the wishes of the memorialists, and in 1665 the Christian teachers were proscribed as seducers of the people, leading them into a false path. Father Schall died miserably at the age of seventy-eight, after having been for thirty-seven years the trusted and favoured servant of five emperors. His converts were degraded, and his colleagues imprisoned or banished.
Among those who were held in chains, beaten, and subjected to every indignity, was Father Verbiest, a native of Flanders, partly educated at Seville, the third of the great triad of priests who, by their talents, their learning, and their personal charm, so nearly succeeded in turning the current of Chinese history. For six long years who shall say what he suffered? Six years of the horrors of a Chinese prison! At last, however, the minority of the Emperor Ka̔ng Hsi came to an end. He had not forgotten the good teaching of Father Schall, and one of his earliest acts, on assuming the power in 1671, was to release the priests, with Father Verbiest at their head. Ka̔ng Hsi was not a Christian; but though he forbade his subjects to follow the new teaching, he was sufficiently liberal to put an end to persecution, and to recognise the value of Western learning. There is a myth to the effect that an earthquake was the immediate cause of the release, but the truth is that the Emperor wanted Verbiest’s astronomical science to set straight the crooked inventions of the native professors. The father was appointed court astronomer and chief mathematician. He was also ordered, as Schall had been, to cast cannon, which, with much pomp and ceremony, robed as for mass, he blessed, in the presence of the court, sprinkling them with holy water, and giving to each the name of a female saint which he had himself drawn on the breech. This brought him a letter from Pope Innocent XI., praising him for having so wisely brought the profane sciences into play for the salvation of Chinese souls. To Father Verbiest are due the wonderful mathematical instruments of bronze, beautiful as works of art, which are still one of the sights of Peking. They are in the Observatory at the southern corner of the Tartar city, where they remain as the last witnesses of the Jesuit greatness. Verbiest died in 1688, and the Emperor himself composed the funeral oration, which was read with great pomp before his coffin. No three men ever succeeded in obtaining the favour of the Chinese court so signally as the three Jesuit fathers, Ricci, Schall, and Verbiest. When Father Verbiest died there was no man with a sufficiently commanding intellect to fill his place and continue his work.
It is conceivable that if they had not been thwarted by the Dominicans and the Franciscans, the Jesuits might have succeeded in their ambition even to the extent of Christianising China. But those two sects effectually put a stop to the process of conversion. The great bone of contention was the so-called worship of ancestors and of Confucius. Another point was the translation of the name of God by Ti̔en, literally Heaven, and Shang Ti, for which there is indeed no other rendering. This last controversy, which has in it much that is childish, and mere splitting of hairs, is not worth discussing. The great point was to render the Sacred Name by some term that should be intelligible to the Chinese mind. Both seemed to fulfil that condition. As regards the former question, we have seen how Father Ricci dealt with it. He saw the wisdom of not repelling the Chinese by at once condemning a custom to which they were so wedded that any attempt to do away with it would evidently alienate them altogether, so he, a true Jesuit, effected a clever compromise, treating the rites in honour of ancestors and of Confucius as civil and not as religious ceremonies. It always has seemed to me that he acted wisely, for in no other way could he have hoped to obtain any hearing. By degrees the Christianised Chinese might have been weaned from their old practices, and Christianity in all its purity have been made a dominant religion. This, however, is mere speculation.
When the Dominicans and Franciscans became aware of the successes of the Jesuits, they too resolved to have their share in the work, and they promptly sent out missions to China on their own account. But their school lacked the liberality and plastic nature of the Jesuits. They resolutely refused any compromise. They accused the Jesuits of countenancing idolatry and heathen practices, and one Morales, a Spanish Dominican, sent home a report to the Propaganda to that effect. This produced a decree from Pope Innocent the Tenth, in which the conduct of the Jesuits was censured and their doctrine condemned in 1645. It took the Jesuits eleven years to procure from Pope Alexander VII. another Bull, not indeed contradicting that of Pope Innocent, but one which might be so read as to give them a free hand. But the battle was not over, for in 1693 Bishop Maigrot, Vicar Apostolic in China, declared in the face of the Inquisition and the Pope that Ti̔en meant the material heaven, and not God, and that the worship of ancestors was idolatrous. In this difficulty it is not a little strange to find that the Jesuits appealed to the Emperor Ka̔ng Hsi to show them the way out. They addressed him in a memorial which is quoted at length by Wells Williams from the Life of St. Martin, and which is so curious that I am tempted to transcribe it, the more so as it shows so clearly all the points of the great controversy:—
“We, your faithful subjects, although originally from distant countries, respectfully supplicate your Majesty to give us clear instructions on the following points. The scholars of Europe have understood that the Chinese practise certain ceremonies in honour of Confucius; that they offer sacrifices to Heaven, and that they observe peculiar rites towards their ancestors; but persuaded that these ceremonies, sacrifices, and rites are founded in reason, though ignorant of their true intention, earnestly desire us to inform them. We have always supposed that Confucius was honoured in China as a legislator, and that it was in this character alone, and with this view solely, that the ceremonies established in his honour were practised. We believe that the rites in honour of ancestors are only observed in order to exhibit the love felt for them, and to hallow the remembrance of the good received from them during their life. We believe that the sacrifices offered to Heaven are not tendered to the visible heavens which are seen above us, but to the Supreme Master, Author, and Preserver of heaven and earth, and of all they contain. Such are the interpretation and the sense which we have always given to these Chinese ceremonies; but as strangers cannot be considered competent to pronounce on these important points with the same certainty as the Chinese themselves, we presume to request your Majesty not to refuse to give us the explanations which we desire concerning them. We wait for them with respect and submission.”
Ka̔ng Hsi cut the Gordian knot by declaring that “Ti̔en means the true God, and that the customs of China are political.” In spite of this Imperial opinion Pope Clement XI. upheld Bishop Maigrot, declared that Ti̔en Chu, Lord of Heaven, must be the name for God, Ti̔en and Shang Ti being altogether inadmissible.
Tournon, Patriarch of Antioch, was sent to Peking, where at an audience of Ka̔ng Hsi the Emperor demanded to be informed of the decision of the Pope. When Ka̔ng Hsi learnt that a Pope of Rome had ventured to give an opinion contrary to his own in a matter which was altogether Chinese, and in part purely linguistic, he was furious, and issued a decree declaring that the Jesuits should be protected, but the followers of Bishop Maigrot should be persecuted. The Patriarch Tournon was banished to Macao, where further difficulties arose between him and the bishop of that diocese, who went so far as to imprison the legate in a private house, where he died. A second legate was sent to Peking in 1715 in the person of one Mezzabarba. Ka̔ng Hsi received him civilly, but would not talk about rites, and after six years fruitlessly spent he returned to Europe.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century it is claimed that there were in the provinces of the two Chiangs alone one hundred churches and a hundred thousand Christians. Those were the palmy days of missionary enterprise, but they did not last long. The quarrels of the missionaries amongst themselves, their political ambitions, which it was represented constituted a danger to the state, disgusted Ka̔ng Hsi. The Jesuits, indeed, he continued to tolerate, forbidding any priests but those who would follow the rules of Ricci to remain in China. In 1723 Ka̔ng Hsi died, and was succeeded by his son Yung Chêng, who in the following year issued an edict strictly forbidding the propagation of the Christian religion. A few missionaries were retained at Peking on account of their scientific acquirements, but the majority were banished to the south. The native Christians in the north were left as a flock without shepherds; they were subjected to extortion and blackmailing of the worst description, and although many remained faithful and even contrived to harbour their teachers secretly, this edict of Yung Chêng gave the death-blow to an energy which had made itself powerfully felt for a century and a quarter.
I have been led further afield than I intended in this sketch of the Jesuit enterprise (based mainly upon Dr. Wells Williams’s book and on the Biographie Universelle), but it is a fascinating subject, and few people outside of those personally interested in China know how nearly at one time the Christian religion seemed to be reaching a great triumph. The story of Ricci, Schall, and Verbiest teaches one great truth. If missionaries are to be successful it must be by the power of masterly talent and knowledge. They can only work on any scale through the lettered class, and in order to dominate them must be able to give proof of superior attainments as the old Jesuits did. With courage, devotion, self-sacrifice, our missionaries are largely endowed. They have given proofs of these, even to the laying down of their lives; but these qualities are as nothing in the eyes of the cultivated Confucian. One such convert as Schall’s friend Sü and his daughter Candida would do more towards Christianising China than thousands of poor peasants. To make such a convert needs qualifications which are rare indeed. Above all things an accurate and scholarly knowledge of the language is necessary. There have been not a few excellent scholars among our missionaries. But there are many more whose ignorance in that respect has been fatal, covering themselves and the religion which they preach with ridicule. Fancy a Chinese Buddhist mounting on the roof of a hansom cab at Charing Cross and preaching Buddhism to the mob in pidgin English! That would give some measure of the effect produced on a Chinese crowd by a missionary whom I have seen perched upon a cart outside the great gate of the Tartar City at Peking, haranguing a yellow crowd of gapers in bastard Chinese, delivered with a strong Aberdonian accent. The Jesuits knew better than that.