The mission minutes spoke, if you remember, of my intention to erect a building for a museum and public lecture room, and present it to the Board. This I intend to do at once. It will cost about twelve hundred dollars, possibly more. I may say in the same connection also that my “Mandarin Lessons” has fully paid all the cost of printing, and so forth, and I expect during the next year to pay into the treasury of the Board one thousand dollars, Mexican. This I do in view of the liberality of the Board in giving me my time while editing and printing the book. When the second edition is printed I expect to pay over a larger amount. I need not say that I feel very much gratified that the book has proved such a success: especially do I feel that it has been, and is going to be, very widely useful in assisting missionaries to acquire the Chinese language. My scientific books are also paying for themselves, but as yet have left no margin of profits.
May 20, 1905, he wrote to a secretary: “I may say, however, that in view of the great importance of the school both to the Tengchow station and as a feeder to the college at Wei Hsien, I have set apart from the profit of my ‘Mandarin Lessons’ enough to support the school for the present year.” December 13, 1906, he wrote to a friend in the United States: “My brother is now holding a large meeting of elders and leading men from all the stations in this field. There are about three hundred of them. It is no small expense to board and lodge so many for ten days. I am paying the bill.” In one of his latest letters to me he mentions this ability pecuniarily to help as affording him satisfaction.
X
THE CARE OF THE NATIVE CHRISTIANS
“The need of the hour in China is not more new stations with expensive buildings and wide itinerating. It is rather teaching and training what we have, and giving it a proper development. Most of all we should raise up and prepare pastors and preachers and teachers, who are well grounded in the truth, so that the Chinese Church may have wise and safe leaders.... There are already enough mission stations, or centers, in the province, if they were properly worked. The need of the hour is to consolidate and develop what we have, and by all means in our power develop native agency, and teach and locate native pastors,—men who are well grounded in the faith.”—LETTER TO SECRETARY FOX, of the American Bible Society, January 6, 1906.
Dr. Mateer believed that sooner than most missionaries anticipated the Chinese Christians will join together and set up an independent church. He meant by this not merely a union of the ministers and churches of the various Presbyterian denominations at work in the country, such as has already been effected, but an organization that would include in its membership all the Protestant Christians, and that would leave little or no place for the service of foreign missionaries. He regarded this as inevitable; and for that reason he considered it to be of prime importance that such an effective preliminary work should promptly be done, that this coming ecclesiastical independence might not be attended by unsoundness as to creed or laxity in life. At the same time, in holding up the care and the training of the native Christians as so important a part of the work of the foreign missionary in China, in anticipation of what is ahead, he was only for an additional reason urging what he had in all his long career recognized as second to no other in importance. Of course, at the beginning of the effort to give the gospel to a people it is indispensable to do “the work of an evangelist”; that is, to seek by the spoken word and by the printed book to acquaint them with elementary Christian truth, and to endeavor to win them to Christ; and we have already seen how diligent Dr. Mateer was in this service, especially in his earlier missionary years. But he was just as diligent in caring for the converts when gained; and in the school and college it was the preparation of men for pastors and teachers and evangelists that was constantly his chief aim.
The first body of native Christians with whose oversight he had anything to do was that very small band that had been gathered into the church at Tengchow. Mills was the senior missionary, and as such he presided over that little flock until his death. In 1867 he was installed as the pastor, and he continued in this office nearly twenty years. During this long period Dr. Mateer at times supplied the pulpit and cared for the church in Mills’s absence or illness, but for most of the time it was only as a sort of adviser that he could render help in that field. We have no reason to think specially unfavorably of Chinese converts because some of those with whom he then had to do at Tengchow, or elsewhere, proved themselves, to him, to be a discouraging set of professing Christians. Were not a good many of Paul’s converts very much of the same grade when he traveled among the churches, and wrote his letters? Did it not take much patience, and fidelity, and persistence on the part of Christ to make anything worth while out of his select disciples? Yet these constituted the membership of the primitive church from which even the missionaries of our day have originated. At any rate some of the earliest experiences of Dr. Mateer with the native Christians were of a very depressing sort. In his Journal, under date of March 17, 1864, he made this record:
Since coming to Tengchow there have been great difficulties in the native church. Several of the members were accused by common fame of various immoral practices,—one of smoking opium, another of lying and conforming to idolatrous practices, and another of breaking the Sabbath. The second of these confessed his fault, and was publicly reproved; the third also confessed, and on his profession of penitence was restored to the confidence of the church. But though the first confessed to the use of the ashes of opium, he gave no certain assurance of amendment; and he was suspended, and so remains. These matters gave us all a great deal of anxiety and sorrow of heart. It is sad thus to find that even those who profess the name of Christ are so much under the power of sin. It is one of the great discouragements of the missionary work. Yet God is able to keep even such weak ones as these unto eternal life.
Under date of September 15, 1866, he told of a worse case of discipline:
We had a hearing with the accused, and gave him notice that he would be tried, and of the charges and witnesses. We wrote to Mr. Corbett at Chefoo, to get depositions for us. He did so, and we met, and tried him. The evidence was sufficient to convict him of lying, and of forging an account, and of adultery; notwithstanding, he denied it all, endeavoring to explain away such evidence as he was forced to admit. We decided to excommunicate him, and it was done two weeks ago.