Calvin Wilson Mateer, forty-five years a missionary in Shantung, China

by D. W. Fisher

Up there it was perpetuated, the main difference consisting in larger and better quarters, with some improved conveniences. His wife continues:

For every machine bought, the market was canvassed by correspondence, and the best selected. Especially was this true with reference to any tools or machinery used in the construction of apparatus,—as machines for turning, blacksmithing, plumbing, screw-cutting, burnishing, electroplating, casting, and so forth. His shop was thoroughly fitted with all appliances for the making of apparatus, or electric or steam outfitting, so that he was ready to do anything, from setting up a windmill or water system, or installing an engine and dynamo, to brazing broken spectacle frames or repairing a bicycle.

So far as it was practicable he turned over the actual mechanical labor to Chinese workmen,—a skilled foreman and apprentices under the foreman’s direction.

Why, though a missionary, did he employ so considerable a part of his time in this way? Especially at the outset of his missionary career stern necessity to meet his own needs and those of his associates drove him to this line of work. Had he been set down in China at some such place as Shanghai, where foreign articles could be purchased, very likely his mechanical gifts would have remained largely dormant. But at Tengchow he helped to make a stove out of odds and ends, because one was indispensable in order to keep warm. For the same sort of reason he extracted teeth and made false sets, cobbled shoes, and acted as master workman of all the building trades in the erection of the “new home.” Sometimes he was thus compelled to do things which seemed strange even to him. When, in 1865, little Katie Mills died, he had to act the part of undertaker. He said:

It fell to me to make the coffin, which I did as well as I could from memory. I could not tell the carpenter, and I had to do the work myself. He did the rough work, and I did the cutting and fitting. I had to go entirely by my eye, and I found it no easy matter to get it in every respect in proportion. We covered it with black velvet outside, and inside with white linen. It looked very well when finished, and pleased Mr. and Mrs. Mills very much. It is a work I never thought of doing.

At one point on the way through Siberia when homeward bound on his last furlough the train was halted by some defect in the working of the mechanism of the locomotive. Dr. Mateer, on account of the delay, got out of his compartment and went to see what was the matter. He saw that the locomotive was a huge Baldwin, with whose construction he had familiarized himself when in the United States on a previous furlough, and he quickly discovered the cause of the trouble. He could speak no Russian, and the men in charge of the engine could speak no English, but he managed to show them the cause of the defective working of the mechanism, and how to remedy it; and soon the train was again speeding on its way.

The time never came during his long residence in China when a necessity did not occasionally force itself on him to utilize his mechanical gifts, and not infrequently on the common utensils of life. In Wei Hsien he often spent hours directing in such repairs as were needed for furnaces and the like.

Few of his later and larger achievements in this field could be fairly regarded as works of necessity, strictly speaking; they rather were meant to be aids in the great enterprise of evangelizing the Chinese Empire. He was thoroughly convinced that one of the most powerful agencies that could be employed for this purpose was the school and the college. He was equally sure that of all the studies that could be introduced into the curricula of these institutions, none could be so effective in opening the way for the gospel as that of the natural sciences, and especially physics, inclusive of modern mechanical appliances of its principles. He believed that if bright young men were educated in that kind of knowledge, and sent out under Christian influences among their own people, if they were also converted to Christianity, the outcome must be the dissipation of the existing blind adherence to the superstitions and ideas of centuries long remote in the past; and that with this must come the opening wide of the door for the entrance of Christianity. That was his forecast; and the present situation in China goes far toward vindicating the wisdom of it. But to teach effectively the natural sciences he must have apparatus. The only way he could secure this was by buying what he could, and by utilizing his own ability to set this up, and to add as much as possible for the outfit yet needed. Such was the prime object not only of what in a more limited sense constituted the apparatus of the school and college, but also of such larger appliances as the plant for heating and lighting the premises. These were far more than conveniences that helped to better work; they were themselves constant exhibitions to the students and to the people at large of the principles of natural science, and of their value in the affairs of actual life.

Dr. Mateer utilized his outfit of apparatus and machinery as a means of reaching others besides the students in his own institution, with the influence of modern science, thus opening a way into their minds for the gospel. As to one of his methods of accomplishing this object Ada gives a graphic account: