The face of Manchuria, Korea, & Russian Turkestan

by E. G. Kemp

The leaders were tortured and executed, firmly refusing to renounce their faith. Nevertheless the number of converts increased, and ten years after the baptism of Senghoun-i at Peking there were 4000 Christians in Korea. A time of comparative peace followed, and the church was consolidated. At last a priest was sent over from China called Jean dos Remedios, in 1791; but he was unable to penetrate into the country, and was obliged to return to Peking. No further attempt to send a missionary was made for several years. Then a young Chinaman called Tsiou was selected for the perilous task, and during a stormy night he succeeded in crossing the closely guarded frontier disguised as a Korean. Some months later the news of his arrival became known to the authorities, and they ordered his arrest. But the Koreans who had long been asking for a missionary to be sent to them guarded him with the utmost loyalty, and the authorities seized instead the Koreans who had brought him into the country, and after cruel tortures which utterly failed to make them confess his whereabouts, they were put to death.

Tsiou, meanwhile, mainly owed his safety to a devoted Christian woman, and continued his labours unremittingly in secret, while she prosecuted an important work in teaching a large number of girls. During the reign of the king at that time on the throne of Korea, the persecution was somewhat limited, but as soon as he died in 1800 it broke out afresh with redoubled energy. Tsiou was at last captured, and with many others laid down his life, not only willingly, but joyfully. He was only twenty-five years of age. The persecution raged till the next year, when the king issued a strange edict, to the effect that he was determined to have done with the matter; that the Christians filling the prisons should at once be judged and executed, and after that no more trials were to be instituted. Many were publicly executed, while others were strangled in the prisons in order to expedite matters. Then followed a lull, and the church had a breathing space, but all its leaders had been put to death, and it was reduced to a pitiable condition.

The church sent a fresh appeal to the bishop at Peking to send them another priest, but he was utterly unable to grant their request, for the mission itself was at a low ebb on account of the French Revolution. No missionaries were coming out to the foreign field, and no promise even could be held out to the Koreans of any one coming to them in the future. Again and again their messenger braved untold risks to carry their piteous appeal to China, but in vain. To those who like myself intensely dislike the system and many of the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church, while loving and profoundly venerating many of its adherents, this absence of the priesthood may well seem a blessing in disguise.

In 1816, for the fifth time, the messenger of the Korean Church arrived in Peking, and the bishop, touched by their importunity, promised to send them a priest. Plans were arranged that he should be met and secretly taken into the country, for persecution still raged. The time came, but at the rendezvous the Koreans found no priest awaiting them; it had proved impossible to find any one willing to undertake the well-nigh hopeless mission. Years elapsed: they were all marked by the same record of faith and suffering, heroically borne, until the year 1827. Then followed three or four years of comparative peace, and the church steadily grew in numbers.

A letter was sent by it to the Pope, beseeching him to send reinforcements to the suffering Christians. He forwarded the appeal to the directors of the “Missions Etrangères” in France, which had recently been re-established, after its destruction by Napoleon in 1805. The directors forwarded the appeal, making it known throughout their missions, with the result that Monseigneur Brugnière, a missionary in Siam, volunteered for the perilous task in a letter burning with apostolic love and zeal. His offer was accepted by the society, and after some delay he set out accompanied by a young Chinese priest, educated in Naples, who had also volunteered for the service.

Three years were spent by them in weary journeyings without success, owing partly to the jealousy of a Chinese priest who had been sent meanwhile to Korea by the Sacrée Congrégation de la Propagande, and when at last the difficulties were on the eve of being overcome, Monseigneur Brugnière was taken suddenly ill and died on the very threshold of the promised land.

In 1836 the first European missionary penetrated into the country, and he was soon followed by others in steady succession. Despite the ceaseless persecutions the number of Christians in 1838 was estimated at 9000. The following year a more violent persecution than ever broke out, and the three French missionaries were betrayed and executed, beside many Koreans of all ranks. The authorities were firmly resolved to exterminate them; but the attitude of the Korean people in general towards the Christians was no longer what it had been. Whereas previously they had been despised, now they were respected, for the people realised that there was a power in this religion which nothing could annihilate. The Christians had been decimated as to numbers, and such as had escaped destruction were reduced to a state of utter destitution, yet still they remained loyal to their convictions. The non-Christian Koreans came to the rescue and lent them the necessary grain to sow their fields, well assured that they would honestly repay the loan, unlike what would have been the case with some others of their fellow-countrymen.

The foreign missionaries having been murdered, there was a new development in the life of the Korean Church; for the first time they had two priests of their own nationality consecrated in China. They came to the church at a time of great need, for persecution was raging more hotly than ever. The time for labour was but brief in the case of one of them, André Kim. His undaunted courage and zeal led him, at the age of twenty-five, to the crown of martyrdom, “he being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time. For his soul pleased the Lord.”

In 1850 we again find two French missionaries at work, who gave their testimony as to the steady growth of the church, despite ceaseless persecution. European missionaries could only enter the country by stealth, and they always had to endure untold hardships in the prosecution of the work, which could never be carried on openly. Monseigneur Daveluy described it in these words: “Our year (1859) may be summed up thus—miseries upon miseries, but everywhere the great protection of God, and in the midst of tribulations the advance of the apostolic work.”

The aggressiveness of the Russians in the north in 1866 goaded the Korean Emperor into a fierce determination to exterminate the Christians once for all. He began by putting to death all the French missionaries upon whom he could lay his hands, and nine out of twelve were taken. They seem to have been put to the torture before execution; one was Bishop Daveluy, who had spent twenty-one years in the country, and another was the latest recruit who had only been there nine months. The three other missionaries succeeded in escaping from the country, and one of them told the whole sorrowful story to the French admiral at Tientsin, which resulted in the sending of an expedition against Korea.