It has been likened to a woman.
From the Château he was taken to a Jesuit monastery and college in St. Pol de Leon, a town of monasteries and nunneries and churches, which, like itself, are the patchwork of different ages. From almost its very beginning until now the cobbled streets of this old town have been filled with monks and priests, while bevies of white-hooded nuns have flitted silently through its shadows as pigeons on the roof-tops and in their comings and goings have left no trace of their passage. Thus this grey old town, with its slumbers, its periodical bustle at Pardons and its endless decay, exists as those who dwell in it—but to mourn and to pray.
In the moss-cowled monastery, where only the chanting of monks was heard or other sounds equally solemn, the sombreness of the Breton was changed to a gentler melancholy and the Spirit of Christ is said to have so deeply affected him that when he departed from the monastery for the Mission in China, an old monk, kneeling in the shadows of the gateway asked his blessing, saying:
“I discern a martyr.”
The Mission of Yingching is not without its history and its antiquity. China has always been a tempting field for missionary effort and from the time the spirit of proselyting first took hold of men there has been no nation that has not at some time or other sent into this old land their priests and missionaries, their apostles and martyrs.
Christianity is not very old in any part of the world, as far as the age of the world goes, but it is far older in China than most people believe; older there, in fact, than in any other part of the world outside the cradle of its infancy.
During those years so momentous to the Roman Church, when her monks, penetrating through the gloomy forests of Europe, sought the conversion of the Goths and the Vandals, the old Bavarians and Alemanni, there were at that time in China more Christians than in all these sombre woods. And while the monks with those devout females, Bertha of Kent, and Clotilda, Queen of the Franks, were bringing over by intrigue their recalcitrant lords to a quasi-Christianity, the Nestorian Fathers in Asia were gaining through education their tens of thousands of adherents. When Columban, the Irish monk of Banchor, with Boniface, the English monk from Devon, were labouring among the Saxons and Goths, cutting down their sacred oaks, overturning their altars and at last securing the crown of martyrdom at the hands of our exasperated forefathers, the Nestorians were building schools and founding colleges, so that toward the end of the eighth century there were in China more Christians than to-day dwell in the whole of Asia.
But when ambition and lust of power crept into the aims of the Nestorians their influence began to decline; when they made education secondary and intrigue the first element in conversion faith in them was destroyed; their power crumbled; their beliefs vanished and now all that is left of their multitudinous congregations is, in the ancient city of Singanfu, a pillar of stone.
Though the Mission of Yingching was founded more than three hundred years ago the present site or compound dates back only to the middle of the nineteenth century when, after the city ex-muros had been destroyed by the bombardment of French gunboats, the Catholic Church took possession of a large tract of land in the western suburbs, which was afterwards divided into two portions; an enclosed tract in which is the Mission, containing nearly eleven acres and an open space some six hundred feet in width between the southern wall of the compound and the river. This vacant tract had been part of the land seized by the Church after the bombardment, but owing to the strenuous and persistent opposition of the Chinese provincial authorities as well as the inhabitants of the city to the Church acquiring such a large piece of land in the populous western suburbs, a compromise was finally agreed upon whereby the Church was confirmed in its title to eleven acres, while the Chinese were to retain ownership to the tract between the Mission and the river but were not to erect buildings upon it or to prevent in any way the Mission from enjoying the cool winds of the river or having free access to their boats. So this tract of land remained an open field in the midst of a crowded population.
The Mission is surrounded by a wall some fifteen feet in height, having two gates. The main entrance placed on the north while from the south wall a gate opens into the field, through which entered those coming from the river. Buildings accommodating several hundred native communicants, schools, quarters, and other establishments necessary to a Mission are arranged in quadrangles, these quadrangles in turn forming a large semi-quadrangle paralleling the enclosing walls other than on the north side, which gave the quadrangles as a whole the form of the letter E, the bishop’s residence forming the centre stroke while between it and the north gate stands a chapel, solitary and massive.