'In Peking we have three chapels. A chapel there is merely a Chinese shop, put into decent repair, and a signboard stuck over the top. The Chinese are very fond of giving themselves very high names. You will come to a man sitting in a little box scarcely big enough for himself to turn round in, and if you read his sign, it is some flowing name about a hall; it may be the "Hall of Continual Virtue," or something of that kind, or the "Hall of the Five Happinesses." So our title above our chapel just runs in the native idiomatic style, and it is the "Gospel Hall.' Inside there is not very much to see. The counter has been cleared away and the shelves, and, in place of the mud, a brick floor has been put down; and then there are forms arranged for the sitters, and there is a low platform for the speaker. I do not know how it happens, but it does happen, that up in the left-hand corner of the chapel—and it is always the left-hand corner—there is a table and two chairs, and on that table there is a teapot and set of cups, because in China everything is done with tea. You must always begin in that way. These chapels are open six days in the week in the afternoon.
'Now, supposing you come in at the door, the natural thing for the missionary seems to be just to walk up to this table and sit down, and then the next thing is to get a congregation. Sometimes there is no difficulty about getting it, if it happens to be a fair day or there is a crowd in the streets. They simply pour in: but the tide goes different ways sometimes, and does not pour in always like that. I want to give you just a fair, square, honest idea of what the thing is. Sometimes the congregation will not come in, and sometimes, after a little while, one man looks in at the door and sees a foreigner, and he is off. He has seen quite enough and does not want to see any more; and if you were to ask him what he had seen, he would not say he had seen a foreigner; no, he would say he had seen "a foreign devil." And, friends, you would not be very much astonished that some of those ignorant men coming from the country are alarmed when they see a foreigner, if you could only imagine the terrible lies that they circulate about us there; about how we take out people's hearts for the purposes of magic, and steal people's eyes to make photographic chemicals, and administer medicines to bewitch them generally. I say that, if the first man who comes to a chapel on an afternoon is a man who has heard these things, you cannot be astonished that all you see of that man is his back and his pigtail as he goes away.
'Another man sometimes comes—a bolder man, and he comes in, and the most natural thing for him seems to be to walk up to the table and sit down on the other side, and there you and he are a pair. The proper thing is to pour him out a cup of tea: that is etiquette, and the etiquette seems to be that he should not drink it. Sometimes, after the service begins, I see the native preacher come slyly up, as if he did not mean anything at all; and he walks up to the teapot, and lifts the lid quite quietly, and slips that tea back into the pot again, and puts on the lid and warms it up, and it is ready for the next man who comes.
'If you get into conversation with one man, the congregation is, for the most part, practically secured, because, though a Chinaman is very much afraid of being spoken to directly by a foreigner, most Chinamen are very curious to overhear any conversation that may be carried on; so if you are speaking to him, in comes another man to listen, and if you can get other men to come in and listen over each other's backs, very soon more come in than the original speaker cares to overhear his private conversation; and when that step is reached, it is time to go to the platform and ask the hearers to sit down and begin the regular service. Sometimes nobody comes in, and then you have to try something else, and that is to go and sit down a little nearer the door, and sometimes, in that way, gradually a few people come in. But then in Peking sometimes there is a great north-west wind blowing; and I think that is about the hardest thing on a man's congregation before he gets it, because, when the weather is unfavourable, there are not many people about, and so we have to adopt another plan. We do not go on to the streets, but inside the chapel the native preacher and I do our best to sing a hymn. I say do our best, because sometimes these native preachers do not succeed in singing very well; however, we succeed in making a noise, and that is the thing that draws. The people look in, and see what they suppose to be a foreigner and a native chanting Buddhist prayers. In they come; they have not seen that before, and they sit down, and, as soon as the hymn is through, we have the opportunity of telling them the contents of the hymn; and there you have your sermon ready to your hand.
'But suppose you have got your congregation, it is not all smooth-sailing water. Sometimes there are interruptions. Sometimes, just when you have the ear of your audience, all at once a tremendous row happens just outside the door, and the congregation jump to their feet and rush out to see what is going on. I could have told them if they had only asked me. No doubt, some unwise Chinaman, in place of coming straight in and sitting down, stood on the outskirt of the crowd on tiptoe. A city thief coming along says, "Ah, there is my man," and he walks quietly up to him with a pair of sharp scissors, cuts off his tobacco pouch, and goes off with it. Of course, as soon as the man misses the pouch, his first impulse is to grab his next neighbour; that neighbour remonstrates, and then a fight commences.
'Sometimes a funeral passes, and that is almost as serious an interruption as a fight; because, although a Chinaman does not think much about his soul after he dies, he thinks a vast deal about his dead body, and, in order to be perfectly sure that he will not be cheated by the undertaker, he buys his coffin before he is sick, and sees that he has a good bargain. And so, having a good coffin, he wants a good funeral; and it is said some men spend nearly half of their fortune in having a grand procession when they are carried to their grave. When one of these enormous funerals, with a procession sometimes a quarter of a mile long, comes by, it is a very bad job for your congregation. Out they go to have a look at it.
'Then the interruption is sometimes another thing, and this last one is a more difficult case to settle. When one of the upper ten thousand in China has a marriage, they want to have a great exhibition; and after they have bought the furniture, they get and hire a great many men, and have them dressed to carry that furniture in procession along the streets and show it to their neighbours. First comes a great wardrobe, and then a little cupboard, a washstand, a square table, and all sorts of furniture. Now when that comes, what are you to do? They have been at the expense of paying for an exhibition for their neighbours to see, and they feel that it would be unneighbourly if they did not step to the door and look out and see the things carried past, and there goes your congregation. Sometimes unusual interruptions happen. I remember once a woman put her head in at the door. Women do not come to these chapels often—I am very glad they do not. That woman put her head in at the door, and I saw danger. She glared round the place, and then she spied one man, and she shouted out something at him: "Come out of that!" and, friends, he came out of that, in a big hurry, too. He disturbed us very considerably. It was not the woman so much as the man—we all pitied him as he went out.
'Those audiences are very mixed, and they are very curious to your eyes. Sometimes I see those audiences, most of whom we do not know anything about, listening to what I have to tell them, quite as still as you are now—their pipes out, the smoke cleared away. They lean forward and listen just as still as audiences in this country sometimes listen when the preacher, in an interesting discourse, is coming up to a division of his subject. And, friends, let me tell you what it is that makes them listen best of all—it is the central doctrine of the truth of Christianity. When we come to tell them of how Christ left the surroundings of heaven, and came to spend so many years in such very poor, unsympathetic company on earth (and that is a subject that a missionary sometimes can talk feelingly upon when he has been in a foreign country for some time), when we can tell them that, and then come to the last and greatest part of all: how Christ allowed Himself, for love of man, to be nailed to the cross, and not only that, but kept in Him that gentle spirit that made Him pray for those who were putting Him to death—oh, friends, when we come to that and tell them of it—I know that a Chinaman is degraded, corrupt, sensual, material, but he has a human heart; and when you can get at the heart, it responds to the story of the Cross. We want to do something in drawing the net, and so, on this table in the corner, there is a pile of books, and as it gets towards the time to close, I say to the friends, "Now, you will soon be going away to your evening meal; and as I am a foreigner, probably you have not understood all that I have said;" and then I say, "Now, before you go, there are a number of books upon this table, where you will find the whole of this subject put down in black and white; will you just come up and have a look at the books before you go?" We want, if possible, to establish a point of contact with them, and so to get a little private conversation, as it were. If you ask them to come up and look at a book, and they ask the price of it, you have an opportunity of talking to them, and some of these men not only buy the books, but they read them and come back for others.
'Now, how does the matter stand? These heathen have been in our chapel, and we have taken the opportunity of putting some of the truth into their hearts; but I know a good part, much, it may be, of what the man has heard when he goes out—well, it is stolen away, or it is trampled under foot; but some part of it remains.
'And now I can come to the practical part. I have not been trying to entertain you, but I have been trying to interest you, and what I want to impress upon you is this: after those men have left the chapel you can do as much for their conversion as we can do in China. I want you to pray for the conversion of these men to whom we in Peking, and others in other parts of the world, are the means of communicating these truths of Christ. I believe it is not only the earnestness of the missionary that is going to produce results, but it is your earnestness here. We are your agents, and I believe, fervently, we shall have results there in direct proportion to the measure of your earnestness here. I believe I am speaking to the right people when I ask you to pray. Unprayed for, I feel very much as if a diver were sent down to the bottom of a river with no air to breathe, or as if a fireman were sent up to a blazing building and held an empty hose; I feel very much as a soldier who is firing blank cartridge at an enemy, and so I ask you earnestly to pray that the Gospel may take saving and working effect on the minds of those men to whose notice it has been introduced by us. Not long ago, at the close of a local anniversary, when we had been having a meeting, as we were going home, three of us got off a tram-car—two ministers of the locality and myself—and, as we were walking along, one said: "Ah, Gilmour, it is all the same over again; it is just the old thing; you missionaries come, and you have an anniversary, and the people's earnestness seems to be stirred up, and you ask their prayers, and it looks as if you would get them, but," he said, "you go away, and the thing passes by and is just left where it was before." I do not think that was quite correct. I think my brother was labouring under a temporary fit of the blues, and I was very glad to find his companion said it was not quite correct. What I want is this, to go back to my work feeling that there are those behind us who are praying earnestly that God's Spirit would work effectually in the hearts of those to whom we have the privilege of preaching. If you pray earnestly you can but work earnestly, and then you will also give earnestly; and I do not think we can be too earnest in the matter for which Christ was so much in earnest that He laid down His own life.'
The month of June and part of July was spent at Millport, a watering-place on the west coast of Scotland, near the lovely scenery of Arran. On July 4 he ascended Goatfell, and in so doing had an adventure which might have had very serious consequences. He started late, lost his way, but finally reached the summit at 8.45 P.M., and then, as he notes in his diary: 'Fog came on nearly at once with rain and thunder. Sat in the lee of a dripping rock on a wet stone and looked at a couple of acres of fog and granite boulders. Very dark and cold about midnight, the time wore on very slowly, more rain dripping, and fog. At 2 o'clock A.M. I began the descent, and in a short while it was light enough to see. Came on all right, and saw where I had missed the way.... I have not caught cold. I was wet all night, but kept wrapt up in my plaid and as warm as I could manage. Next day the minister congratulated me on being seen alive after my Goatfell adventure.'
On September 1 the return voyage to China began, and Peking was reached on November 14.
CHAPTER VIII
SUNSHINE AND SHADOW
In Peking the old familiar round of mission duties recommenced. Gilmour after his absence of eighteen months was the same man, and yet not the same. He yearned for fruit in the conversion of souls, and he began to devote himself with more eager self-denial than ever to the winning of Chinamen's hearts for the Saviour. The winter of 1883-1884 was spent in Peking, and his diary is full of incidents illustrative of the time and effort he gave to dealing with individuals.
In February, 1884, he made one of the most remarkable of his Mongolian journeys. He visited the Plain, travelling on foot, and thus subjecting himself to risks and hardships of a very serious order. But he had good reasons for his method, and he sets them forth with his usual clearness. Possibly no other journey of his life more strikingly testifies to his strict sense of duty, the unsparing way in which he spent himself in its discharge, and his eager desire to win souls.
'On this occasion, partly owing to the shortness of the time at my disposal, which made it hardly worth while to set up an establishment, and partly owing to the peculiar season of the year, which would have made it difficult to find pasture for travelling cattle, I determined to go on foot, without medicines, in a strictly spiritual capacity, and not seeking so much to make fresh acquaintances or open up new ground as to revisit familiar localities and see how far former evangelistic attempts had produced any effect. In addition there were some individual Mongols who have been taught a good deal about Christianity, and on whom I wished once more, while there was still opportunity, to press the claims of Christ.
