Of course these testimonies of Jesuits may be rejected by some people, but the Protestant missionaries in Hindostan, at that time, leave no room for doubt about the actual conditions. Buchanan, for instance, who was particularly conspicuous among his fellows and was greatly extolled in England says: "There are in India members of the Church of Rome who deserve the affection and respect of all good men. From Cape Commorin to Cochin, there are about one hundred churches on the seashore alone. Before each is a lofty cross which like the church itself is seen from a great distance. At Jaffna, on Sundays, about a thousand or twelve hundred people attend church and on feast days three thousand and upward. At Manaar they are all Romish Christians. At Tutycorin, the whole of the tribe, without exception, are Christians in the Romish Communion. Before they hoist sail to go out to sea, a number of boatmen all join in prayer to God for protection. Every man at his post, with the rope in his hands, pronounces the prayer."
One of these parsons who bore the very inappropriate name of Joseph Mullens and whose writing is usually a shriek against the Church says that "in 1854, the Jesuit and Roman Catholic missions are spread very widely through the Madras Presidency. At Pubna there is a population of 13,000 souls. It is all due to the Catholic missionaries. I allow that they dress simply, eat plainly and have no luxuries at home; they travel much; are greatly exposed; live poorly, and toil hard, and I have heard of a bishop living in a cave on fifty rupees a month, and devoutly attending the sick when friends and relatives had fled from fear. But all that is much easier on the principles of a Jesuit who is supported by motives of self-righteousness than it is to be a faithful minister on the principles of the New Testament."
The bloody persecution of 1805 in China showed how fervent and strong those Christians were in their faith. Very few apostatized, though new and terrible punishments were inflicted on them. Dr. Wells Williams, a Protestant agent in China, says that "many of them exhibited the greatest constancy in their profession, suffering persecution, torture, banishment and death, rather than deny their faith, though every inducement of prevarication and mental reservation was held out to them by the magistrates, in order to avoid the necessity of proceeding to extreme measures." It came to an end only when it was discovered that Christianity had even entered the royal family, and that the judges were sometimes trying their own immediate relatives. In 1815, however, the very year that the Protestant missionaries arrived in China the persecution broke out again. Bishop Dufresse was one of the victims, and when the day of execution arrived he with thirty-two other martyrs ascended the scaffold. In 1818 many were sent to the wastes of Tatary, and 1823 when pardon was offered to all who would renounce their faith, after suffering in the desert for five years only five proved recreant. In the midst of all this storm one of the missionaries reported that he had baptized one hundred and six adults.
That a great many Chinese had remained faithful Catholics during the long period which had elapsed after the Suppression was manifested by a notable event recorded by Brou in "Les Jésuites Missionaires."
"On November 1, 1903," he writes, "a funeral ceremony took place in Zikawei, a town situated about six miles from Shanghai. It was more like the triumph of a great hero than an occasion of mourning. The people were in a state of great enthusiasm about it, and assembled in immense throngs around the tomb of the illustrious personage whose glories were being celebrated. The object of these honors was [Paul Zi] or Sin, a literary celebrity in his day, the prime minister of an emperor in the long past, and one of the first converts of the famous Father Ricci, whom he had aided with lavish generosity in building churches and in establishing the Faith in the neighborhood of Shanghai.
"The celebration of 1903 was the third centenary of his baptism, and all his relations or descendants who were very numerous, had gathered at Zikawei for the occasion. Among them, the Fathers discovered a great number of Christians who had remained true to the teachings of the Church during those 300 years; and there were many others throughout the country who resembled the Zi family in this particular. In Paul's district, that is in the neighborhood of Shanghai, there were, 60 years after the baptism of the great man, as many as 40,000 Christians, and in 1683 the number had risen to 800,000, but a century later the persecutions had cut them down to 30,000 though doubtless there were many who had succeeded in concealing themselves."
With Cochin the Jesuits never had anything to do, except that their great hero, de Rhodes, was its first successful missionary in former days. It was at his suggestion that the Society of the Missions Etrangères was founded and took up the work which the Jesuits were unable to carry on alone.
About Corea, Marshall furnishes us with two very interesting facts. The first is that England had the honor of giving a martyr to Corea, the English Jesuit, Thomas King, who died there in 1788, that is fifteen years after the Suppression. Unfortunately the name "King" does not appear in Foley's "Records."
The second is vouched for by the "Annales" (p. 190) which relate that a French priest, known as M. de Maistre, had for ten years vainly endeavored to enter the forbidden kingdom and had spent 60,000 francs in roaming around its impenetrable frontier. He assumed all sorts of disguises, faced every kind of danger in his journeys from the ports of China to the deserts of Leao-tong, asking alternately the Chinese junks and the French ships to put him ashore somewhere on the coast. Death was so evidently to be the result of his enterprise that the most courageous seaman refused to help him. It required the zeal of an apostle to comprehend this heroism and to second its endeavors. Father Hélot, being a priest, understood what the Cross required of him, and as a member of a society whose tradition is that they have never been baffled by any difficulties or perils, felt himself at the post where his Company desired him to be. The Jesuit becomes the pilot of a battered ship, safely conducts his intrepid passenger to an unknown land, and having deposited him on the shore, looked after him for a while and returned to his neophytes with the consoling satisfaction of having exposed his life for a mission that was not his own.
From the Catalogues of the Society, we find that Louis Hélot was born on January 29, 1816. He was a novice at St. Acheul, in 1835, and in the same house there happened to be a certain Isidore Daubresse, not a novice, however, but a theologian who was well-known later on in New York. The master of novices was Ambrose Rubillon who was subsequently assistant of the General for France. By 1850 Hélot was in China and spent the rest of his life hunting after souls in the region of Nankin. He died sometime after 1864. De Maistre succeeded in entering the country and we find him waiting one Good Friday night to welcome the first bishop who had three priests with him, one of whom was a Jesuit.