16 A Modern Pioneer in Korea
native chronology, which, like that of Japan and China, is founded on national vanity and mythical zoology. I also avoid, as far as possible, any emphasis on the wonder fill and sensational, as peculiar to the peninsular country or man; for, having lived in the interior of feudal Japan, I find little or nothing in Christless Korea different from that in Christless Japan. In all essential particulars, of custom, social life, indirection of misgovernment, oppression of the people, hoary superstitions and things odd and strange, the fibre of civilisation in the peninsula was identical, or nearly so, with that in the island. Unreformed countries in Asia, before the advent of true Christianity, all bore a common likeness. Their ancient history ends and their modern story begins when the religion of Jesus sways the hearts of men. Yet before the temple of truth can rise, Christianity saps and rends hoary structures, causing at first much ruin, as it reduces to rubbish the long buttressed false- hoods of ages, on which the moss of artistic charm has gathered and over which the vines of sentiment have luxuriantly grown.
Startling changes have taken place within forty years, since prayer first went up for Korea — a hermit nation becoming social, a Sahara of paganism trans- formed into a garden of Christian hope. The outflowering of Japan, the shattering in war of the Chinese dogma of universal severeignty and the extension of American power and influence in the Pacific, were all within the lifetime of our subject. These events were followed by the check given to
