that M. Huc avows his opinion that polygamy, though unchristian, is the best method for Mongolia, the Jesuits were in a more urgent and constant peril than they could have been in almost any other country. It was indispensable that they should dress as priests,—celibates as they were, and unable to appear as traders: but to escape detection all the way to Lhassa, among a people, one-third of whom were priests, was so improbable, that they went as under sentence of death. Their disengaged state of mind and gay French courage saved them in many a crisis. They could refuse to kneel as successfully as the most solemn confessor; but they chatted together in French, quizzing the two rows of executioners between whom they passed,—frowning executioners, who shook and clattered their axes and knives, and cried out “Tremble!” When they had audaciously refused to offer rites of homage, and there was a pause during which their fate was to be decided, they were so struck with the ludicrous aspect of the grandees before them, and their mutual remarks so nearly upset their gravity, that it was a relief when they were remanded. The minute details of M. Huc’s sketches of character and portraits show that there was no affectation in this. His observation was as active and admirable in these critical moments, as when he was jogging on with the caravan through the deserts of Thibet. His humour was unsleeping. When charged by some Chinese authorities with being English, or at least of the same race, he protested on this ground: “You know very well that sea-monsters, such as you yourselves declare the English to be, can no more penetrate thus far inland, than the fish of the ocean can wriggle to Pekin. You know how fishes thrown up on land gasp and tumble about, and at length die, unless some one throws them back into the water. Well! these sea-monsters from England, though very strong when they first rise from the bottom and venture on the margin, must have died from bring in a wrong element, before they could have travelled thus far. This shows that they are of a radically different race from us and you.” All this may seem very shocking to some people: and so may the stealthy way in which they advanced their work of conversion. Where Henry Martyn preached to five hundred beggars, they shut themselves up, with every chink stopped, to take out the vestments and sacred vessels they managed to carry, to celebrate mass with their converted servant. When they discussed religious matters with Lama priests, they did not tell them they must root out their superstitions, and resort to a new belief; but instead, they traced out the analogies (which are very remarkable) between their own faith and that of the Buddhists, and took for granted that a transition from one to the other would not be very difficult. This is very unlike our view of effectual missionary work; and none but men unlearned, credulous, and agents of ritual religion, like these Lazarists, could have adopted such methods: but, regarding them as representatives of their class, we must admit that they did their work faithfully and effectually. They learned what they were sent to ascertain; they opened a path for others to pursue; one laid down his life,—dying, like Henry Martyn, of fatigue and hardship under a bad climate, and at about the same age: the other lived to win an easy passage through China, by dint of gay audacity, when a solemn, unready, self-conscious man, however brave, would have perished at almost any point of the journey.
These are the differences between representatives of different religions,—the Catholic and the Protestant,—the ritual and the spiritual. In the great essentials of devotedness, courage, patience, and sustained zeal, all are so admirable that we are free to honour them all in the highest degree. As to the points of difference,—of gravity or gaiety of mood and manner, and methods of furthering their objects, their admirers may differ as much as the men themselves. Probably all will go on to admire most the representatives of their own communion.
Our Protestant missions have considerably changed their character even since Henry Martyn’s day. The American mission in Ceylon, and others from the United States, gave us a sound lesson of wisdom above a quarter of a century ago. At the very time when the lives of devoted Englishmen and women were thrown away, and ground was rather lost than gained among heathen peoples, because the dogmatical part of Christianity was put forward first or solely, in places where it could not be in the least understood or intelligently appropriated, the Americans were engaging the interest, and enlisting the understandings, and winning the hearts of even the Singalese by a wiser method of approach. Sir Alexander Johnston, who, as Governor of Ceylon, abolished slavery there, and introduced trial by jury, and many other good things (and whose son, by the way, brought the knowledge of MM. Huc and Gabet to England), always bore the heartiest testimony to the quality of the Americans as missionaries.
What their methods were may be best indicated perhaps by referring to the highest types of the English missionary of the present day.
Long after Henry Martyn was in his grave the type of the English missionary was looked for in such men asTyerman and Bennett, who went round the world to report on the state of missions, and the capability of countries and peoples to entertain more. As I do not regard those gentlemen as fair representatives, any more than missionaries of yet another class who have built up a prosperity of their own on the funds of missions, and the helplessness of their barbaric charge, I shall say nothing more of Messrs. Tyerman and Bennett than that they went round the world without having learned to swim, or, apparently, to do anything but pray and preach and rebuke; that they conceived themselves to be the first care of the Universal Father, and everybody else who did not think exactly as they did, doomed to perdition; so that they insisted on Western, on European, on English, and even on Protestant dissenting ideas as the only way of salvation. Those who may remember the incidents of their travel, the upsetting of their boat, and the mistaking the clasp of a faithful native for the gripe of a shark, and the way in which the preservation of both from dangers which ought not to