The Open Door in China
By W. A. S.
It is still true that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. Never, apparently, was there so great a readiness to hear on the part of the Chinese people. In the last Methodist annual report, a presiding elder of a district within the bounds of the terrible Boxer uprising, speaks thus of the present situation:— In a brief survey of the year, as well as of the work of the district, one is constantly impressed with the results of the convulsion of 1900. The unexpected has happened. The Boxer movement with its persecutions and assassinations struck heathenism in the center of its power one of the heaviest blows it has yet received in China. The irony of fate has shown itself by putting into the hands of the church many of the places where Boxerism during its short day held high carnival. In one larger market town, where the church has a plant, on my last quarterly round it fell to my lot to occupy a room, with its adjoining bedroom, where the Boxer chief had held his court. I slept two nights on the same bed he had used. I held quarterly conference in the rooms where he had tried and condemned Christians because they would not burn incense to idols and worship them; sitting in about the place where he sat, I saw, through the open door directly in front of me, a tree on which hung the heart of one of our local preachers for days; on either side the door were columns supporting the roof of the porch of this building. To these posts the martyrs were tied while waiting to be taken away to execution. I walked along the via dolorosa they traveled to the river bank west of the town, where they met death; some of them by being burned alive, some of them by slow torture, some by beheading, and others by having their hearts torn out of their quivering bodies. There on the banks of that river I saw the bones and skulls of those who had triumphed through great tribulation. But now what has happened? The buildings where these thirty men and women were condemned for believing in the Lord Jesus Christ are now the property of the church, and a cemetery with the graves of these dead and a slab erected to their memory is near at hand, all the gift of the community where these atrocities were committed. The same is true of other places; the influential men of these places seeking in this way to make reparation for the wrong which they acknowledge was done the church and its people. The crime of 1900 most of the people now confess, and if in wisdom and love we are able to take up the fragments of these societies, reorganize, and prevail on the living to seek by forgiveness of their enemies and fidelity to Christ, to show the power of the Christ life in the heart of the disciple, then we may look for great days in Zion when men shall come crying, “Men and brethren, what must we do to be saved?” The awful experience has but opened out the door more widely for the speedy evangelization of China. Surely the Lord does not mean that opportunities afforded at such cost—of deaths and sufferings manifold—shall be met by us with hearts unmoved. God is dealing with the world, and preparing the way for a quick work. We must be quick to enter open doors. The effort just begun by us has yielded abundant evidence that God has prepared hearts in China for this last message. Pray that the Lord of the harvest may raise up re-enforcements for the little band of our missionaries in China—a half dozen, facing nearly a third of the world’s population.