chapter X
., when telling of my start for Ceylon on board the _Hindoo_, and how the _Montana_ had on board the first and last passengers of that ill-fated vessel.
Afterwards, when from time to time news reached me of how the various vessels by which I have travelled have finally met their fate, I wrote a paper on SOME EVENTFUL VOYAGES,[71] which appeared in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for March 1890. It certainly gave me matter for thought considering the many, many thousands of miles by land and sea, which I have travelled in such safety.
Among the new friends whom I was privileged to make soon after my return to England, few proved so congenial as Miss Marianne North, who had travelled over so much of the same ground as I had done, and with the same love for faithfully reproducing by her paint-brush everything of interest. I had accumulated about five hundred large landscapes in water-colour, and about as many more small ones. She had upwards of eight hundred oil-paintings, in each of which the subject was an admirable study of flowers, and the scenery in which they grew wild was thrown in as the background.
Sir Joseph Hooker told me that her work was so absolutely accurate, that he could at once identify any new plant or variety. It was therefore a matter of national congratulation when she decided to present all her pictures as a gift to the Botanical Gardens at Kew, and there herself to build a gallery in which to exhibit them permanently.
When I first knew her, these only numbered about five hundred, and her gallery was designed and built to show that number. But the craving to see more and more of her beloved plants in their native homes was still so strong, that she could not resist further arduous travels in tropical forests, whence she returned with ruined health, but with about three hundred more paintings, all of which she likewise presented to the nation. Naturally, the wall-space which would have shown five hundred to advantage was insufficient for eight hundred, and with grief I have watched her actually cut down pictures (which, as I saw them one by one in her pleasant studio, were most fascinating) to the size which space would allow, without any isolation between the pictures except a narrow line of frame. Of course such close proximity has lamentably spoilt the effect of each. But nevertheless her grand gift has been an abiding joy to thousands of visitors to the beautiful gardens at Kew.[72]
She was a gifted and noble woman, and her home was ever a gathering-point for cultured and interesting people. But whether her early and life-long intimacy with Darwin and various agnostic[73] thinkers had resulted in her own happiness, is another question. She always gave me the impression of being an exceedingly sad woman.
Many a time I have been inclined to regret that I did not follow her example, and present my portfolios as a whole to the nation, as illustrations of Greater Britain. Undoubtedly their real value was collective, in presenting successively a number of realistic pictures of each district in each country where I so long sojourned, and worked so diligently.
But unless I had also been in a position to build and keep up a costly gallery, as she had done, I knew of no means to secure a permanent exhibition. So, after acting private show-woman till my portfolios had become a weariness to me, I lent three or four hundred for a few months at a time to various great exhibitions in different cities—notably the great Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London, when each of our colonies borrowed my portfolios of its own scenery, and generously returned them to me in large frames, with heavy glass, whereby they became to me a sort of white elephant, requiring stables.
All this involved a good deal of trouble, especially in re-arranging catalogues, and no advantage whatever, beyond receiving a couple of medals, from the Indian and Colonial, and the Forestry Exhibitions. (To the latter I had contributed pictures of many of the largest or most celebrated trees in the world.) So at last I made over about two hundred and fifty of my most important pictures in India, Ceylon, New Zealand, and the Fijian Isles to my eldest nephew, to be added to the family travel-accumulations at Altyre and Gordonstoun. Many more are scattered in the homes of other relations, leaving a more manageable series of portfolios in my own hands, to be looked over on those very rare occasions when a busy Present allows a little time to think over the Past.
Two large portfolios containing sixty pictures in China have really proved the most useful of all, as affording interesting illustrations of scenes where our missionaries are at work in that great Empire, and as such have occupied a definite place in twenty-five of the great Missionary Exhibitions which within the last few years have been held in many large cities. They thus help to draw attention to other exhibits of the particular mission in which (as the final result of my far wanderings) I have become most deeply interested.
This is what is commonly called “THE MISSION TO THE CHINESE BLIND,” a title which only describes the primary phase of a very much more important invention, namely, the application to the use of sighted persons, of the same system by which the blind are so easily taught to read and write. Those practical men who have taken the trouble to give the invention a fair trial, all agree that it is destined to prove one of the most valuable factors in the evangelisation of China by the Chinese.
In order to understand its value, I must explain that one of the many difficulties of mission-work in China is due to having no alphabet. Instead of a simple A, B, C, there is a complicated ideograph to represent each sound and each combination of sounds in the many dialects of the vast empire.
It is said that in the classics of Confucius forty thousand different ideographs are found. Happily, a knowledge of four thousand suffices to enable a student to read such a book as our Bible; but to acquire even these takes an average student about six years, and even when he has attained some skill in reading, he has not begun to learn to write. It is estimated that only about five per cent. of the men and one in two hundred of the women in China are able to read, and these are persons of some leisure.
But our Christian converts are all poor, hard-working people. It is in China to-day as it was in Judea, when the Pharisees asked in derision, “Have any of the rulers of the people believed on Christ?” None of the rulers, but a very large number of the poor, and when once a Chinaman does become a Christian, he does so heart and soul, and never rests till he can persuade friends and neighbours to accept the same great Gift which has gladdened his own life, albeit he is certain thereby sooner or later to incur cruel persecution.
But he cannot give his neighbour a book and say, “Read this for yourself,” for few indeed of the poor can read the difficult Chinese characters. Hence the value of a system which will put very cheap books in a very easy character into the hands of the poorest.
Let me give you a slight sketch of this work and of its origin. (I have written more fully concerning it under the title _The Inventor of the Numeral-Type for China_, printed by Gilbert and Rivington, St. John’s House, Clerkenwell, London.) When the inventor, WILLIAM HILL MURRAY, was a boy about nine years of age, his left arm was torn off by an accident in a sawmill in Glasgow. Ere long he was employed as a rural postman, carrying the mail-bag on his crippled shoulder eighteen miles daily, but devoting his evenings to the study of Greek and Hebrew, and beguiling his long daily tramp by the study of his Greek or Hebrew Testament.
After awhile he became convinced that in some way he was to work for missions, so he applied to the National Bible Society of Scotland, who employed him for seven years in selling portions of the Scriptures in foreign languages to the crews of foreign vessels in the Clyde. All this time he carried on his own education by rising at 3 A.M., and studying in his humble attic till 8 A.M., when he went to the Old College for classes till 10 A.M. Then his day of hard work as an open-air bookseller began.
When for seven years he had thus proved his grit, the Society asked him if he would go as a colporteur to North China. He accepted joyfully, and putting his soul into the study of Chinese and its bewildering ideograph, was soon able to commence work, when his exceeding courtesy and unfailing good temper soon won him a favourable reception among a race who have always something of reverence for everything literary.
Like every newcomer in China, he was amazed by the number of the blind leading the blind, in doleful processions sometimes numbering from ten to twenty, all making a hideous noise with cymbals and castanets, and howling dismal ditties, which induce the hearers to give them infinitesimal coin to bribe them to go and make their horrible music elsewhere. Their great multitude is due to leprosy, neglected smallpox, or ophthalmia, and largely to exceeding dirt.
As a general rule they bear a very bad character, but occasionally an adult who has been a devout heathen becomes blind, and of course retains the devout habit of mind. Now and then one of these amazed Mr. Hill Murray by coming to buy a copy of “The Foreign Classic of Jesus” (as they might have asked for the Classics of Confucius). They said that they wished to possess the book, hoping that some one would read it to them, as they wished to know what it was about.
Now, considering the exceeding poverty of these men, these purchases were the more remarkable, and from that time Mr. Hill Murray ceaselessly strove to devise some means by which the blind Chinese might be enabled to read for themselves. Year after year he persevered, with small encouragement from any one, for even other missionaries deemed the thing quite impracticable. And for eight years all his efforts failed.
Then came the solution. As a Glasgow man, he had made his headquarters beside Dr. Dudgeon, likewise a Glasgow man, then in charge of the medical mission. Just about the time of Hill Murray’s arrival in Peking a little blind baby had been added to that family, and of course became the special pet of every one. When she was eight years old, a lady was sent out from England to teach the little Scottish child to read by means of Dr. Braille’s system of embossed dots, which represent the alphabet, punctuation, and music.
Naturally Mr. Hill Murray quickly mastered these, but how could this simple system be applied to China, which has no alphabet? As he prayed for guiding, the thought was given to him: “Make the dots represent numerals. Then write out all the sounds in use at Peking, with a numeral under each, and in reading or writing only mark the number, and memory will supply the corresponding sound.” So instead of reading A N D H E W E N T U P, the dots all stand only for numbers, and the gliding finger recognises 1, 26, 48, 94, 308, etc., and simultaneously the lips utter in Chinese, AND HE WENT UP IN-TO AN EX-CEED-ING HIGH MOUNTAIN, _i.e._ one numeral suggests one sound.
Having completed this arrangement, Mr. Hill Murray selected four blind men who were not lepers—a matter of some consequence in bringing them under his own roof—but who were otherwise typical cases, their fingers being either knotted with rheumatism or hardened by toil, and proceeded to teach them. In less than three months those four poor blind beggars could read and write fluently, far better than the majority of their sighted countrymen could do after six years of study.
It is from this point that my interest in the subject dates, for at that moment, quite unintentionally, I arrived not only in Peking, but actually as a guest at the Medical Mission, where my hosts, Dr. and Mrs. Dudgeon, assured me that three months earlier these four men were as miserable and as ignorant as all the other blind men I saw begging in the streets. Only a Chinaman can fully estimate the social rise involved by such a literary triumph as the power of reading.
I said my journey to Peking was quite unintentional. In point of fact I had so thoroughly enjoyed my five months in Southern China, from Canton to Ningpo, that on my return to Shanghai I decided to make a clear run thence to California on my homeward way, and I had actually secured my ticket to Japan, _en route_ to San Francisco, when it really appeared as if for some reason I HAD to go to Peking. All my friends in Shanghai seemed to be seized with an unaccountable determination that I MUST go, and though I vainly pleaded that it was a long and expensive journey, and that, moreover, I had not the slightest wish to visit that dirty city of “magnificent distances,” all my protestations were silenced, till at last I consented to cancel my homeward ticket, and accompany a very agreeable couple, who had just arrived from England, on their return to Peking, and who most kindly undertook all the trouble of making arrangements for me on the complicated voyage.
In the easy way in which, in those days, people in the East passed on their friends to the assured hospitality of other friends, several of the leading residents in Shanghai had consigned me to one of the principal residents in Peking. Had I gone there I should most certainly never have heard of the existence of my humble countryman, the crippled street bookseller. But by one of those developments which men call chance, a lady at Tientsin had occasion to send a special messenger to the Medical Mission at Peking, and mentioned that I was on my way thither, and so I was met by a heart-warming letter of welcome from Dr. and Mrs. Dudgeon, inviting me to make their house my home for as long as I cared to stay in Peking.
Thus it was that, arriving there on 5th June 1879, just when Mr. Hill Murray’s first four blind students had mastered his system, I became an eye and ear-witness of the perfect success of this very remarkable invention. In fact I stood, as it were, at the fountainhead of that which I now believe is destined to be a great river of the Water of Life for millions yet unborn in the great Chinese Empire.
But I did not at the time realise how very wonderful it was, nor dreamt of its infinitely wider value when it should be applied to the use of illiterate sighted persons. I was absolutely bewildered by all the varied novelties to be seen in and around Peking. Then I returned to Japan for six months, and thence to the Hawaiian volcanoes, so it was not till, in 1885, when I found leisure to write my _Wanderings in China_, that it occurred to me to wonder how the teaching of the blind was progressing. On inquiry I learnt with surprise that Mr. Hill Murray was still known only as a very good colporteur who had a curious fad for looking after blind people.
So the development of the work was still left entirely to the self-denying efforts of a working-man, who (with just one gift from a friend in Glasgow) had contrived, off the meagre salary intended to support one man, to lodge, feed, and clothe upwards of a dozen men and boys. The latter, having become blind through neglect in smallpox, had been cast by their relatives into foul pools, there to suffocate in filthy black mud. When washed, fed, and comforted, these small lads were taught to read to the sick men in hospital, who never wearied of hearing the little fellows, who read so fluently with the tips of their fingers.
One of these salvage boys actually started the School for Blind Women, for, being under eight years of age, he was admitted to the women’s part of a house in which a blind woman longed to acquire this wonderful new art, which she could not possibly have been taught direct by Mr. Hill Murray. But the small boy taught her to read, write, and play the concertina, and then she announced her willingness to teach other blind women, and I know of at least two women who separately persuaded their relatives to bring them a whole month’s journey day by day in the depth of winter, on a horribly uncomfortable Chinese wheelbarrow, jolting over the rough, frozen rice-fields, that they might be taught by her to read the Scriptures, and thus enriched, return to teach others in their own villages.
In this interval Mr. Hill Murray had also devised an adaptation of the Tonic Sol-Fa in numerals, by which he taught all his pupils to read and write music, and also to play the accompaniments of about two hundred hymns on harmoniums and American organs, which he had contrived to buy very cheap, as being quite worthless. But, getting a Chinaman with two hands to help his one hand, they replaced the rusty wires, the split reeds, and decayed felts and leathers, and produced instruments on which this self-taught musician taught his blind pupils so efficiently that a number of them are now organists at different mission-stations.
When at last I realised in how great a measure this remarkable work was still dependent on the small earnings of the inventor, then for the first time I understood why I had been constrained to end my prolonged aimless travels by making that journey to Peking so entirely against my own inclination. Also, why it had been so ordered that I became a guest at the Medical Mission at the very moment when Mr. Hill Murray’s eight years of earnest endeavours on behalf of the blind had been so signally crowned with success. If we believe at all in the daily guiding of our lives, even in smallest details, as I emphatically do believe, I could not doubt that it was clearly my duty and my privilege to tell the story of this earnest worker, and so enable his countrymen and countrywomen to share the honour of helping him to carry out his beneficent projects.
I accordingly did so, with such success that ere long his tiny school was placed on a more satisfactory footing, a good business committee undertook to do their part in forwarding his views, and arranged with the National Bible Society that, while still devoting one-third of his time to street bookselling (in order to keep his influence with the people, and avoid the danger of their attributing his work for the blind to evil magic), he should be able to employ the remainder of his time in developing his special work.
Thus for ten years from the date of my visit to Peking we knew only that he was engaged in a very interesting work on behalf of the blind.
But in 1889 some poor sighted Christians came to him, and urged him to devise some easy method by which they also might learn to read rapidly, as they could not possibly give the time, even if they had the ability, to master the complicated Chinese characters. Very sorrowfully he explained to them that the dots could only be felt by the finger, and were useless to those who would read by the eyes.
In his grave perplexity he made it a matter of earnest prayer that God would guide him to some means by which he might help these people who did so wish to learn to read. Then in direct answer to his prayer the thought seemed flashed into his mind, “JUST CONNECT THE DOTS BY STRAIGHT BLACK LINES.” That was all—a very simple thought, but one which solved the whole difficulty. By so doing, he produced a series of lines, angles, and squares, forming the simplest set of symbols ever devised for use in any country.
He at once realised that this was a distinct revelation for the good of the illiterate sighted, and as soon as possible he got these simple forms cast in metal printing-type, and gave them to his blind students, who were embossing the Scriptures for their own use. They at once recognised them as being their own symbols, but asked why lines had been used instead of dots? “Because,” said Mr. Hill Murray, “YOU ARE NOW GOING TO PRINT BOOKS FOR SIGHTED PERSONS, AND YOU WILL TEACH THEM TO READ FROM THESE BOOKS.”
And this has proved a wonderful success. The neat-fingered blind compositors set up the type, and when the book, perhaps one of the Gospels, was printed, a blind man or a blind girl took a class of perhaps a dozen sighted persons, quite ignorant field-workers or others, and in periods ranging from six weeks to three months all would be able to read and write, and could return to their villages to teach others, who in their turn could carry on the chain of blessing to more remote villages, carrying with them the cheap paper-bound books printed at the blind school.
Now it is evident that if Mr. Hill Murray had in the first instance tried to help the illiterate, he would certainly have experimented with the alphabetic curved forms—so dear to us, but so obnoxious to the Chinese, and which, moreover, would have to be adapted separately for every variety of dialect. BUT BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN GUIDED TO WORK FIRST FOR THE BLIND, HE HAD OF NECESSITY USED BRAILLE’S SYMBOLS, WHICH, BEING FILLED IN WITH LINES, PRODUCE THE SIMPLEST SET OF GEOMETRIC FIGURES, AND THESE HE HAD USED TO DENOTE NUMERALS, AND BOTH GEOMETRIC FIGURES AND NUMERALS ARE HELD IN REVERENCE BY THE CHINESE.
Thus he was guided not only to adopt the simplest possible square and angular forms, but these are also symbols which the people are naturally inclined to revere.
Further, he was signally guided in having adapted his system to that dialect of Mandarin Chinese which is spoken at Peking. For although about three hundred and eighteen millions of the people talk Mandarin dialects, these vary greatly in different parts of the Empire, and had Mr. Hill Murray begun to work in any other part, even of Mandarin-speaking China, he would have found a different number of sounds. But from his being led to begin work at Peking, he of course ADAPTED HIS SYSTEM TO PEKINGESE MANDARIN, AND AFTERWARDS DISCOVERED THAT IT IS THE RECOGNISED STANDARD FOR THE WHOLE EMPIRE.
(About eighty-four million persons, chiefly along the south-east coast, speak non-Mandarin dialects, so different from one another that each requires a separate version of the Bible, which has been printed for their use by the great Bible societies in the Roman alphabet, and this the converts do learn, notwithstanding their natural repugnance to it.)
Mr. Hill Murray’s conviction is that by his system one version, with slight modifications for certain provinces, can be used wherever Mandarin is spoken. Of course it has opponents among missionaries who have already agonised over having to learn the four thousand essential Chinese characters, and would much prefer that the illiterate converts should have to learn to read by the alphabet, than that they themselves should have the trouble of learning the numeral system.
On the other hand, those missionaries who have given the numeral system a fair trial, are unanimous in their praise of it, and if any one is sufficiently interested by this brief outline to care to know more, if he will send 1s. 9d. to my printers, Messrs. Gilbert and Rivington (as aforesaid), he will receive my little “yellow book,” and on pages 139 to 160 he will find the testimony of many men who have used the system and pronounce it an unqualified success.
Some of its strongest advocates are workers in Manchuria, where the last thirty years have wrought such great progress in Christian work. At that time there were virtually no Christians in that great province. Mr. Hill Murray had the gladness of selling the very first copy of the Scriptures which was carried thither by Mr. Wang, who became instrumental in beginning to arouse attention. Then a small medical mission was established, and from that centre the light radiated. By the year 1900 there were fully twenty-five thousand staunch Manchurian Christians, and upwards of a thousand of these who, one by one, came to the missionaries to ask for baptism stated that their conversion was due to the teaching and example of one of the blind men trained by Mr. Hill Murray.
The story of that man is very striking. He was known as Chang, the Blind Apostle of Manchuria. Alas! we now have to say “Apostle and Martyr.” He was one of those who came to the Medical Mission at Moukden to see whether his sight could be restored. That was impossible, but he opened his whole heart to receive the teaching there given. He said, “I have been all my life studying the systems of Taou, Buddha, and Confucius, and there is not a grain of comfort in one of them. But to hear of a Friend who cares for me is very different. I will be His servant for ever.” Very soon he craved baptism. But a lengthened probation is always required, and six months elapsed ere it was possible to follow him to his mountain home. During that time, he preached his new faith so earnestly that a considerable number of his neighbours desired to be baptized with him. Nine were so unmistakably in earnest, that they were received with him. Others were required to wait for further instruction.
His friend (the Rev. James Webster) said to Chang that he feared he had already been subjected to considerable persecution for his faith, but he replied that it was not worth speaking about, he had been so cheered by a wonderful dream. “A dream? what was it?” Then he told how he had dreamt that his Lord had appeared to him in radiant light, had put a
## book in his hand, and then vanished. He added: “Of course I know it was
only a dream, but it was so vivid that it has been a real comfort to me.”
His friend had the presence of mind to reply, “It was no dream; it was a true vision, for THE BOOK is now put into the hands of the blind, but in all Manchuria there is no one competent to teach you to read it. If you are going on teaching others, you must go all the way to Peking to be taught to read.”
It was a wearily long journey for a blind man. A hundred miles on foot through the forests back to Moukden; then by boat down the river to the sea-coast, thence by ship across the Yellow Sea, then hiring another boat to go up the Peiho to Peking. But the blind man faced it all, chiefly to please Mr. Webster, for he did not believe that he could really be taught to read. But like the others, within three months he could read, write, and play the concertina to accompany the hymns he loved to sing.
Mr. Hill Murray tried to persuade him to stay at Peking for a course of theological training. But he replied, “I would love to stay with you to learn all that you can teach me, but none of my people in Manchuria ever heard about JESUS and HIS offer of the gift of Eternal Life, and now that I know this, do you think I can keep it to myself? No, I must go and tell my people.” So he returned to Manchuria, and thenceforward till the day of his martyrdom he never ceased going up and down the steep mountain-passes, feeling his way along difficult mountain-paths and visiting all the villages hidden in the valleys. He preached with such earnestness that, as I said just now, upwards of a thousand men came one by one to ask for baptism, because they were convinced from Chang’s life that his teaching must be good.
His marvellous memory helped him right well, for as he constantly read the Holy Scriptures with his finger-tips, he seemed to see the very words ever before him, and he not only knew by heart the whole of the New Testament, the Psalms, and several other books of the Old Testament, and the two hundred and forty hymns in the hymn-book, but if you named any chapter and verses, he could at once begin at the right verse, and quote faultlessly to the exact word indicated.
Of course he was a very marked man, and as soon as the Boxers came to his village they seized him, and with him a young sighted Christian, who, however, could not face all the horrors and the bloodshed. So he burnt the little stick of incense at Buddha’s shrine, and they let him go. He had thereby denied the faith. But old blind Chang stood stedfast. They forced him on to his knees, and bade him worship Buddha. He said: “I am on my knees, but not to that idol. I am kneeling to my Lord Jesus.” Then one took a sword and cut off his head, and then they chopped up his body into bits, that in the spirit-world it might be recognised as that of a malefactor decapitated and mutilated—a doom of terror in the eyes of all except decided Christians.
Through much opposition and amid many difficulties Mr. Hill Murray held calmly on his way, gradually developing his system, and as home interest increased, we were at length able to secure really good old Chinese houses, which were transformed into good schools for blind men and blind women. There we had good printing-presses, where all were busily at work, useful and happy. Then in an evil hour came the Boxer troubles.
Happily Mrs. Hill Murray and her children were not in Peking during that awful siege. The four eldest were at Bishop Scott’s school for missionaries’ children at Tientsin, and were with the Bishop and Mrs. Scott during the bombardment of that city. Their parents and the younger children were at the sea-coast, whence Mr. Murray hurried back to Peking to be with his poor blind people.
The Mandarins came and told him that if he was found there by the Boxers, his presence would inevitably lead to a general massacre, but that if he would join the other foreigners at the British Legation, they would put Chinese soldiers to guard his schools and all would be well. Having no option in the matter, he obeyed, and shared in all the horrors of that appalling nine weeks’ siege, the memory of which must for ever haunt all who survived it.
But even in that awful time there were gleams of wondrous light for those who looked for them, such as in that hour of direst peril, when the Chinese in their mad determination to destroy the foreigners, resolved to set fire to their own most precious national library, the Hanlin, which was so situated that, should it catch fire while the wind was blowing from that quarter, the fate of the British Legation was inevitable. As a measure of self-defence, that building should have been at once destroyed, but reverence for its antiquity and for the national archives therein stored made the besieged resolve to spare it, feeling convinced that the Chinese would likewise endeavour to save it from harm.
So they could scarcely believe their eyes when they saw the besiegers commence piling cases all round the building, which were unmistakably cases of kerosene! Soon a strong wind set in from that quarter; and when they saw a Chinaman deliberately set these on fire, all felt that their doom was sealed. Another moment, and with a wild, rushing sound the flames commenced sweeping towards the Legation. Then those who believed that even then, HE, at WHOSE bidding the raging wind and the waves of Gennesaret were stilled, could stay the progress of the flames, united in a brief agonised prayer—such real prayer of faith as perhaps does not often rise to heaven.
Suddenly the wild roaring of the wind and flames ceased, the flames rose straight to heaven, not a breath stirred, there was a great calm. Even those whose prayer had so mightily availed looked one to another, bewildered—all were bewildered. Then once more the soughing of the wind recommenced. What did it forebode? Were they after all to perish by fire? No! THE WIND DID INDEED RISE AGAIN, BUT FROM QUITE ANOTHER QUARTER, CARRYING THE FLAMES RIGHT AWAY FROM THE LEGATION, WHICH WAS THUS MIRACULOUSLY SAVED. The great Answerer of Prayer had once more proved “a very present help in time of trouble.”
The secular papers (and some who might have known better than to be ashamed of giving the only clue to this story of a great deliverance) all described this hour of awful peril, and all added: “At this moment, when destruction appeared inevitable, A TOTALLY UNACCOUNTABLE CHANGE OF THE WIND carried the flames in a new direction, and the danger was averted.” I suppose many answers to believing prayer do appear unaccountable to those who only see results.
But although these lives were spared, doubtless to accomplish special work on earth, the great enemy was allowed to triumph appallingly in other places. Upwards of two hundred European and American missionaries, and according to the lowest computation, fully twenty thousand Chinese, who were either Christians or closely associated with them, were barbarously put to death.
Often as we repeat in the _Te Deum_, “The noble army of martyrs praise Thee,” do we ever give a thought to the Chinese contingent of twenty thousand added to that army in A.D. 1900? and to the thousands of Japanese martyrs prior to the year 1870 (in which year eight hundred families of Christians were scattered and deported from lovely Nagasaki to bleak districts in the Northern Isle, one and all expressing their determination to die, as so many of their brave countrymen and women had already done, sooner than abjure the Christian religion).
When the arrival of the allies enabled the besieged missionaries to go forth to their homes, they found nothing but ruin and desolation—churches and schools totally destroyed, and converts massacred. Mr. Hill Murray found only blackened earth to mark the spot where his flourishing schools and printing-presses had stood. The Chinese soldiers placed to guard them had decamped on the approach of the Boxers, who had rushed in and martyred all the blind women and girls, and as many as they could catch of the blind men. Some of the latter mercifully escaped. When they had thoroughly ransacked and plundered the mission-house, and destroyed what they could not remove, they set fire to the whole, and the beautiful carved wood and other well-seasoned timber of the old Chinese houses formed a funeral-pyre which utterly consumed every vestige of the massacres.
Then all foreigners who could possibly be spared, left Peking in search of much-needed change and rest. But sorely as he, too, needed it, Mr. Hill Murray utterly refused to leave the city of awful death till he had hunted through its slums for any of his blind men who might be in hiding. In order to prepare a home to which to bring them, he took possession of an empty, deserted house, and there established himself under protection of the Union Jack. After months of patient search he found, one by one, about seven of his blind men, and two or three of his sighted helpers, and also learned that two of his blind men had made their way safely fully three hundred miles across country haunted by Boxers, straight back to their own villages.
All this time he was carrying on very troublesome negotiations with the leading Mandarins, to secure new premises in which to re-establish his work. This was only accomplished by their anxiety to induce him to vacate the house he occupied, which proved to be Imperial property. He was kept perpetually going to and fro over the huge city, exhausted by suffocating, midsummer heat, and constantly exposed to such pitiless rain that for four months he never knew the luxury of dry clothes. This brought on torturing neuralgia in the head, and such excruciating agony in the right eye that for months he was unable to read or write.
Still he struggled on, till at last he secured suitable Chinese houses which could be adapted to his purpose. He had also the satisfaction of receiving from Shanghai a case of numeral-type which we had just sent out from Edinburgh, and which we feared had been melted down for bullets! He also succeeded in buying a small printing-press from Shanghai, and forthwith setting his men to work. And so the first book printed in Peking after the Reign of Terror was an edition of a thousand copies of the Gospel of St. John for sighted persons, printed in Murray’s numeral-type, by blind survivors.
Truly pathetic was the joy of many of the recipients who had lost everything they possessed, including their precious books, but who in several instances had written out large portions of the Gospels from memory, and were actually teaching some of their neighbours to read from these manuscripts!
At length, when he had got his new premises and the poor remnant of his scholars into thorough working order, Mr. Hill Murray quite broke down, and was sent to London by the doctor, to see what could be done for him. Of course the first care was for his precious sight, and he was received as an in-patient at the Royal Eye Hospital in the City Road. Alas! it was at once pronounced that the excruciating agony he had so bravely endured, was due to _glaucōma_, and that it had left the right eye totally blind, and the left seriously damaged, and exposed to the future danger of a similar attack of _glaucōma_—a most pathetic result of his devoted care for his blind pupils.
That poor dimmed eye is an abiding badge of heroism. Never was V.C. more gallantly won in the service of poor, defenceless creatures, than this most honourable scar. Had Mr. Hill Murray left Peking to seek treatment when the agony commenced, the sight of the right eye might probably have been saved. But had he once vacated the deserted house which he occupied and held as a hostage for the three burnt properties of the Mission, he would have lost his hold on the Mandarins, who would not have helped him to secure new premises, except to induce him to remove himself and his blind men from that house. But this great gain to his Mission has proved for himself a dearly-bought triumph.
The three months of awful anxiety, followed by many months of hardship and privation, had proved well-nigh as calamitous to his wife’s health as to his own, but the terrible expense of the journey for so large a family made her resolve to remain in China with her children. Soon, however, she broke down so completely that the doctor shipped the whole party to London, whence they all came to Scotland, to Joppa—a seaside suburb of Edinburgh, where a year of Scottish sea breezes wrought such wonders for them all, that a twelvemonth later the whole party, father, mother, seven children, and two young men, practical printers, sailed to recommence work at Peking.
We can only hope that, as for the last fifty years Mr. Hill Murray has done more work for his fellow-men with one arm than most people do with two, so he may be enabled with the partial sight of one eye to continue his work of blessing for China’s millions. I felt it inexpressibly pathetic to see him gazing wistfully at his happy, bonnie bairns, with all their life before them, and taking comfort in the thought that if he MUST face the possibility of a trial so awful as that of total blindness, he has seven pairs of bright young eyes to see for him.
It had been supposed that it would be deemed desirable to leave the elder children in Scotland, and it had been a matter of serious anxiety how to get them disposed of. Happily the parents soon solved that difficulty by their determination not to part from even one of their flock. For they said: “They were all given to us in China, and we must take them back to China, there to train them all to work for China.” And this was the wish of all those little Scottish children, who claim China as their loved native land, and longed to return to their dear Chinese friends, both blind and sighted. Thus they will retain their valuable birthright, which is a perfect knowledge of the purest Mandarin Chinese, and they all hope as they grow up, to be of real use in developing their father’s schemes for benefiting the illiterate classes of China.
Can you wonder that, from having been an eyewitness of this work from its very beginning, and having for the last fifteen years been in constant correspondence with all concerned in it, it has become to me an ever-increasing source of interest, both as regards its extension in China and the endeavour to increase PRACTICAL interest in it in this country. As I have already said, any one desiring further information can obtain it by sending for my “yellow book,” _The Inventor of the Numeral-Type for China_, and subscriptions in aid of any branch of the work will be welcomed either by the OFFICIAL TREASURER, JAMES DRUMMOND, ESQ., CHARTERED ACCOUNTANT, 58 BATH STREET, GLASGOW; or by me, MISS C. F. GORDON-CUMMING, COLLEGE HOUSE, CRIEFF, SCOTLAND.
For as the very extensive correspondence connected with this work makes it necessary for me to have a permanent address from which my letters can be daily forwarded, I some years ago secured a couple of rooms at Crieff, in a house which has the merit of being probably the oldest in that little town, and into these I have crammed so many of my travel treasures and home pictures, as to be continual reminders of a larger past. And here I can test to the full that power of adaptation to circumstances which has stood me in such good stead in many lands (as it did to St. Paul in his more serious variations!)
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