Page:Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China.djvu/340

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TWENTIETH CENTURY IMPRESSIONS OF HONGKONG, SHANGHAI, ETC.

The Cathedral School is under the care of the Rev. F. Perry, B.A., and has some forty scholars, most of whom are in the choir.

The Church of St. Andrew, situated in the Broadway, is a daughter church of the cathedral, and is connected with the Missions to Seamen. The chaplain, the Rev. H. M. Trickett, resides at a house adjoining the church.

BISHOP MOULE, the late incumbent of the Mid-China See, stands in the foremost rank of the men who have devoted themselves to mission work in China. For close upon fifty years he laboured as student, teacher, evangelist, and bishop, until, overtaken by age and infirmity, he resigned his task into the hands of younger men, and retired to the rest he had so justly earned. The Rt. Rev. George Evans Moule, D.D., was born at Gillingham Vicarage. Dorset, in 1828. He was educated privately until he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in 1846, where he took honours in classics and in mathematics. It was while at Cambridge that he felt the missionary call, and he was one of the founders, in 1848, of the Cambridge Union for Private Prayer, which now numbers hundreds of men all over the world. He was ordained in 1851, and was given a curacy at Fordington, Dorsetshire. Four years later, in order to prepare himself for missionary life, he undertook, in addition, the chaplaincy of the Dorset County Hospital. Joining the Church Missionary Society in 1857. he came to China, and, having whilst in Hongkong married his cousin, Adelaide Griffiths, he proceeded in the following year to Ningpo. He was there during the Taeping rebellion; and he and his brother, now the Ven. Archdeacon Moule, who joined him in 1861, were under fire, and in great personal danger. In 1864 he planted a mission in the vast inland city of Hangchow and that place has been his home ever since. He was consecrated Bishop of Mid-China, in succession to Bishop Russell, in October, 1880, the service taking place in St. Paul's Cathedral. During the twenty-eight years of his labours he proved himself, in the words of an eminent writer on the work of the Church Missionary Society in China, "a true father in God, and also a most loving brother in Christ to his fellow-missionaries and the whole of the scattered Christian flock." He witnessed a wonderful accession to the number of his co-workers, and had the joy of seeing three nephews join the mission. Shortly before his resignation, in 1907, he was made an Honorary Fellow of his College in recognition of his life-long labours, and especially of his literary work. He has translated parts of the Prayer Book into classical Chinese, has contributed several papers on religion, topography, and language to European periodicals in China, and he was one of a committee of missionaries appointed to supervise a Chinese version of Scripture. In his retirement he still resides at Hangchow.

THE RIGHT REV. HERBERT JAMES MOLONY, D.D., was appointed to the Bishopric of Mid-China by the Archbishop of Canterbury, on February 26, 1908, in succession to the Rt. Rev. Bishop Moule. Ordained deacon in 1888, and priest in the following year, Bishop Molony worked for two years in the parish of St. Stephen, Low Elswick, and then proceeded to India for the Church Missionary Society to join the band of evangelists in the Gond mission. In 1904, he was appointed clerical secretary of the Central Provinces Diocese, and later returned to England. He was consecrated bishop on St. Paul's Day, January 25, 1908, in Westminster Abbey, and on his appointment to the Mid-China See in the following month, he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity, causa honoris, from his Alma Mater. Bishop Molony visited England in 1908 as representative of his diocese at the Pan-Anglican Congress and the Lambeth Conference.

THE REV. A. J. WALKER, M.A., Dean of Shanghai Cathedral, is the son of a clergyman, and was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School and at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was a choral student. Entering the Church, he was for a time Curate of St. John's, Tunbridge Wells, before volunteering for work in the mission field. He came to China under the aegis of the Church Missionary Society, and was stationed at Ningpo as vice-principal of Trinity Training College for Chinese students. A year after his arrival he went to Hongkong to meet his bride, Miss Middleton, to whom he was married in St. John's Cathedral by the late Bishop Hoare. He returned to Ningpo, and, after five years' earnest work, went to England on leave. At the end of his furlough two appointments were offered him—the head-mastership of Shaoshing School and the office which he now fills. He came to Shanghai in April, 1904, and has since that date endeared himself to his congregation by his earnest and kindly zeal in the cause to which he has devoted his life. He took the initiative in the formation of the now excellent choir at Holy Trinity Cathedral. Despite the indifference which threatened to prevent the realisation of the idea, he started the Cathedral Choir School, which, under the head-mastership of the Rev. R. G. Winning, himself a former choral scholar of King's College, Cambridge, soon had a roll of fifty boys. Mr. Walker was responsible for the formation of the Communicants' Guild, which was started in October, 1907, and now numbers nearly one hundred members; and has interested himself, also in the prison, hospital, Hanbury School, and kindred institutions. He is hon. chaplain to the Shanghai Volunteer Corps. Mrs. Walker has closely identified herself with her husband's work; notably in connection with the Ladies' Benevolent Society and the Mothers' Union. Mr. Walker visited England in 1908, and attended the Pan-Anglican Congress as delegate for Shanghai.

THE REV. R. G. WINNING, B.A., Acting Chaplain-in-charge of Holy Trinity Cathedral, was a choral scholar of King's College, Cambridge. He was ordained deacon, in 1906, and priest in the following year. Upon coming to China he was, in April, 1906, appointed head-master of the Cathedral School. In December, 1907, he resigned in order to take up the secretaryship of the foreign branch of the Y.M.C.A. in Shanghai. In the absence of Dean Walker, Mr. Winning has been assigned by the trustees, with the approval of the bishop, to the acting chaplaincy of the cathedral, and he has taken up his residence at The Deanery. He has in Mrs. Winning a most sympathetic second in the work he is called upon to undertake.


PROTESTANT MISSIONS IN CHINA.

By the Rev. J. Steele, B.A., Presbyterian Church of England, Swatow.

In the years that followed the Reformation missionary activity was not a characteristic of the new-born Protestant Church. Even while labouring in the throes of this birth the mother Church had produced within herself the great Jesuit order, and so inaugurated a new era of missions. But after the division, the Reformed Church was so occupied with the work of reconstruction, and, later on, so pressed down with the weight of intellectualism little tempered with love, which issued in the deism of the eighteenth century, that she failed for long to realise her duty to non-Christian nations.

This could not last for ever. A Church that read on its charter the words " Go … and preach the Gospel to the whole creation"; and which numbered among its saints Paul the Apostle, and the great Gregory, and Lull, and Xavier, must sooner or later gird herself to the work. Luther nailed his theses to the door of the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg in 1517. In 1556 Protestant missionaries began a work in Brazil, and in 1559 in Lapland. Other attempts of some magnitude were made, but it was not until the religious movement of the eighteenth century that the Church as a whole awoke to its duty; and then, within a short ten years, the four great Protestant Missionary Societies were born.

While the Church was still undivided, colonisation and the movements of trade determined the order of missionary expansion, and the course which the Protestant Church followed was substantially along the same lines. Thus it came about that China was the last of the great non-Christian nations to become the sphere of Protestant missionary activity.

It was fitting that the missionary interest of the Protestant Church should be directed to China by the discovery in the British