Page 310 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

296.

19
of authority. Missionaries realized that they could never reach

the upper classes of Chinese through regular channels of pro­

selytism.
1
Despite the success of Parker s Opthalmic Hospital,

prospects for other missionary operations in China remained

bleak. By 1839 the American missionary community had grown

to six. Besides Bridgman, Williams, and Parker, Abeel returned

after a leave of absence in England and the United States to

regain his health. In 1832 Edwin Stevens had ventured to

1 1
Wnampoa as Abeel s successor in the American Seamen s Friends
Society. By 1836 he too had joined the American Board of Com­

missioners as a missionary to the Chinese, but a year later he

died of fever. The next two missionaries to reach China repre­
sented a new society, the American Baptist Board of Foreign

Missions. Jehu Lewis Shuck, who settled with his family at

Macao in 1836, and Issachar Jacox Roberts, who arrived in 1837,
20
devoted their first years to studying the Chinese language.
1
These additional recruits did not alter the American mission s

mode of operation. Their efforts remained confined to education

and distribution of tracts.

19
Letter, China Mission to American Board of Commissioners,
Mar. 7, 1838, in the Missionary_Herald, XXXIV, 9 (September 1838),
338-39. G.R. Williamson, Memoir of the Rev. Dc1vid Abeel, D.D., Late
Missionc1ry to China (New York, 1848), pp. 177-78. Strong, in
Story of the American Boardu pp. 109-10, claims that in the per-
1
iod 1834-39 the number of Chinese who entered Parker s Opthalmic
Hospital totalled close to thirty thousand. Of this total number,
six thousand were estimated to be patients. Most of the American
missionaries spent a few hours each day proselytizing at the
Hospital.
20
Alexander Wylie, Memorials of Protestant Missionaries to
Chinese, Giving a List of their Publications, and Obituary Notices
of the Deceased (Shanc;rhai, 1867). Wylie gives biographical sketc}:les
of most American missionaries who went to China and Southeast Asia
in this period.