Page 314 - Merchants and Mandarins China Trade Era

300.

accepted by natives, the books and tracts had not made any

converts to Christianity. Williams admitted that he could

find "no proof that the thousands of books scattered among

the Chinese people had interested one mind to inquire care­

fully concerning their contents." In a letter to the American

Board, Williams remarked that "all of us, have painful evi­

dence of the great distance there is between foreigners and

natives." Mission activities in the scattered missions of

Southeast Asia suffered similar failures. The gap between
25
Chinese and Westerner was almost unbridgable. Differences

between the two cultures and Chinese unwillingness to con­

sider Western civilization equal or superior to their own

hampered the missionaries' progress. These foreigners also

had conceptual inadequacies. Identifying Christianity with

Western culture, they viewed the Chinese as "gross idolaters."

To the Chinese, all foreigners were barbarians. Peter Parker's

Opthalmic Hospital remained the only successful American

missionary effort. This enterprise was also the most secular

branch of the work.

II

Although the American Board of Commissioners was the
source of financial support and instructions, American mission­

aries in China depended as well on the maintenance of good

relations with the American mercantile cormnunity at Canton.

25
strong, Story of the American Board, p. 109. Letter,
S.W. Williams to American Board of Commissioners, Jan. 1839,
in the Missionary Herald, XXXV, 6 (June 1839), 213. Williams,
Middle Kingdom, II, 323-24.