"Now every child of God knows that happiness is alone enjoyed in walking in obedience to God's revealed will, and so conscious am I of being where God has placed me that no further desire enters my head: it is not duty, no, but joy unspeakable and very real."
— Arthur T. Polhill-Turner
Source: "A Year's Experience in China" (June 1886), in B. Broomhall, ed., The Evangelisation of the World (1889)
Life, value, worldly affairs, mission, love, redemption
Views: 221
"The German missionary Richard Wilhelm (1873–1930), born in Tübingen, was sent to Qingdao, Shandong, at the end of the nineteenth century. When Germany's forcible construction of the Jiaozhou–Jinan railway led to bloodshed, he led doctors to rescue the injured. He founded the Lixian school, organized a society for Confucian studies in 1913, and turned his tennis court into a library of some 30,000 old Chinese books. In his twenty-odd years in China he translated many Chinese classics into German; returning home in 1924, he taught Chinese studies at the University of Frankfurt and founded the China Institute there."
— Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity (BDCC)
Source: BDCC, "Wilhelm, Richard" (reproduced from A Dictionary of Asian Christianity, ed. Scott W. Sunquist, 2001), bdcconline.net
Life, mystery, destiny, will, order, time, death, peace
Views: 203
"The Belgian Vincentian Frédéric-Vincent Lebbe was convinced that missioners should become Chinese in dress, language, attitude, and even loyalty. In 1915, with a group of Chinese Catholics, he published the first Catholic daily, Yi shih pao, and he called for the church to relinquish the protection of foreign powers. In 1928 he adopted Chinese nationality and founded two Chinese religious orders, the Little Brothers of St. John the Baptist and the Little Sisters of St. Therese; after the war with Japan began in 1931 he organized his brothers into a stretcher-bearer corps. Taken captive for six weeks in the spring of 1940, he died of exhaustion shortly after his release."
— Jean-Paul Wiest, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity
Source: BDCC, "Lebbe, Frédéric-Vincent" (reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions)
Church, love, hope
Views: 206
"Celso Costantini reached China in late 1922 as the first apostolic delegate, and in 1924 convened the First Council of China in Shanghai to address the promotion of the Chinese clergy and the ordination of Chinese bishops. In October 1926 Pope Pius XI ordained six Chinese bishops, the first such ordinations since 1685. By 1933, when Costantini finished his mandate, 19 of the existing 119 ecclesiastical territories were in Chinese hands; in 1926 he had also founded the Disciples of the Lord, a Chinese religious congregation."
— Jean-Paul Wiest, Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity
Source: BDCC, "Costantini, Celso Benigno Luigi" (reprinted from Biographical Dictionary of Christian Missions)
Church, missionary, holiness
Views: 185
"These records are the earliest archaeological remains of China, and they throw such a fresh light into the dim origins of Chinese religion and culture that the author feels compelled in the interests of Sinology to place these plates before the public before he has been able to complete the whole of his design."
— James Mellon Menzies
Source: Preface to Oracle Records from the Waste of Yin (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1917)
Civilization, humanity, history, nation, culture, grace
Views: 208
"But, if this is so, we are standing on holy ground. There will therefore be no question, either, of winning over Buddhism in China in any outward manner, but rather of winning Buddhists from within, so that they, in their own peculiar way, may move into Christ's great temple, and take their place there as gleaming jewels in His crown."
— Karl Ludvig Reichelt
Source: Truth and Tradition in Chinese Buddhism (tr. Kathrina Van Wagenen Bugge, Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1928), Introduction, pp. 6-7
Mission, Temple, Christ, Love, Humility, Darkness, Soul
Views: 213