Robert Morrison, Missionary

The biographical essays in G. Wright Doyle’s Builders of the Chinese Church summarize the lives of nine key missionary figures in Chinese Christianity. Doyle apologizes early on for including only two Chinese leaders, Liang Fa and Xi Shengmo (Pastor Hsi). He is aware that many other Chinese nationals contributed to the early mission effort, and laments that there are so few records among the Chinese or among the Western missionaries, of their contributions. 

It’s an impressive group, including several of the stars of the early missionary movement – Hudson Taylor, Jonathan Goforth. The first chapter, by Christopher Hancock, is on Robert Morrison, a thinly educated son of Scots Presbyterians who converted during the Evangelical Revival and made his way to Macao at the age of 24. 

Once in China, Morrison became a “pioneer in Chinese translation work. As he learned the Chinese language, he systematized it for those who followed and then applied his skills to the translation of the Bible )New Testament, 1814; the whole Bible in 23 vols., 1823), preparation of a multi-volume Chinese-English Dictionary (1815-23), and publication of a range of other texts for use in China or for the purpose of interpreting China to the West” (31).

Morrison had a clear idea of his purpose in China, rooted in a sophisticated, tolerant sense of cultural diversity. “A Christian missionary from England,” he writes, “is not sent to India or any other part of the world to introduce English customs, but Christ’s gospel. He should not be shocked or irritated by the innocent usages of other nations, which happen to differ from his own. . . . A notion which some people possess, that there is nothing good or comfortable out of England, that all God’s works, everywhere, are inferior and to be despised, in comparison with what He hath done for England, may be called patriotism; but it is a notion that is unjust, and of an impious tendency, and is unworthy of a Christian Missionary” (34-5). Morrison saw himself as a servant of Christ sent to serve the Chinese. 

Morrison’s was an ecumenical mission effort. He brought the Scottish catechism with him, but found that “the Church of England has supposed us with a Manual of Devotion as a help to those who are not sufficiently instructed to conduct social worship without such aid.” Morrison insisted that “we are of no party. We recognise but two divisions of our fellow-creatures – the righteous and the wicked – those who fear God, and those who do not. Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity” (quoted, 37). 

Though he was hostile to the “idolatrous rituals” of Rome, Hancock notes that he even regarded the Catholic mission in China generously: “Morrison commends his Chinese Catholic assistants, who are, he observes, ‘much more ready to communicate what they do know, than any of the heathen that I have seen.’ . . . We find him studying a Roman Catholic prayer book, approving of Catholic ideas respecting the Chinese language, anxiously monitoring the fortunes of Roman Catholic missionaries, having ‘occasional intercourse with a native Roman Catholic’ who was ‘sometimes dissuaded by the Romish clergy from visiting the ‘heretical missionary,’ meeting with the French Catholic priest, Richenet.” (38).

Doyle’s inspiring volume thus helps dispel the common caricature of jingoistic, divisive missionaries.