The First Protestant Translator in China

In the early years of the nineteenth century, a young Englishman set sail for a land that did not want him. His name was Robert Morrison, and he would become the first Protestant missionary to China. He carried a calling that most thought impossible. China was closed. The Qing authorities forbade the teaching of Christianity. Foreigners were watched, restricted, hemmed in to a narrow strip of trade. Even the East India Company, who carried him across the world, was nervous about what a missionary might stir up. Before he ever left England, someone asked him with a sneer whether he really expected to make any impression on the great empire of China. Morrison answered that he did not. But he expected God would.

So picture him in 1807, a man of twenty-five, arriving in Canton and Macau, into a world of merchants and silk and suspicion. He could not preach in the streets. He could not gather crowds. He could barely show his face as a missionary at all. What he could do was learn. So he bent himself to the Chinese language, one of the hardest tongues on earth, often working in secret, often working alone. He shut himself away for hours over characters and grammar until his health suffered for it. Teachers who helped him risked punishment for doing so. Day after day, year after year, he sat at a desk surrounded by manuscripts, and the visible fruit was almost nothing.

Think of what that costs a man. He had crossed the world to bring people to Christ, and for years he could point to no crowds, no movement, no harvest. The first known convert tied to his ministry, a man named Cai Gao, was not baptised until Morrison had been labouring for some seven years. Seven years for one. By the world's fast accounting, it looked like failure. A man at a desk, scratching out words in a language not his own, with little to show.

But Morrison was not building for the eye. He was building for a future he would never fully see. He laboured over a translation of the Bible into Chinese, so that the words of God could be heard in the people's own tongue. He compiled a Chinese dictionary and grammar so vast it would serve others for generations. He helped lay the foundations of Chinese Christian printing. He was sowing seed into soil that would not bloom in his lifetime. Dictionaries before disciples. Grammar before gatherings. The patient, hidden work that no one applauds.

And here is the truth that must not be missed. The gospel that took root in China was never Morrison's possession. It was carried, in the end, by Chinese believers, Chinese printers, Chinese evangelists and pastors, who bore it into places no foreigner could go. Morrison opened a door with his words. Others walked through it and made it their own. He worked, too, inside a tangled world of empire and trade, the same ships and companies caught up in the opium that would scar that land. He was not the master of that history. He was one small figure standing inside it, doing the one thing he could do faithfully.

When Morrison died, after a quarter of a century in China, the number of converts was still small. But the Word now lived in the Chinese language, ready to be read by people he would never meet. That was the staggering thing about his obedience. He measured his life not by what he could harvest, but by what he could plant. He gave his health, his years, and his loneliness to a labour whose fruit belonged to another generation. And the church that grew, and grows still, in that vast land, rises in part from the quiet work of a man at a desk, who was content to sow in hope and leave the harvest to God.