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In February 1921, A. E. Armstrong, the undersecretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the Presbyterian Church in Canada (FMB), asked Dr. Robert Grierson, one of the founders of the Canadian Presbyterian Mission in Korea and Manchuria, to write a booklet about the history of the mission “that would give in popular style for the ordinary Christian who is not particularly intelligent about missions, a somewhat readable sketch of our work.”[1] Going further, he stated:

it is our desire to produce a booklet which will not go into details but will give interesting anecdotal facts and incidents concerning the work in our Korea missions. There ought to be enough history in it to enable one to get the main facts of the growth of the Mission. There ought certainly to be much of the story and incident in it, a few sketches of native Christians will be of value and prove a stimulus to faith and zeal for the missionary cause.[2]

Grierson accepted Armstrong’s offer. He completed the booklet in the spring of 1921, and awaited a response from the FMB.[3] Finally, in the fall of 1921, he was informed that his work was unacceptable — he was not asked to make revisions. [4] Although he was not told his booklet was rejected outright, it was — and it would never be published. Grierson was stunned, a feeling which no doubt derived from an awareness he was the most talented author in his mission. Grierson was, in fact, among the most talented missionary authors in Korea, a talent that compelled his peers on the Union Newspaper Committee in 1920 to ask him to become the foreign editor of The Christian Messenger, a joint publication of the Presbyterian Church and Methodist Church.[5] Grierson refused their offer and remained at the mission station he had founded in Sŏngjin in 1901.[6] Adding to his shock was a belief that he had not deviated from the instructions given to him by Armstrong. To his mind, the rejection was unjust. He bitterly stated his feelings in a letter to R. P. Mackay, the secretary of the FMB, in January 1922: “Mr. Armstrong especially emphasized the fact that above all, it [the booklet] should be interesting, as very much missionary literature was not.”[7] He added: “I will make an attempt to restrain my boyishness in the revision, and to make it politically careful, and yet keep it interesting.”[8] Mackay, and the rest of his colleagues on the Board, were unmoved by Grierson’s entreaties because, in the words of Mackay, his booklet had “proved a conundrum.” He, and they, felt “It [was] very clever and yet too highly flavoured.”[9]

Mackay, Armstrong, and Grierson’s other critics on the FMB believed the booklet to be so “flavourful” and “politically uncareful” they had no other recourse than to throw it into the dustbin.

Grierson’s booklet failed to get published because it did not conform to the long-established conventions of the missionary literature genre and because of this was deemed objectionable, if not shocking by missionary administrators. These administrators also believed the booklet’s tone and content to be impudent and its objectives to be unfeasible. Grierson sought a new, less pious audience. However, the FMB had little interest in such an audience. The audience Grierson had in mind was composed of individuals who, by the late 1910s and early 1920s, were reading glossy magazines, daily newspapers, and novels rather than missionary literature.

Until 1915, the Presbyterian Church in Canada had two foreign mission boards: The Foreign Mission Board (Eastern Section) and the Foreign Mission Board (Western Section). The Eastern Section was responsible for operations in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), British Guiana, Trinidad, and Korea. The Western Section was responsible for Formosa (Taiwan), China, and India.[10] The amalgamation of the two sections in 1915 (under the name of the Board of Foreign Mission, a.k.a. the Foreign Mission Board) was a result of the dire financial situation of the Eastern Section.[11] By 1920, 305 missionaries worked under the auspices of the FMB, the largest contingent of overseas missionaries among Canadian Protestant denominations.[12]

Of the missions operated by the FMB, the Korean mission was its most noteworthy. Korea was the “darling” of the FMB’s missions. Considering solely the other FMB’s other missions in Asia, Korea had attracted the largest number of converts per capita. By the mid-1920s, of the 1,000,000 inhabitants in Canadian mission territory — situated in Hamgyŏng Province (Northeastern Korea) and Kando (Northeastern Manchuria) — there were approximately 22,721 Christians.[13] Only the Formosa (Taiwan) mission came close to matching the numbers of the Korea mission. The population in the territory of the Taiwan mission was 365,913 and there were 8,987 Christians.[14] Mackay jubilantly underscored the distinctiveness of the Korean mission in a 1909 booklet he wrote about the Presbyterian missions. After reporting that there were “200,000 professing faith in Christ” in Korea, he stated: “The increase is so rapid as to have suggested the possibility that Korea, the last opened, may be the first evangelized in the East. God moves in a mysterious way.”[15]

Arguably, the primary reason for the success of the missionaries in Korea was Japanese imperialism. In 1910 Japan annexed Korea, which had been a protectorate since 1905. As Japan was seizing control of Korea, the more spiritual Koreans flocked to the Church in the belief that repentance could help them reclaim their nation.[16] The more temporal saw the Church and mission schools as institutions in which a modern and independent Korea could be constructed.[17] When the Japanese took control of Korea in 1910, the Canadian Presbyterian mission had been in operation for 12 years. The missionaries had founded their first station in the major port city of Wŏnsan in 1898. Others were started in Sŏngjin, Hamhŭng, Hoeryŏng, and Yongjung, a city in Kando, Manchuria. Compared to their compatriots elsewhere in Asia, the Canadians in Korea were successful, although not nearly as successful as their American counterparts in Northwestern Korea, especially in P’yŏngyang. By the 1910s P’yŏngyang was referred to as the “Jerusalem of the East.” In this Jerusalem, there were a great number of Protestant nationalists, including Kim Il-song’s father, Kim Hyŏng-jik. He was a student at Sungsil Middle School for a short period in the early 1910s. Sungsil was operated by Americans missionaries from the Northern Presbyterian Church.[18] A similar nationalist spirit existed in the Northeast and Kando.[19] Unlike the other mission territories in Asia, imperialism was beneficial, rather than detrimental, to church growth.

Robert Grierson was one of the five pioneering Canadian Presbyterian missionaries in Korea. A minister and a doctor, he built scores of schools, churches, and a hospital during his career, spanning from 1898 until 1935.[20] Like all the missionaries, he worked tirelessly. The life of a missionary in northern Korea demanded stamina. In the first few years of being in Korea alone, he itinerated continuously. In addition to his medical and church work, Grierson wrote numerous articles and letters for the religious press in Canada, most of which were published in the Presbyterian Witness and the Presbyterian Record.[21] He also contributed articles to the Korea Mission Field, the primary audience of which was the foreign community in Korea. His work was likely read by the members of the Union Newspaper Committee in Seoul.

Grierson’s writing reflected his personality; he was emotionally strong, original, contrarian, and confrontational. These qualities are apparent in an article he wrote for the Korea Mission Field in 1918 in which he strongly criticized what he considered to be a false dichotomy regarding the portrayal of Koreans by certain missionary authors/scholars. He stated that, on one hand, Koreans were praised for their “scientific achievements,” such as their invention of Hangul (the Korean alphabet), the metal-movable type, the “iron-clad warship,” and the “first great suspension bridge mentioned in history.” Yet they are also characterized as “indifferent,” “hopeless,” lazy, and unambitious, on the other hand.[22] He then described the writers who characterized the Koreans in such a manner as “cartoonists rather than artists.”[23] He ended the article by venting his anger:

I have written the present article with a considerable measure of self-restraint. It has been revised and modified from the draft that flowed from the first heat of the spirit out of love for, and consideration of, and gratitude to the writers who were criticized. I would commend this method to writers on Korea, that they too may give thought to the feelings and interests of the people under their vivisection: that they may not “damn with a generalization” a whole nationality to please a reader: that they may write as carefully about the nation and the Christian body as if there were able to bring a libel action like a slandered individual could do.[24]

Grierson would have never used such an indignant and irascible tone for a Canadian publication because he understood the heads of foreign mission boards and religious newspaper editors did not want the home audience to be aware of serious contentions between missionaries. The editors of the Korea Mission Field, however, published the article because the target audience was other missionaries. As Elizabeth Underwood, an expert on Korean missions, has shown, many, if not most missionaries, did their utmost to cultivate good working relations with Koreans, which could be jeopardized if they were depicted negatively in missionary publications. [25] This was probably the case with Grierson. When recounting Korean stereotypes in missionary publications, he wrote: “As to which of the two is more appropriate for guests in this hospitable land — for missionaries who must win the confidence of the people — for ecclesiastics who are establishing an independent Native Church, [this] does not need to be discussed.”[26]

Missionary Literature and “Rethinking Missions”

Of the scholars who have published on the Canadian missionaries in Korea and Manchuria, only Hamish A. Ion and Geoffrey Johnston have examined their literary output.[27] Unfortunately, they did not do so exhaustively. The same is true of the studies of other Canadian overseas missionaries.[28] In fact, the same could be said of the entire overseas missionary movement until the past few decades.[29] One of the factors which influenced scholars to pay more attention to missionary literature was a growing appreciation of its seminal importance to the survival of the missionary movement. The sole source of funds for this enterprise came from the faithful in the pews. Missionaries and missionary administrators, therefore, had to attract them to their cause. The main method they employed to do so was by engaging in the production of missionary literature. It ultimately became a massive venture. Mission historians Felicity Jensz and Hanna Acke, for example, have demonstrated that by 1860 there were approximately 200,000 missionary periodicals throughout the world.[30] The contents of these journals consisted of missionary letters and articles that frequently spoke of the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the mission. They also included stories of “native” and “non-native” Christians as well as their societies, a tradition that goes back to the Jesuit Relations (the letters and annual reports the Jesuits wrote about their experiences in New France).[31] In addition to writing letters and articles, authors wrote booklets, tracts of various kinds, and biographies. They ultimately achieved their goals. Throughout the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, the more pious among the churchgoing public donated much to the missionary cause. Like the French supporters of the Jesuits in New France during the seventeenth century, supporters of the modern missionary movement were ready to part with their money because they were inspired by the tales of heroism and martyrdom they had read. They were moved by stories of the “plight of the heathen in dark lands” and the faith filled native Christians who, like their missionary counterparts, were just as zealous as the apostles of old. And they were continuously reminded that their support was desperately needed for the missionary cause to succeed.

Another essential catalyst which has given rise to an interest in missionary literature is a growing appreciation of the role missionaries played in shaping the views that the home audience had of non-Western peoples.[32] Numerous studies have clearly shown that missionary propaganda was Orientalist (as Grierson suggested in the previously mentioned article in the Korea Mission Field). But other studies have revealed that missionaries often depicted the “other” positively.[33] The missionaries had no other recourse but to accentuate the positive in their writings if they wanted to entice the faithful to donate to their missions. Supporters would not have been attracted to this endeavour if the targets of the missionaries had few redeeming characteristics — as was well known to missionary authors such as Grierson.

Although much more scholarly work has been done on missionary literature recently, there has been little done on how and why there was a lack of effort by missionary propagandists to make changes to the missionary literature genre during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Given that this was an era in which missionary scholars, missionary administrators, and missionaries in the field were in the process of “rethinking” all other aspects of the missionary enterprise, this is a rather startling omission.

Historians of overseas missions have demonstrated that the re-evaluation of missions was a response to the challenges missionaries encountered in the 1910s and 1920s. Their work was seriously undermined by the rising tide of secularism and the growing popularity of nationalism, socialism, and communism, which contributed to fostering anti-imperialist, anti-western, and anti-Christian attitudes.[34] Consequently, missionaries faced hostility, even among native Christians, many of whom, like their more secular-minded compatriots, demanded to be given more control over their destiny.[35] At this time, missionaries controlled the finances in most mission fields. Two of the most important exceptions were China and Japan — nations where hostility to Christianity was exceptionally strong.[36] Episcopalian missionaries in Japan, for example, had begun sharing authority with native Christians at the beginning of the twentieth century.[37] In China, missionaries of various denominations, especially the more liberal-minded among them, started to hand over control of decision making regarding the missions and the churches in the 1920s.[38] In Korea, the same was true and the shift in power continued throughout the 1930s. Sebastian C. H. Kim and Kirsteen Kim have argued that missionaries gave more authority to Koreans because they believed that “Westerners brought more difficulties than benefits to the Korean churches.”[39] It was, however, also the result of native Christians (and students in mission schools) protesting to have more of a say in Church affairs. The missions in Japan, Korea, and China only fully “devolved” in the advent of the Second World War and the Communist takeover of China.

Some reformers, such as Daniel Johnson Fleming, called on missionaries to rid themselves of their superiority complexes (which would compel them to question their notions of race), to learn and appreciate the cultures in which they lived and worked, to respect other faiths, and to disentangle Christianity from empire and western civilization.[40] The reformers who were involved in the Laymen’s Inquiry, an investigation into why and how missions should be reformed in the early 1930s — were more radical than Fleming. In their report, entitled Re-thinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years, they made suggestions similar to Fleming’s. However, they stressed that missionaries should concentrate much more on providing social services, cease from overtly evangelizing, and cooperate with non-Christians to bring material improvements to society and stem the tide of secularization.[41] Canadian reformers contributed to the rethinking of missions by extolling the virtues of Christian internationalism. They contended that by uniting with one another, Christians from around the world could extinguish the fires of nationalism and prevent the spread of secularism, socialism, and communism.[42]

Missionary literature was given short shrift during the discussions about the rethinking of missions, as Frank Lenwood, the Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society, noticed in 1921. Writing for the flagship missionary periodical, The International Review of Missions, Lenwood referred to the lack of interest in missionary/Christian literature when elaborating on the work of the International Missionary Committee: “Christian literature was taken seriously for once” when the members of the International Missionary Committee “resolved to try to persuade our boards (and our committees in the field) to release more funds from important work for the sake of this work more important still.”[43] Judging from a report of the Jerusalem Meeting of the International Mission Council in 1928, it is apparent that the boards and committees addressed by the IMC seven years earlier had not heeded its call. The report stated: “It is generally recognized and admitted that this [Christian/missionary literature] is the most neglected part of the missionary enterprise. There is possibly no other missionary subject on which so many resolutions have been passed and so few put into effect.”[44] Clearly, missionary literature was not a high priority for most missionaries, administrators, and reformers.

For John Ritson, a member of the Continuation Committee of the World Missionary Conference, missionaries overlooked the importance of literature at their own peril, especially that directed at a non-Western audience, Christian and non-Christian alike. As early as 1915, he warned his compatriots that translated Western secular literature was having, and would continue to have, deleterious effects on their enterprise. In his work Christian Literature and the Mission Field, he declared: “They [students who attend missionary schools] find ready at hand a vast amount of materialistic and poisonous literature turned out from publishing houses, especially in the East, and unless we provide something better they will read that which will undermine their spiritual and moral life, and ruin them body and soul.”[45] J. Lovell Murray, the first director of the Canadian School of Missions, seconded Ritson’s concern:

As we reach out with our influence into non-Christian nations, is it safe to teach them [missionary school students] Western literature, for example, and then leave them no Christian literature? They will be abundantly supplied with translations of indecent French novels and the writings of Paine and Voltaire and Huxley. Is it safe to cultivate their intellects, making them efficient instruments of good or evil to themselves and others and not attach those intellects to the highest uses?[46]

For all his concern, Murray did not delve into how Christian literature could be utilized to counteract the influence that secular Western publications had on readers in the mission fields. Ritson did not make any specific recommendations about the matter either, but he did make suggestions on how to improve the quality of missionary literature as well as how to produce more. Concerning how to improve, he posited that talented missionary writers should be given time to concentrate on producing literature and that “native” Christian writers should be fostered and developed by missionaries in the field. As for how to increase production, he argued that mission boards from around the world should make more of an effort to cooperate with one another.[47] In the end, the concerns expressed by both Murray and Ritson, and the suggestions proposed by Ritson, were ignored by missionary administrators. The audience of missionary literature in Western countries was ignored by Murray and Ritson as well. It appears they believed the support of this audience was secure. Hence, no changes to missionary literature directed at them was necessary. There was little or no thought to capturing an audience outside the confines of the church. Such an audience, was, perhaps, unlike the targets of missionary literature overseas, already so enchanted with, and entangled in, the secularist materialist world that attempting to entice them into the spiritual world of the missionary movement would inevitably prove fruitless.

Many of the recommendations regarding missionary literature championed by reformers suffered the same fate as those put forward by Ritson and Murray. Most overseas missionaries, such as Grierson, could accept the importance of separating Christ from culture, ridding themselves of their prejudices, and giving more control of mission affairs to native converts — an idea, which as shown, was put into practice in places like East Asia. This idea had, in fact, originated in the nineteenth century,[48] and the more progressive among the missionary reformers in the twentieth century saw the value in working with non-Christians to reverse the gains won by secularism.[49] But few of them gave credence to the proposals of elevating the needs of the body over the soul or giving up proselytization. Taking these courses of action would cast doubt upon the very purpose of the missionary movement.[50]

Robert Grierson’s History of the Canadian Mission in Korea and Manchuria: An Outline

As stated at the outset, one of the central reasons why Robert Grierson’s booklet was not published was that, like the radical reforms mentioned above, it was considered to have the potential to undermine the missionary cause. It was also mentioned earlier that the other factors which contributed to it not getting published was that the FMB believed it to be lacking in propriety and practicality. As to why Grierson’s booklet was deemed subversive, offensive, and impractical, such criticisms were based on his modifying the traditional depictions of missionary heroes, lampooning missionary institutions and personages, calling into question the relationship between missionaries and imperialist powers, and not attempting to reach the audience of “ordinary Christian[s] who [were] not particularly intelligent about missions,” as Armstrong had requested. Instead, Grierson attempted to reach an audience that was not composed of devout individuals who went to church regularly on Sundays and donated to the missionary enterprise. Before discussing these issues, however, a brief overview of the booklet will be undertaken.

The booklet contains an introduction and four chapters, which Grierson labelled “Phases.” The introduction is composed of four passages from the Bible and two poems. Phase One, entitled “The Corn of Wheat,” is a very short description of William John McKenzie, an independent missionary from Nova Scotia who died in Korea in 1895. McKenzie’s death was the spark that catalyzed the Presbyterian Church in Atlantic Canada to start a mission in Korea. Phase One was written in the third person. In Phase Two of the booklet, entitled “First the Blade,” he recounted the reluctance of the FMB (Eastern Section) to begin a mission in Korea, on the one hand, and the eagerness of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society (WFMS) (Eastern Section) to begin a mission in Korea, on the other. The WFMS and the Presbyterian missionary supporters of Nova Scotia eventually won out, and soon thereafter Robert Grierson, Rufus Foote, and Duncan MacRae, all graduates of Pine Hill Divinity College in Halifax (McKenzie’s alma mater), founded the mission in Hamgyŏng. In this phase, Grierson began to write in a style often found in creative non-fiction, a genre in which the author employs creative licence of historical situations and historical figures.

The setting of Phase Three of the booklet, “Then the Ear,” is the beach of Wŏnsan in the summer of 1918 during the mission’s annual meeting, a meeting in which Armstrong was present. To mark the special occasion of the mission’s 20th anniversary, the three pioneers told tales of the “early days.” Phase Four, entitled “Full Corn in the Ear: Independence Korea,” is set in two places. The first is a 1919 Seoul prison in which six members of the Presbyterian Church in Canadian mission territory discuss the events that led to their arrest, incarceration, and subsequent experiences in prison. Each of them was accused of having taken part in the protests in March 1919 when hundreds of thousands, if not millions, took to the streets to demand an end to Japanese rule. Tens of thousands were arrested and jailed — and many were tortured.[51] The second setting was the beach of Wŏnsan in 1921, during the mission’s annual meeting, where a missionary recounts the progress and needs of the mission — traditional fare in the conclusion of missionary articles. Now that that a brief outline of the booklet has been provided, a thorough analysis of its contents can be conducted.

Politically Uncareful: Victims of Imperialism and Questioning Missionaries and Empire

R. P. Mackay reserved his strongest criticism for Phase Four of Grierson’s booklet, particularly the jail scene. He was very conscious of the possibility that the Japanese imperialist administration could enact laws that would undermine the work of the mission or even compel the mission to close. Mackay was extraordinarily knowledgeable of the threat that the Japanese posed to the mission at the time he was writing to Grierson in the late fall of 1921. He had spent the previous 20 months attempting to de-escalate tensions that had arisen between the missionaries in Korea and Manchuria and the Japanese imperialist administration in Seoul. Hostility between the two began in the wake of the March 1st Independence Movement demonstrations of 1919. Like their counterparts on the peninsula, the Canadians denounced and publicized the violent crackdown of the demonstrations, which included the arrests of tens of thousands, many of which were Protestant. Then, in the fall of 1920, the Canadians in Manchuria began protesting the brutal suppression of Koreans there. Thousands were killed and wounded and, again, many of the victims were Protestant. The Japanese, already suspicious of the motivations of western missionaries, were furious at the Canadians. Endeavouring to ensure the safety of their missionaries, the Korean Protestants, and the very existence of the mission, Mackay and Armstrong had been in frequent contact with Japanese officials in Canada. Their efforts did much to improve the relations between the Canadian missionaries in Korea and Manchuria and the Japanese. By 1921, the intense animosity that had existed between them dissipated.[52]

Mackay’s exasperation with Grierson is no surprise. He explicitly expressed it to him in a letter from November 1921, in which he wrote, “I know your fearlessness and all that, but is it best to needlessly excite the indignation of a wily enemy?” Just prior to sending Grierson the letter, he had specifically objected to an “imaginary conversation … apparently fitted to give offense to the Japanese.” [53] In these “imaginary conversations,” the Koreans recount the trials and tribulations they endured. One of them described a massacre he witnessed in his village in Manchuria in which all the men were shot; the survivors were bayoneted. Before leaving the village, the soldiers set fire to the houses and grain reserves. His companion, a leader of the independence movement, stated that he had “been beaten black and blue to make [him] squeal.” Another prisoner spoke of how, in a different prison, he was forced to “run across the wide courtyard, barefoot in the snow and slush.”[54]

Grierson most fully expressed his outrage at the events of 1919 when he recounted a story told by a man who decided to participate in the demonstrations because of the inhumane treatment meted out to his sister in prison:

She was stripped of all her clothes before the leering eyes of male officials and compelled to run across the room on all fours like a dog; they touched the hot ends of cigarettes to the most tender parts of her body. She was asked the most insulting and indelicate questions accusing her of immorality. The treatment of my pure sweet sister drove me wild. I would have faced death itself to show my feelings toward the Powers that Be in Korea which, I am sure, are not the Powers that ought to be.[55]

Stories such as these had been told in the religious press by other missionaries in Korea, but they had all told their stories using the third person, ensuring an objective point of view that minimized emotions in tone and mood. Grierson, by using an omniscient third-person point of view and allowing his characters to speak for themselves, maximized emotions in tone and mood, and provided opportunities for his readers to become emotionally attached to the characters. It was his intention to display a sense of immediacy and intimacy. He was sympathetic to the plight of the Koreans, especially Korean Christians, and he wanted his readers to be sympathetic as well. He let this be known to Mackay when he defended his work: “If I am not to speak of these things [the brutality of the Japanese] as this, how is the sympathy of the Church, and their prayers to be secured for the suffering Korean Church.”[56] He made no apology for being “politically uncareful.”

Mackay did not answer Grierson’s question. By 1921, he wanted a return to peace. But publishing Grierson’s booklet could have put peace in jeopardy because it would have surely antagonized the Japanese. It could also have alienated the missionary literature-reading public. Unlike the missionary accounts of 1919 and 1920 published in the religious press, Grierson’s account contained “real to life” characters who were humanized through their speech. Their nightmarish stories drew the reader to them. As a result, they compelled the reader to feel a closeness to them. On the other hand, in such a presentation, the reader would most likely come to despise the Japanese. As a consequence, truly sympathetic readers might re-evaluate the relationship between missionaries and imperialists and question the notion of the “civilizing mission” – as many missionary reformers were in the process of doing by the 1920s.

Cultivating a New Audience

Upon learning of the negative response to his booklet, Grierson denounced his detractors to Mackay. He characterized them as “censors who have forgotten their boyhood” and “matured and stereotyped clergy, approaching, many of them, their literary sterility.”[57] In reply, Mackay alluded to Lord Byron’s “Reviewers Reviewed” and continued: “It is possible to be interesting, and yet preserve the dignity of expression that will appeal to all classes of society which are supposed to be the constituency in this case.”[58] He then assured Grierson that he was referring to the latest letter he received from him and not his manuscript, a rather dubious claim given that Armstrong made similar complaints. Writing to Rufus Foote about the booklet, he noted that “we [the FMB] shall have to alter it considerably” and “I don’t think we should allow so much American slang to appear in it lest the good name of the Foreign Mission Board under whose imprint it would go forth to the church be tarnished.”[59] Clearly, one of the pivotal factors that compelled Mackay and Armstrong to not publish Grierson’s booklet was a deep-seated worry over his failure to comply with the well-worn standards of missionary literature in terms of tone, diction, and, characterization. The characterization of missionary heroes would be interpreted as undignified in the eyes of the traditional audience of this literature — namely, the pious in the pews. Alienating them was not a risk Mackay and Armstrong would take. Grierson, on the other hand, did not seem to take this possibility into account — one of the main reasons was that he was attempting to reach a new audience, something he believed his critics on the FMB could neither appreciate nor understand.

In his correspondence with Mackay, Grierson specified that he was attempting to attract the type of readers who read magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular in twentieth-century North America. [60] He believed he could do so by employing what he termed the “language of the common people” and by making the missionary hero less a heavenly saint, and more an earthy human being. Grierson hit upon these notions while living in Los Angeles between 1919 and 1920, as he told Mackay in early 1922. He stated that “the language of the common people of California was ringing in [his] ears.”[61] And what was some of the “common language” he used in his booklet? He referred to money as “dough” and “bucks,” and energy as “pep.” He used colloquialisms such as “sure thing” and “sneezed at.” He described himself as a “hard boiled guy.” Missionary children were “kiddies.”[62] He went as far as to use the term “hussies” when telling a story of the first time a group of Koreans saw women missionaries. According to Grierson, they told one another, “Come and see the barbarian hussies.”[63] The term hussies would have conjured images of the archetypal biblical dichotomy of the virginal/pure and the whore/impure to the audience of missionary literature. He may not have intended for his readers to come to this interpretation. According to Grierson, he was utilizing the type of language he heard while in Los Angeles — the very same he once admitted in December 1919 he found shameful. He informed Armstrong that he quit a manual labour job he was doing not because it was physically demanding but because of the “obscenity of the language and conversation.”[64] That said, he did admit that he forged friendships with some of his co-workers. Nonetheless, he simply “could not stay any longer in Sodom.”[65] The audience Grierson had in mind must have been limited to the refined or genteel among the “common people” — the types of people who could appreciate the values of the middle class/professional class — the class which was the traditional audience of missionary literature — the class of which the FMB was so concerned to appease.

To develop a new audience, Grierson believed it was imperative not only to use the language of the “common people” but to portray missionary heroes of the Korean mission more realistically. He hoped they would become more relatable and identifiable figures. He expressed his thoughts on the faulty nature of the traditional depictions of missionary heroes to Mackay, using the portrayal of McKenzie as an example. He began by speaking of the low sales of McKenzie’s biography written by E.A. McCully, and that it was going out of print. He then suggested that the biography suffered this fate because “it was written in a style too goody-goody.” He meant that McKenzie was depicted as being too “goody-goody.” Grierson also criticized the diction employed by McCully. He stated that the biography was written “in a phraseology of a bygone era.”[66] There is much truth in these assertions. The quaintness of the diction (or phraseology) employed by E. A. McCully is evident from the very first paragraph:

No romance of life can begin without the most ordinary of facts regarding time and place, which must, at the outset, adjust the mind of the listener to the hearing of the story; for without some knowledge of the obscure days, the lights and shadows, of early surroundings, who can receive the true impression of the final picture of beauty, of manliness, of bold enterprise or patient suffering of a hero’s life?[67]

In the booklet, Grierson, although he makes references to McKenzie’s sacrifice and its importance to the mission, unlike McCully, he does not characterize him solely as a lofty saint. He does the same when discussing the other heroes of the mission.

The lack of deference in Grierson’s treatment of McKenzie is obvious from the outset. Grierson referred to him by the diminutive “Mac.”[68] Another instance of this lack of deference is when he used the playful qualities of alliteration in his description of McKenzie as “a lad of parts, big of brawn, and brain of heart.”[69] Such descriptions of McKenzie might have seemed somewhat to be indecorous or to “lack the dignity of expression” to Mackay and the FMB. Grierson’s allusion to a “corn of wheat” as well as his admitting that he did not want to be a martyr were likely construed by Mackay and the FMB as sacrilegious — maybe even heretical. [70] To explicate the first idea, the full title of McCully’s biography was Corn of Wheat, or the Life of Rev. W. J. McKenzie of Korea. The “corn of wheat” referenced the death and resurrection of Christ and the Christian belief that martyrdom, or at least the sacrifice of one’s life for Christ, brings great gains to the church — for as Tertullian said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” Thus, “corn of wheat” connotes sanctity and holiness for Christians. Grierson’s use of a “corn of wheat” in his booklet turned this traditional connotation on its head. While relating a story of when he had yellow fever, he asserted, “I too almost became a ‘corn of wheat,’ but by God’s grace I was through from the gates of death.’[71] In this one sentence, Grierson made light of a sacred term, downgraded McKenzie’s heroism/saintliness, and let it be known that some missionaries, like him, were not superhuman figures who willingly embrace martyrdom.

Grierson’s depiction of McKenzie and his work was not entirely playful. It was reverential too. Yet, his employment of the types of literary devices not traditionally used in missionary literature, namely mixed metaphors and allusions to Greek mythology, likely caused the FMB to believe he was portraying McKenzie in an undignified fashion all the same — especially because the mixed metaphor that he used was particularly jarring and the allusion excessively hyperbolic. He utilized both literary devices while he outlined the affects that McKenzie’s death had to help create a prosperous church in Korea as well as to help his friends, family, and associates in Nova Scotia. Grierson stated, “He was a seed you see, and not a fruiting plant.”[72] He then began the next paragraph, “Upon his death, the tears of loved ones mingled with his dust: from which sweet alchemy of sorrow sprang a rare result like warrior host from the strewn dragon teeth of Cadmus.”[73] He ended his discussion of McKenzie with a simile. Unlike the allusion to Cadmus, the FMB and the traditional audience of missionary literature would have understood the simile immediately, since it refers to a passage in the Book of Job: “He had but half as long for his life-service as his Master lived-half of three years, swift as a weaver’s shuttle.”[74] Grierson’s comparison of McKenzie to Christ could not be missed — and there is no reason to believe he was being insincere.

Duncan MacRae, Rufus Foote, and Robert Grierson, although not as revered as McKenzie, were nonetheless held in very high regard among the readers of the Presbyterian Record and the Presbyterian Witness. By the time Grierson was writing the booklet, their life and work had been documented by either themselves or other missionary authors for two decades — and they only received good press. In fact, the stories written by, and about them, made MacRae, Foote, and Grierson semi-legendary figures, particularly among the Presbyterian parishioners of Atlantic Canada.[75] It was exactly this legendary status that Grierson undermined in his booklet. For example, while telling stories about MacRae, his closest friend in Korea, he divulged that MacRae once vowed he would swim to Korea if the FMB would not send him. Grierson then asserted, “Poor fish! He would get very wet.”[76] Elsewhere, he related a story about a time when MacRae lashed out at Japanese soldiers who detained him (and Grierson) on account of their taking pictures of a sea battle occurring off the coast of Wŏnsan during the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. He wrote, “Then a great hairy hand laid upon the pygmy guard and flung him to the rear, and precedence was satisfied.”[77] Obviously, MacRae was “muscular,” a “muscularity” that Grierson alluded to in a more lighthearted fashion when he identified him as “chivalrous,” a “Highlander,” and “our sprinting forward”[78]

Grierson’s description of Rufus Foote was less colourful than that of MacRae, but it was more unique given that he was not described as a cardboard character. Grierson depicted him as “that man in black, of massive mould, yet shy and modest as a child.”[79] Further on, Grierson made fun of Foote with the use of indirect characterization and a pun. He related a fictitious occasion when Foote introduced himself to a man he had recently met by stating, “I’m Foote of Wonsan.” The man replied, “I’m Toe from Seoul.” Upon hearing this, Foote became angry because he thought the man was, in Grierson’s words, “kidding him.”[80] For Grierson, Foote, “that man in black,” was far too serious.

Missionary biographers, such as McCully, gave the subjects of their study many of the same characteristics of what the literary critic Northrop Frye has called the hero of the “high-mimetic mode” — “the typical hero of epic and tragedy.”[81] Frye has defined this individual as “superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environment, the hero is a leader. He has authority, passions, and powers of expression far greater than ours, but what he does is subject to social criticism and the order of nature.”[82] McCully depicted McKenzie as superior to other human beings: braver, more loving, more faithful, and more selfless. However, she asserted that he over-exerted himself, which caused his death.[83] Thus, although McKenzie was indeed superior to others, he, similar to Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, had a tragic flaw. That tragic flaw was, ironically, his superiority: his near superhuman characteristics blinded him from seeing his limitations.

Grierson, to capture a new audience, depicted McKenzie not as a “hero of the high mimetic mode,” but a “hero of the low mimetic mode,” which was a type of hero, according to Frye, found in “most comedy and realistic fiction — a hero who is superior neither to other men nor to his environment, the hero is one of us: we respond to a sense of his common humanity, and demand from the poet [or author] the same canons of probability that we find in our own experience.’’[84] Grierson chose to portray McKenzie as a hero in the low mimetic mode because he believed that by bringing him back down to earth he would become fully human, which, in turn, would make him identifiable and captivating to a less than pious secular audience. In sum, by becoming more akin to a “common person,” McKenzie could attract “common people.” The same could be said about his portrayal of the pioneers.

Ultimately, Grierson’s novel depictions of missionary heroes, like his utilization of the modern vernacular, had little chance of attracting a new audience. By the early 1920s, those who had never read missionary literature were not likely to ever do so, even if its conventions changed drastically. As was the case in the overseas mission fields, readers in Canada had a near-infinite number of magazines, novels, journals, and newspapers to choose from. They were not interested in religious literature. Grierson was blind to this fact. The FMB was not, and for this reason, believed, unlike Grierson, there was little likelihood they could become enticed to support the missionary movement. Non-churchgoers, unlike churchgoers (especially the more devout), simply could not, to paraphrase Mackay, fully appreciate “the dignity of expression” as contained in the form and content of missionary literature. The non-churchgoing public was composed after all, of the sorts of individuals who used phrases such as “dough,” “bucks,” and “hussies.”

If the leaders of the FMB did seek out a new audience, they could never have accepted Grierson’s replacing the heroes of the high mimetic mode with heroes of the low mimetic mode. The same would hold true with the other mission boards for that matter because the heroes of the high mimetic mode were the missionary movement’s very source of inspiration. Missionary heroes of the high mimetic mode were regarded as instruments through which God acted and conduits by which the benefits of civilization could be bestowed upon non-Christian peoples. The divine sanction of God and the capability of missionary heroes of the low mimetic mode to be successful cultural ambassadors was less obvious. If these heroes replaced their superior counterparts, the traditional audience of missionary literature might just have begun to rethink the purpose and justness of the missionary movement.

Undignified, Boyish, and Politically Uncareful

Robert Grierson not only refused to “preserve the dignity of expression” in regard to his use of diction and tone as well as his depiction of missionary heroes. He also refused to “preserve the dignity of expression” when discussing the FMB, the WFMS, and Armstrong. The FMB and the WFMS were mocked in Phase 2 of his booklet. During a fictional dialogue that the character of Bobby Grierson, a “Dalhousie Med,” has with Rufus Foote, a “solemn theologian from the prophets’ school”[85] have about the possibility of going to missionize among the Koreans, both refer to the FMB as “conservative.”[86] Earlier in the dialogue “Bobby Grierson” asserts that “it will require some rough stuff to put it over [to start the mission] while the office bosses are unfriendly.”[87] Grierson’s lack of deference toward the WFMS was as blatant as it had been toward the FMB. During his conversation with Foote, Grierson infantilized them in one instance by calling them “girlies” and then poked fun at their outspokenness and toughness by stating, “these good women are regular fellows.”[88] Grierson mocked Armstrong in Phase 4. When recounting the time Armstrong attended the meeting in Wŏnsan in 1918, he referred to him as a “brother from the ‘Board’ back home” and a “bored secretary.”

Even if the FMB in Toronto would have allowed Grierson the freedom to mercilessly criticize Japanese imperialism, employ modern diction and tone, and strip missionary heroes of their sanctity, they would never have allowed themselves, their peers, and the WFMS to be mocked. The FMB was one of the most respected institutions in Canada and the devout parishioners of the church simply could not accept it being ridiculed in a public forum. Parishioners ould have been shocked if the FMB gave Grierson license to publish. As for the WFMS, the FMB could not afford for it to be ridiculed. Women were the lifeline of the missionary movement. By the latter half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, women had made huge contributions to the coffers and made up over half of the missionary workforce.

When Armstrong told Grierson that the target audience for his booklet was to be the “ordinary Christian who [was] not intelligent about missions,” he did not mean the irreligious — those individuals who were enthralled by the affairs of the world rather than the life of the spirit and who did not care much about the “dignity of expression.” He meant churchgoers who did not regularly donate to missions. Unlike non-Christians overseas, the nominal Christians at home were seemingly beyond reach. It was of little use to try. Grierson’s misinterpretation compelled him to write a unique history. Unlike other missionary authors, he condemned the violence of imperialism outright without qualification, used a risqué or indelicate tone, utilized the sort of diction employed by the impious, transformed archetypal missionary heroes/saints into mere mortals, and ridiculed the FMB and the WFMS. Armstrong, Mackay, and the other heads of the board were stunned. To them, Grierson’s booklet was a triple failure. Not only would it never attract a new audience, it would offend the Japanese — and it would both offend and confuse the traditional audience of missionary literature. The description of the horrors that occurred in 1919 in Korea and the eccentric characterization of McKenzie and the heroes of the Korean mission could compel them to question the missionary cause while the slang and idioms used and the mocking of important missionary institutions and personages could turn them against Grierson and cause them to doubt the wisdom of the FMB. For these reasons, the FMB did not risk publishing Grierson’s booklet. Like the radical proposals put forth by missionary reformers, it was not only unfeasible, it was potentially harmful to the missionary endeavour.