The foreign missionaries having been murdered, there was a new development in the life of the Korean Church; for the first time they had two priests of their own nationality consecrated in China. They came to the church at a time of great need, for persecution was raging more hotly than ever. The time for labour was but brief in the case of one of them, André Kim. His undaunted courage and zeal led him, at the age of twenty-five, to the crown of martyrdom, “he being made perfect in a short time, fulfilled a long time. For his soul pleased the Lord.” In 1850 we again find two French missionaries at work, who gave their testimony as to the steady growth of the church, despite ceaseless persecution. European missionaries could only enter the country by stealth, and they always had to endure untold hardships in the prosecution of the work, which could never be carried on openly. Monseigneur Daveluy described it in these words: “Our year (1859) may be summed up thus—miseries upon miseries, but everywhere the great protection of God, and in the midst of tribulations the advance of the apostolic work.” The aggressiveness of the Russians in the north in 1866 goaded the Korean Emperor into a fierce determination to exterminate the Christians once for all. He began by putting to death all the French missionaries upon whom he could lay his hands, and nine out of twelve were taken. They seem to have been put to the torture before execution; one was Bishop Daveluy, who had spent twenty-one years in the country, and another was the latest recruit who had only been there nine months. The three other missionaries succeeded in escaping from the country, and one of them told the whole sorrowful story to the French admiral at Tientsin, which resulted in the sending of an expedition against Korea. Meanwhile the church in Korea was exposed to relentless persecution, and was again left to carry on unaided the long struggle to win her people to the Catholic faith. Here Père Dallet’s narrative ends; but it would not be complete without adding one word as to the position and numbers of the Roman Catholics in Korea at the present day. I regret that it only amounts to a statistical statement drawn from Krose’s _Katholische Missions Statistik_, 1908. The mission is that of the Paris Seminary, and there are 45 European priests, 53 sisters, and 10 native priests now working in different parts of the country. Their native membership numbers 64,070 and they have 8220 catechumens. They have 45 stations, and a considerably larger number of schools. I hoped to have visited the sisters working at Seoul, and to have been able to give some personal details, but was prevented from doing so, as well as from visiting various institutions, owing to the fact of having a severe chill, which confined me to bed during much of the time I was there. CHAPTER X Seoul