The city of Su-wŭn dates its importance from the year 1789, for at that time the king removed his father’s grave to that place and went there several times to sacrifice. He secretly called his banished brother from Kang-wha, but when his mother learned of it she made such an ado about it that he was fain to send him back. At Ham-heung, near the ancestral seat of the dynasty, there was an immense tree, so large that ten men holding each other’s hands could but just encircle it. The shadow which it cast was “A hundred furrows wide.” So goes the story. The king had it enclosed in a wall, as being the place where his great ancestor practiced archery. The year 1791 will always be memorable for the persecution of the Roman Catholics. During the preceding year the Roman Catholic converts had sent a man to Peking to arrange for the coming of a priest who could administer the sacraments, for the Koreans had been strictly forbidden by the Catholic authorities in China to administer them among themselves without the services of a regularly consecrated priest. At the same time certain important questions about ancestor worship were asked. A priest was promised to the Korean church but the answers to the questions about ancestor worship were very unsatisfactory to the Koreans and in consequence there were many defections. It is much to the credit of the Roman propaganda that from the very first it set its face hard against the practice of ancestor worship. In the fifth moon it is said the “flame of Roman Catholicism burned high.” In other words it was discovered then what had been going on quietly for many years. Two men of Chin-san in Chŭl-la Province were caught and killed because they had burned their ancestral tablets. It was only after long discussion and with great hesitation that the order was given for their decapitation, and at the very last moment, after the men had already been carried to the place of execution, the king changed his mind and sent a reprieve; but it was too late. The king called the new religion not Ch‘ŭn-ju-hak or “Religion of the Lord of Heaven,” but Sa-hak or “The Deceiving Religion.” The Minister Choă Che-gong advised the king to annihilate all Roman Catholics, but the king answered, “We must do it by elevating Confucianism.” He had found the only rational way to deal with religious differences. He said, in substance, let the fittest survive. This is all that Christianity asks in any land, and the opposition of it by force always has been and always will be an acknowledgment of inferiority. The king knew well that China was the source from which the new influences came and he made a very strict law against the bringing across the border of Christian books. An edict was promulgated threatening with punishment all who did not deliver up their Christian books within twenty days, and the prefect of Chin-san, where the two men had been working, was cashiered and forty-five other prefects were degraded one