Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/186

ultimately took on the colour of their environment, or has history concealed some catastrophe which would offer a less unwelcome explanation? Whatever the truth may be, it is certain that to-day there remain no ruins of their churches, no traces of their writings, no evidences of their work, material or moral. Nothing tells their story except a solitary stone tablet with an inscription which augments the wonder of their failure instead of accounting for it.

Throughout the course of nearly thirteen centuries no attempt to carry the gospel of Jesus to China was made by Christians of any denomination except the Nestorians, and when at length, in 1246 A.D., communication was opened between Christendom and East-Asian peoples, it was for political rather than religious purposes. Alarmed by the ravages of the Tartars in the regions between the Caspian and the Mediterranean, Pope Innocent sent a Franciscan monk, John of Plano Carpini, to convey a letter of remonstrance to the Grand Khan. The correspondence between the two potentates, though limited to a solitary despatch on each side, forms one of the most interesting pages of history, the language used by the writers being entirely unobscured by the diplomatic insincerities of later ages. His Holiness the Pope couched his despatch in the tone of a superior addressing an inferior. He denounced the outrages committed by the Tartar conquerors; warned them that "by many and