Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/190

manner of dealing with children which afterwards bore, and is still bearing, evil fruit. Corvino lived thirty-six years in Peking. He translated the whole of the New Testament and the Psalms of David into the Tartar language; he caused "the mysteries of the Bible to be represented by pictures in all his churches for the purpose of captivating the eyes of the barbarians;" he was able to "write and read and preach openly and freely the testimony of the law of Christ," and he "converted more than thirty thousand infidels." "Barbarians" and "infidels"—even this noble apostle had no other conception of the believers in Buddha and the disciples of Confucius among whom he worked. Yet when he died among these "barbarians" and "infidels," it is related that "all the inhabitants of Cambaluc, without distinction, mourned for the man of God, and both Christians and pagans were present at the funeral ceremony, the latter rending their garments in token of grief, … and the place of his burial became a pilgrimage to which the inhabitants of Cambaluc resorted with pious eagerness."

During the years that separated the death of Monte Corvino (1328) and the expulsion of the Mongol rulers from China (1363), the work of Christian propagandism appears to have continued uninterruptedly and successfully. Corvino was succeeded in Peking by Nicholas, who brought with him a company of twenty-six Franciscans,