Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/191

and there was another bishopric at Kuldja. But suddenly the curtain falls upon all this effort. It disappears without a trace. Some stormy incidents preluded the end. The mission of Pascal, a Spanish friar, at Almalik in Ili, was massacred in 1339, and in 1342 a similar fate befell a new church built and a new mission established at the same place in 1340 by John of Marignoli. It may be observed, in parenthesis, that then, as now, no prospect of bodily peril deterred these intrepid propagandists. If there were any reason to regard the catastrophes of Almalik as forerunners of anti-Christian persecution on an extended scale, a partial explanation would be furnished of the disappearance of Nestorians and Franciscans alike from the Chinese field in the fourteenth century. But history could not be silent about such an extermination, had it occurred. Thus the only plausible conjecture is that the Christians of China, teachers and converts, followed the Mongols when the latter retired into Central Asia before the victorious armies of the Ming, and gradually losing in a nomadic life their hold upon the doctrines of the foreign creed, became merged in the multitudes of Moslems and Buddhists. It is not a satisfactory explanation: it leaves too much to the imagination. For though some of the comparatively immature disciples of the Monte Corvino mission might easily have fallen away from grace, credulity is overtaxed by the supposition that all the fruits of Franciscan and Nesto-