Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/63

which they could not do at Macao on account of the tumult and bustle" of commercial activity. "They had at last ascertained with their own eyes that the Celestial Empire was even superior to its brilliant reputation, and they desired to end their days in it." Not a word was said about Christian propagandism. Ruggiero and Ricci wore the garb of Buddhist priests, and when the governor acceded to their request, he cannot have entertained any suspicion of their real purpose.

These Jesuits and many of those that followed them in China, as well as many of their sect now working in that country and in Japan, fully deserve to be called heroes. There is no higher form of heroism than theirs. Their lives of silent, ceaseless, and unrewarded effort, their absolute abnegation of self, their patient endurance of privations and hardships, their noble disregard of every object of earthly ambition, their unflagging zeal in the cause of their creed,—all these things are entirely beyond praise. But with these splendid attributes there is combined "the wisdom of the serpent," absolute confidence in the doctrine that the end justifies the means. It results that the story of the Propaganda in China during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, while on the one hand it is a story of heroic effort, is on the other a story from which "Oriental deception" might have learned how to deceive. If the tendency of western nations'