Herbert Sowerby Is Assaulted

Wuhan Church of the Nativity. Herbert Sowerby was present when it was
consecrated.

It seems always to have somehow baffled the Western world that other cultures should be so stubbornly resistant to their self-evidently superior way of life. And yet any suffering or dangers the missionaries encountered in their work in any case simply mirrored the rejections suffered by their Lord and Saviour. To put this in contemporary terms, this put them in a ‘win-win’ position, in which both temporal success and failure were part of a divine destiny.

So, terrifying as it therefore might have been, the Mission was reasonably sanguine in recounting the destruction of the Yichang Mission House, and the assault  by a mob on Herbert Sowerby on his way from his home to the British Consulate. Herbert, it was reported, was stunned by the blows, and all his personal belongings were destroyed or lost. 

It is notable too that even in these more remote areas, consulates had been set up, and important to recognise that the missionaries were not merely harmless, naïve and unworldly eccentrics. They kept in touch with the politics of the day, their governments and their consular representatives. In this case, they lost no time in lobbying for support at the highest levels. Political pressure then produced the desired result:

The missionaries called attention to the remarkable fact that the proclamation of the emperor drawn forth by the riots recognized Christianity as one of the religions of the empire, and commanded all the officials to protect the native Christians. 

Such was the power of the British Empire and other colonialist operators at their height. The relationship between the government and the missionaries must have been an interesting one though. On the one hand, the missionaries opened up new spheres of influence, bringing with them those religious and civilizing values that the Victorians saw it as their mission to propagate. It was all well and good in principle at least that the politicians would deal with all the realpolitik of trade and diplomacy whilst the missionaries would win the hearts and minds of the local people, and convince them of the error of their ways through education, health services and Bible Classes. 


On the other hand, when those same missionaries succeeded in inflaming local sentiment, provoking riots, and otherwise destabilising relations with governments with whom the authorities were engaged in delicate discussions, then indeed the politicians would not have been human if their irritation had not been profound. Their relationship with the missionaries was thus, to put it politely, somewhat ambiguous.