Long before Korea was open to the outside world, missionary pioneers tried to enter it.  The French Catholics forced admission as far back as the end of the eighteenth century, and made many converts, who were afterwards exterminated.  Gutzaleff, a famous Protestant pioneer, landed on an island at Basil’s Bay, in 1832, and remained there a month, distributing Chinese literature.  Mr. Thomas, a British missionary, secured a passage on board the ill-fated General Sherman in 1866, and was killed with the rest of the crew.  Dr. Ross, the Scottish Presbyterian missionary of Moukden, Manchuria, became interested in the Koreans, studied their language, talked with every Korean he could find, and built up a grammar of the language, publishing an English-Korean primer in 1876.  He and a colleague, Mr. McIntyre, published Gospels in the language, and opened up a work among the Koreans on the north side of the Yalu.  Those who can recall the state of that district in the days before railways were opened and order established, can best appreciate the nerve and daring needed for the task.  They made converts, and one of these converts took some newly printed Christian books and set back home, reaching Seoul itself, spreading the new religion among his friends.

It was two years after the opening of Korea to the West before the first missionary arrived.  In 1884 Dr. Allen, a Presbyterian physician (afterwards United States Minister to Korea), arrived at Seoul.  It was very doubtful at this time how missionaries would be received, or how their converts would be treated.  The law enacting death against any man who became a Christian was still unrepealed, but it was not enforced.  Officialism might, however, revive it at any time.  It was thought advisable, when the first converts were baptized in 1887, to perform the ceremony behind closed doors, with an earnest and athletic young American educationalist, Homer B. Hulbert, acting as guard.

Dr. Allen was soon followed by others.  Dr. Underwood, brother of the famous manufacturer of typewriting machines, was the first non-medical missionary.  The American and Canadian Presbyterians and Methodists undertook the main work, and the Church of England set up a bishopric.  Women missionary doctors came, and at once won a place for themselves.  Names like Appenzeller, Scranton, Bunker and Gale—­to name a few of the pioneers—­have won a permanent place in the history of missions.

The missionaries found a land almost without religion, with few temples and few monks or priests.  Buddhism had been discredited by the treachery of some Japanese Buddhists during the great Japanese invasion by Hideyoshi in 1592, and no Buddhist priest was allowed inside the city of Seoul.  Young men of official rank studied their Confucius diligently, but to them Confucianism was more a theory for the conduct of life and a road to high office than a religion.  The main religion of the people was Shamanism, the fear of evil spirits.  It darkened their souls, as the tales of a foolish nurse about goblins darken the mind of a sensitive and imaginative child.  The spirits of Shamanism were evil, not good, a curse, not a blessing, bringing terror, not hope.