The tens of converts grew to tens of thousands.  From the first, the Koreans showed themselves to be Christians of a very unusual type.  They started by reforming their homes, giving their wives liberty and demanding education for their children.  They took the promises and commands of the Bible literally and established a standard of conduct for church members which, if it were enforced in some older Christian communities, would cause a serious contraction of the church rolls.  The first convert set out to preach to his friends.  Latter converts imitated his example.  From Pyeng-yang the movement spread to Sun-chon, which in a few years rivalled Pyeng-yang as a Christian centre.  From here Christianity spread to the Yalu and up the Tumen River.

The Koreans themselves established Christianity in distant communities where no white man had ever been.  Soon many of the missionaries were kept busy for several months each year travelling with pack-pony and mafoo, from station to station in the most remote parts of the country, fording and swimming unbridged rivers, climbing mountain passes, inspecting and examining and instructing the converts, admitting them to church membership and organizing them for still more effective work.

When I hear the cheap sneers of the obtuse stay-at-home or globe-trotter critics against missionaries and their converts, I am amused.  It gives me the measure of the men, particularly of the globetrotters.  When the British and American Churches seek to send out missionaries, the British and American people will have registered the sure sign of their decadence.  For the Churches and nations will then cease to be alive.  In travelling through the north country I employed a number of the Christian converts, I found them clean and honest, good, hard workers, men who showed their religion not by talk, but by good, straight action.  It is a grief to me to know that some of these “boys” have since, because of their prominence as Christian workers, been the victims of official persecution.

Under the influence of the missionaries many schools were opened; hospitals and dispensaries were maintained, and a considerable literature, educational as well as religious, was circulated.

When the Japanese landed in Korea in 1904, the missionaries welcomed them.  They knew the tyranny and abuses of the old Government, and believed that the Japanese would help to better things.  The ill-treatment of helpless Koreans by Japanese soldiers and coolies caused a considerable reaction of feeling.  When, however, Prince Ito became Resident-General the prevailing sentiment was that it would be better for the people to submit and to make the best of existing conditions, in the hope that the harshness and injustice of Japanese rule would pass.