were not a few in that country: however, the magistrates allowed
us a little guard, and we had a soldier with a kind of half-pike,
who stood sentinel at our door, to whom we allowed a pint of rice
and a piece of money about the value of three-pence per day, so
that our goods were kept very safe.
The fair or mart usually kept at this place had been over some
time; however, we found that there were three or four junks in the
river, and two ships from Japan, with goods which they had bought
in China, and were not gone away, having some Japanese merchants on
shore.
The first thing our old Portuguese pilot did for us was to get us
acquainted with three missionary Romish priests who were in the
town, and who had been there some time converting the people to
Christianity; but we thought they made but poor work of it, and
made them but sorry Christians when they had done. One of these
was a Frenchman, whom they called Father Simon; another was a
Portuguese; and a third a Genoese. Father Simon was courteous, and
very agreeable company; but the other two were more reserved,
seemed rigid and austere, and applied seriously to the work they
came about, viz. to talk with and insinuate themselves among the
inhabitants wherever they had opportunity. We often ate and drank
with those men; and though I must confess the conversion, as they
call it, of the Chinese to Christianity is so far from the true
conversion required to bring heathen people to the faith of Christ,
that it seems to amount to little more than letting them know the
name of Christ, and say some prayers to the Virgin Mary and her
Son, in a tongue which they understood not, and to cross
themselves, and the like; yet it must be confessed that the
religionists, whom we call missionaries, have a firm belief that
these people will be saved, and that they are the instruments of
it; and on this account they undergo not only the fatigue of the
voyage, and the hazards of living in such places, but oftentimes
death itself, and the most violent tortures, for the sake of this
work.
Father Simon was appointed, it seems, by order of the chief of the
mission, to go up to Pekin, and waited only for another priest, who
was ordered to come to him from Macao, to go along with him. We
scarce ever met together but he was inviting me to go that journey;
telling me how he would show me all the glorious things of that
mighty empire, and, among the rest, Pekin, the greatest city in the
world: “A city,” said he, “that your London and our Paris put
together cannot be equal to.” But as I looked on those things with
different eyes from other men, so I shall give my opinion of them
in a few words, when I come in the course of my travels to speak
more particularly of them.
Dining with Father Simon one day, and being very merry together, I
showed some little inclination to go with him; and he pressed me
and my partner very hard to consent. “Why, father,” says my
partner, “should you desire our company so much? you know we are
heretics, and you do not love us, nor cannot keep us company with
any pleasure.” – “Oh,” says he, “you may perhaps be good Catholics
in time; my business here is to convert heathens, and who knows but
I may convert you too?” – “Very well, father,” said I, “so you will
preach to us all the way?” – “I will not be troublesome to you,”
says he; “our religion does not divest us of good manners; besides,
we are here like countrymen; and so we are, compared to the place
we are in; and if you are Huguenots, and I a Catholic, we may all
be Christians at last; at least, we are all gentlemen, and we may
converse so, without being uneasy to one another.” I liked this
part of his discourse very well, and it began to put me in mind of