Vic in China

Acta Victoriana was established in 1878 as a monthly journal reflecting the activities of student societies, general college and education news, literary prose and poetry pieces, and questions of interest to the alumni and friends of Victoria University. By the early 1890s a regular "missionary" column appeared in each issue. In these columns one sees the growth of the student missionary movement at Vic. The movement called for missionary work in Canada as well as in foreign countries such as China.

In 1886 an appeal was made by the Intercollegiate Missionary Alliance, calling for college men to engage in missionary work.

... The best men are needed in the mission work. Men who can advise and command, who can explain and persuade; men who can woo and win. There are no men better fitted for this work than college bred men. Here a man learns himself. He knows something of human nature, and canvasses more or less thoroughly the fields of learning sacred and secular. He is thus qualified to defend and,  teach the truth. The Intercollegiate Missionary Alliance is doing much to promote missionary zeal and Christian unity throughout the Christian world." Acta Victoriana 10:2, 1886

Three years later Acta published an open letter from a group of China missionaries from England. 

" ... The Master says, 'Go! We urge, Come! Come! for the soul of men. Come! for the sake of Christ. Come! for the glory of God. " Acta Victoriana,11:4, 1888, 10

Various student groups were formed at the college which engaged with the call for missionaries. These included the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions,  the Y.M.C.A and the Y.W.C.A. The Victoria Ladies' Missionary Society was formed in 1891, its meetings alternated with the Ladies' Literary Society. It was felt that women missionaries were essential to the success of foreign missions, "Intelligent women with tact and patience are needed to reach those women whom custom obliges to veil their faces and who can be taught only by their own sex. In our cities, the sight of a clergyman with his black coat is the signal to hide, but a woman is seldom denied entrance to these poor hovels, and people no matter how wicked do not interfere with her labours." (Acta Victoriana, 14:5, 1891, 21)

At the same time, The Missionary Society of Victoria College was re-organized with a new constitution, and series of  objectives for promoting interest at the college in Home and Foreign Missions. The Society wanted to be recognised by the Canadian Methodist Church as having an ongoing commitment to promote home and foreign missions, with a permanent fund for supporting missionaries in the field. The first missionary that the Society sought to fund was for a mission to Japan.(Acta Victoriana 14a:3, 1891). The missionary societies later merged.

Victoria College students  attended and wrote dispatches to Acta Victoriana covering SVM Conventions. These Conventions often extracted commitments from students to become missionaries. In 1902 Edward Wilson Wallace attended a SVM Convention where he signed a pledge, "I will, God willing, volunteer as a foreign missionary." (Austin and Scott, Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples, 285)

Acta Victoriana published a range of articles about Vic Missionaries experiences in China. The articles described the journey to China, sights on the Yang-tse, difficulties of learning Chinese, the establishment of a printing press, medical missions, and letters from missionary graduates.

Charles Service, a Victoria College undergraduate,  was one of three founders of the Young People's Forward Movement - an important missionary organ in the Methodist Church that helped to create a mechanism for churches and local religious societies for funding individual missions. (Many of the individual missionary entries in this exhibit mention the church and/or Epworth League that funded an individual's mission to China).

Sources:
Alvyn Austin and Jamie S. Scott. Canadian Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples: Representing Religion at Home and Abroad. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, c2005