Buddhist, whose struggles after spiritual peace, and whose efforts to
obtain it through fasting, sacrifice, earnest study, and the most
scrupulous obedience to all the forms of Buddhist worship, remind one
strongly of the experiences of Saul of Tarsus. Like Saul too, Hü Yong Mi
was, before his conversion, a vigorous and sincere opponent of
Christianity. When his older brother became a Christian, Hü Yong Mi felt
that his casting away of idols and abolishing of ancestral worship were
crimes of such magnitude that the entire family "ought all with one heart
to beat the drum and drive him from the house." He tells of finding a copy
of the Bible in his father's bookcase one day, and how, in sudden rage, he
tore it to pieces and threw the fragments on the floor, and then, not
satisfied with destroying the book, wished that he had some sharp implement
with which to cut out "the hated name Ya-su, which stared from the
mutilated pages."

But when, through the efforts of the very brother whom he had persecuted,
he too came to recognize the truth of Christianity, he became as devoted
and tireless a worker for his Lord as was Paul the apostle, preaching in
season and out of season, first as a layman, afterwards as an ordained
minister of the Methodist Church. His work often led him to isolated and
difficult fields; he was "in journeyings often, in perils of rivers, in
perils of robbers, in perils from his countrymen, in perils in the city, in
perils in the wilderness." But, alike in toil and persecution, he remained
steadfast.

He was made a presiding elder at the time of the organization of the
Foochow Conference in 1877, and from that time until his death, in 1893, he
was, in the words of one of the missionaries of that district, "a pillar of
strength in the church in China, because of his piety and wisdom and his
literary ability, having, withal, an eloquent tongue which in the ardour of