Peter Parker: Missionary and Diplomat *

In the centenary celebration for Peter Parker the date chosen is that of the opening of his hospital in Canton. This is as it should be. It was as a physician that Doctor Parker made his best known and most distinctive contribution. It is appropriate that his memory should be kept green in connection with the work of physical healing and with the rise of the modern medical profession in China. Yet it is also fitting that he should be remembered as missionary and diplomat. It was a missionary purpose which led him to seek a medical training; it was as a missionary that he first went to China; and to the end of his long days it was as a missionary that he looked out on life. In his mind, his work as a physican was purely ancillary to that dominating purpose. As it chanced, however, approximately half of his active life in China was spent neither as physician nor as Christian minister, but in the diplomatic service of the American Government. If in this employment he did not make as unique a contribution as in medical missions, it was not through any lack of conscientious effort. Peter Parker's missionary purpose was the natural outgrowth of his early environment and of his education. He was reared on a Massachusetts farm and in a family in which the strong Puritan tradition was combined with that belief in religious conversion which so marked much of rural New England from the days of Jonathan Edwards well into the nineteenth century. As an adolescent he passed through deep despondency into a sense of joy and forgiveness. This, in the circles he knew, was considered the normal entrance into the religious life. The experience shaped his life. Soon thereafter he determined to enter the Christian ministry. His family was in the straitened circumstances to be expected of those who sought to wrest their living from a New England farm. For some years he gave his services to them, contributing his winter earnings from the prosaic occupation of teaching in district schools and his summer labor in the