Leong On Tong assumed the position of catechist for the Wesleyan mission in 1866. He had been converted himself while in Australia, in Vaughan, by his predecessor but one as catechist, Leong Ah Toe (no family relationship is ever mentioned between the two). He was regarded as very successful and stayed in the position for thirteen years. In 1879 he was ordained and then was placed in charge of the Little Bourke Street chapel in Melbourne where he stayed until 1885. He then returned to China.

Fortunately, parts of Leong On Tong’s journal survive. Unfortunately, that part of his journal dealing with July to October 1868 is lost, or perhaps better put, has not yet been found. It is a fascinating document, describing his daily work on the goldfields and the occasional translated and transcribed conversation, sometimes with temple keepers—undoubtedly tidied up—and the arguments he puts to them strongly echo the statements of Hoa Ah Pang in his baptismal statement: worshipping images is a sin against God, setting up a temple to allow others to worship images is thus a greater sin, images are nothing but paper and wood and therefore cannot protect you, buying incense and candles to worship the images is a waste of money, and so on.

Leong’s views on idolatry were absolutely mainstream in protestant missions of the time across the world. One favourite biblical text on idolatry comes from Psalm 805, 15 and 16:

The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; neither is there any breath in their mouths.

On this logic the worship of idols is simple absurdity, with no possible rational justification. Missionaries in China and elsewhere, who belonged to the London Missionary Society, in fact encouraged their converts to hand over their sacred images as a sign of true conversion. The missionaries often sent these to the museum of the LMS in London. The ‘Advertisement’ on the first page of its catalogues speaks of ‘the most valuable and impressive objects in this Collection are the numerous, and (in some instances) horrible, IDOLS, which having been imported from the South Sea Islands, from India, China, Africa; and among these especially which were actually given up by their former worshippers, from a full conviction of the folly and sin of idolatry - a conviction derived from the ministry of the Gospel by the Missionaries’. ^[15]

Idolatry, specifically in China, aroused deep emotion in a notable witness to its religion in this period. The Right Rev. Bishop C.R. Alford, Anglican Bishop of Victoria in Hong Kong from 1867 to 1872 published a pamphlet for the Church Missionary Society called Idols: Idolatry: Idolators in 1887. In it he writes from his own observations doing the rounds of Anglican missions from Hong Kong to Beijing, 1000 miles west up the Yangtze, and east to Yokohama:

I can tell you what I myself saw of the idolatry of China when, as Bishop of Victoria, it was my duty to visit the Missions … I can testify that, though their language differed in every important Mission that I visited, as also their physical appearance and even their mental temperament, their social manners and customs also to some extent, -everywhere the people were given to idolatry … In fact, everywhere in heathen lands, and in everything purely native, as a rule, idolatry overshadows the people, like some pestilential cloud enveloping and defiling more or less the great mass of the population … But I have said enough to show you that, notwithstanding all that can be written about the philosophy of the ancient religions of the East, idolatry, whatever name it may assume, holds the heathen nations fast bound in chains of sin, and wretchedness, and death, -a piteous sight that brought the Son of God from heaven to destroy these works of the devil, and that ought to stir to the bottom of his soul every soldier of the Cross to go forth in his Master’s name and overcome the Evil One by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony. ^[16]