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Thousands and thousands of professed Christian seamen are found every day in the year at seaports inhabited by heathens. Into what disrepute do they too generally bring Christianity, instead of exhibiting its beauty and excellence by the propriety and correctness of their lives I will not say, as I could wish, by their purity and holiness.
To him, Christianity had been not so much a system of doctrines based upon historical proofs, as emotions springing from his own heart. He believed in another world not because its existence had been testified to by others, but because he daily and hourly entered its sacred precincts.
So, Japanese Christianity, having vanished in blood, was supposed to have no existence, thus furnishing Mr. Lecky with arguments to prove the extirpative power of persecution.
The empire was crumbling, and upon its ruins the race of the future and social conditions of modern times were forming. Paganism and Druidism would have been an impossibility. Christianity, even with its lustre dimmed, its purity tarnished, its simplicity overlaid with scholasticism, was better than these. The miracle had been accomplished. The great Roman Empire had said, "I am Christian."
We owe to Christianity the first real hospitals, the first really compassionate and unselfish care for the sick and impulses which, as they have finally worked out, have had more to do with giving quality and direction to medicine and particularly in investing the whole practice of medicine with its true atmosphere than any other single force.
We must acknowledge these have been a small minority compared with the many whose pride and bigotry have shut up their mind against everything we had to advance, and whose sole aim has been to assail Christianity and Christians. In the prosecution of the evangelistic work, which I have endeavoured to describe, missionaries come into contact with all classes.
Again, marriage offers her the only safe opportunity, considering the levantine view of women as property which Christianity has preserved in our civilization, to obtain gratification for that powerful complex of instincts which we call the sexual, and, in particular, for the instinct of maternity.
If there were Congregational churches in this region in the same proportion as in New England there would be a full thousand. If they were in the same proportion as Connecticut, there would be twelve hundred churches; as New Hampshire, thirteen hundred; as Vermont, sixteen hundred. Congregationalism goes to these people as the representative of pure, intelligent and progressive Christianity.
In the immense spiritual movement of our day, the English aristocracy, as I have elsewhere said, always reminds me of Pilate confronting the phenomenon of Christianity. Nor can a materialized class have any serious and fruitful sense for the power of beauty.
That this assertion may not appear too sweeping, it is only enough to instance the example of India, which England has held long enough to convert, at least in part, had she so desired and been moved by the Spirit of God, yet to-day India stands in a worse relation toward Protestantism than when Protestantism in the name of Christianity, but in the person of a British trader, settled down in its midst.
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