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He doubtless felt that to preach the gospel to the heathen was his peculiar mission; so that his duty coincided with his inclination, for he seems to have been very fond of travelling. He made his journeys on foot, accompanied by a congenial companion, when he could not go by water, which was attended with less discomfort, and was freer from perils and dangers than a land journey.
It touches the most sacred feelings of his nature, and is everything to him. Mrs. D. O. Hill's celebrated statue of Livingstone in Prince's Gardens, Edinburgh, therefore, represents too truly the attitude of our missionaries in the flowery land as well as in other so-called heathen lands: the Bible in one hand and the pistol in the other. In Japan the pistol is wholly unnecessary.
Unhappily it was not granted to these heathen philosophers in any true sense to know what Christianity was. They ignorantly thought that it was an attempt to imitate the results of philosophy, without having passed through the necessary discipline. They viewed it with suspicion, they treated it with injustice.
Would that I might die." "Death is not difficult to find, Prince," I replied, and left him. These may seem hard words, but, be it remembered, I was no Christian then, but a heathen man. To see one who had been great and fallen from his greatness, one whom Fortune had deserted utterly, whining at Fate like a fretful child, and yet afraid to seek his freedom, moved me to contempt as well as to pity.
"This reflection," he continued, "makes me very happy, and fills me with reverence for a Christian people. For if you built superb churches in one street, and tolerated heathen squalor of soul and body in the next street, you would crucify Christianity. No, no: these sweet flowers of Easter are not symbols of your words, but of your work; not of your professions, but of your practice."
Such they have been in all ages and in every country, with the exception of the devoted Jesuit slaves, who have gone forth to carry their spurious gospel into heathen lands.
'And as for the old lady, there must be some one in the connection to whom it would be a Godsend to care for her. 'Now, Connor, he said quietly, 'don't. We have gone over all there is to be said. Nothing new has come. Don't turn it all up again. Then I played the heathen and raged, as Graeme would have said, till Craig smiled a little wearily and said 'You exhaust yourself, old chap.
Knox and various others were taken to France, and there set to work as galley-slaves. Escaping through connivance he made his way to Geneva, attracted by the fame of Calvin. But his heart was in Scotland, and in a year he was back once more on the heather calling upon the papal heathen to repent. John Knox was in Geneva three different times.
One of them did get it, and taking it to the window set it at liberty. It was Uncle Toby and the troublesome fly over again, as immortalized by the genius of Sterne: "Get thee gone, poor devil! there is room enough in the world for thee and for me," quoth Uncle Toby. And does not Cowper say Well, these Hindoos wouldn't do it either. Let them be credited accordingly, heathen though they be.
As to the spiritual background, for the present let us postpone the heathen world and consider the Jews, who represented in some ways the world's highest at this period. Modern scholarship is shedding fresh light on the literature and ideas that were prevalent between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New. But what uncertainty about God!
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