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This odd effect of the great agnostics in arousing doubts deeper than their own might be illustrated in many ways. I take only one. As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing.
Peking being the city of the court, and the headquarters of many of the greatest officials, is the receptacle of the finest products of the oldest and greatest non-Christian people the world has ever known.
The non-Christian provinces had a very disproportionately large total of delegates, of whom four are put down as elected, but on examination we find that one of these is from Lepanto, the capital of which was an Ilocano town; one is from Nueva Vizcaya, where there is a considerable Cagayan-Ilocano population; one is from Benguet, the capital of which was an Ilocano town, and one from Tiagan, which was an Iloeano settlement.
That a man should undertake, at seventy-eight years of age, such a journey, was felt to be a tribute both to the country and to the man himself, and there was a desire, if anything more in non-Christian than in Christian circles to hear him, and do him honour.
The Preliminary Discourse prefixed to Sale's Koran; and Professor Palmer's Introduction in S. B. E., vol. vi. Islam, by J. W. H. Stobart, in the "Non-Christian Religious Systems" Series of the S.P.C.K. Der Islam, by Houtsma, in De la Saussaye. Sell, The Faith of Islam, Second Edition, 1896. Margoliouth. Mohammed and the Rise of Islam, 1905.
No doubt many of their eager apostles are non-Christian or even anti-Christian, but though some of them have tried violently to pluck up the plant by the root from the soil in which it first flowered, much of that soil still adheres to it, and it will not live long if torn from its native 'habitat.
This, at all events, is a very instructive indication of the present tendency which deserves prominence: and its significance becomes more evident when we recall how the work of Wigand was received by the non-christian press a quarter of a century ago. It was either ridiculed or ignored.
Still it is true that the freedom extended by our constitution to other forms of faith has been claimed by some of their adherents, and we have in the United States a goodly number of groups representing non-Christian creeds. Of these the Jews constitute much the largest number, there being, perhaps, six or seven hundred Jewish congregations in all parts of the country.
The position of a government official or of a rich man is no longer, as it once was, and still is among non-Christian peoples, regarded as necessarily honorable and deserving of respect, and under the special blessing of God.
It is worthy of remark, as one characteristic of the Christian missions of the recent period, that the religions of the non-Christian nations have been studied more thoroughly, and the true and praiseworthy elements in them have been better appreciated.
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