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When we recall the energy that characterized the agitation over the clergy reserves, I think of what the same effort would have accomplished had it been directed to evangelize the province. Another agitation, less prolonged but fiercer while it lasted, was that which reached its head in the rebellion year.
To console, to evangelize the masses by the help of childhood, to disarm religious incredulity by the youth and naivete of the apostles, such was the aim of this little society; an aim entirely missed, moreover.
It is his ambition to rear the fleur-de-lis in the remote wildernesses of the New World, and to evangelize the savage hordes by whom that world is peopled. The latter object is the most dear to his heart of all, and he has already recorded his belief that the salvation of one soul is of more importance than the founding of an empire.
The question which arose was a choice between two kinds of community, the one fast-bound by external obligations to the Church in the form of vows, placing the members in a relation of peculiar strictness to the Canon Law; or another kind, in which the members trusted wholly to the strength of Divine grace, and their own conscious purpose never to give up the fight for perfection; which of these states would better facilitate the action of the Holy Spirit in the present Providence of God; and which of them would tend to produce a type of character fitted to evangelize a nation of independent and self-reliant men and women?
To translate the Bible into every tongue, to carry the Gospel message to every people, and to evangelize the masses at home, prodigious efforts have been put forth, and enormous sums of money have been expended. Mental activity, uncompromising veracity, indefatigable energy, have characterized the Church through the century, and its closing years show no abatement in any of these characteristics.
The Father Guardian of the College of San Fernando, on receiving the letter from King Carlos, immediately appointed Junipero Serra, whose zeal and sanctity were so well known, as the Father President of the band of missionaries to set out for California. Among the missionaries who volunteered to evangelize California were Fathers Francisco Palou, Francisco de Lasuen and Juan Crespi.
It is her threefold task at once to develop and make real within her own borders the life of brotherhood in Christ, to evangelize the heathen by declaring to them the satisfaction of their instinctive search for GOD in the answering search of GOD for them, and to labour for the discovery and application of Christian solutions to the problems of industry and commerce, of politics and social life and international affairs.
A country which, in spite of learning and opportunity, has wilfully elapsed from civilization into barbarism can scarcely evangelize Confucians or Buddhists. If we turn from the Protestant strongholds of the North to the citadel of Authority at Rome, the signs of an Epiphany are equally lacking.
The foreigners who entered India adopted Indian religions and probably Buddhism more often than Hinduism, for it was at that time predominant and disposed to evangelize without raising difficulties as to caste. Foreign influences stimulated mythology and imagery.
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