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Updated: June 21, 2025
This is the Mount Ararat of the Pacific Coast peoples; for those readers who are familiar with the ways and beliefs and faiths of primitive races will agree that it is difficult to discover anywhere in the world a race that has not some story of the Deluge, which they have chronicled and localized to fit the understanding and the conditions of the nation that composes their own immediate world.
And this, doubtless, will be the weakness of the Indian Church of the future. But she will have her strong points, also, and in these she will glory and through them glorify her exalted Lord. Educated Hindus proudly claim for it superiority to all sacred books of other faiths. Of all ancient Brahmanical writings it is to-day the most cherished by the members of that faith.
It never seemed to occur to either of them that all faiths may be and indeed probably are progressive; in short, different rays of light thrown from the various facets of the same crystal, as in turn these are shone upon by the sun of Truth. Our passage down the Red Sea was cool and agreeable. Thence we shaped our course for Ceylon.
As a rule, we take such things as matters of course, but when one comes over here into Asia and into countries where the people have been cursed by corrupt governments, where innocent lives have been taken upon the mere whim of the government, where property has been confiscated with no better reason, and where men have had to die for their faiths: when he, in short, comes into lands where the rights of neither life, property nor conscience have been respected, he is likely to prize his American privileges somewhat more highly.
The passionate loves and hatreds of the clans, their pride of race, their deathless lealty; and more than all, and better than all, their religious instincts, faiths and prejudices; these, with the mystic, wild loveliness of heather-clad hill and rock-rimmed loch, of roaring torrent and jagged crags, of lonely muir and sunny pasture nuiks; all these, and ten thousand nameless and unnamable things united in the weaving of the spell of the Glen upon the hearts of its people.
From these quaint and simple faiths the people were roused by the professors of a more enlightened one, who made their teaching useless, however, if not odious, to the brown people by their practises. It was an old belief, at least among the Haytiens, that a race of strangers, with bodies clad, would cross the sea and would reduce the people to servitude.
They have learned something of Christianity; they have also studied their own national systems; they have become especially familiar with all that our own sceptics have written against Christianity; still further, they have added to their intellectual equipment all that Western apologists have said of the superiority of the Oriental faiths.
She completely undermined the general belief in the state religion, substituting for it the fair creations of her finer fancy, or when she did not substitute, blending the two faiths together with sympathetic skill; she entwined herself round the earliest legends of Italy, and so moulded the historical aspirations of Rome that the great patrician came to pride himself on his own ancestral connection with Greece, and the descent of his founder from the race whom Greece had conquered.
How tragic is the record of the substitute faiths that the worldly-wise of our age have created. In the massive disillusionment of entire populations who have been taught to worship at their altars can be read history’s irreversible verdict on their value.
In liberated moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible; the elements already exist in many minds around you of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have. The new statement will comprise the skepticisms as well as the faiths of society, and out of unbeliefs a creed shall be formed.
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