American Heathen | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 5, 1875

American Heathen.

ONE Sunday morning Mrs. Livingston Guyer walked into church very late, as was Mrs. Livingston Guyer’s custom, and at every onward step the drops and bugles on her mantle shook, and the hard ball trimming on her dress rattled, and the beads around her throat clinked, and her hoop ear-rings struck the beads, adding to the clatter, and the dangling ornaments on her bonnet struck like tinkling cymbals.

There was a missionary in the pulpit that day, a man browned by foreign suns, who had come to tell the fashionable New York audience of the benighted heathen whom the church of Christ was trying to convert.

He told them of the Feejee Islanders who arrayed themselves in fantastic garments covered with curious ornaments, and draped with fringes of beads and balls. He described the rings they wore pendent from their noses, and the bracelets that encircled their arms and ankles.

The audience listened attentively, and their sanctimonious faces said, as plainly as words could say it, “From all such folly, good Lord, deliver us!”

An old-fashioned fellow sitting under the gallery, one Common Sense, thoroughly unprejudiced, and somewhat unpopular, looked hard at Mrs. Livingston Guyer, and taking into account the fringes, beads, and ornaments on her dress, and the hoops pendent from her ears, and the bracelets on her arms, thought there was a distinction without a difference between this woman and a Feejee Islander.

The missionary told his audience of the Burmese women who colored their faces to make them beautiful, and discolored their teeth by chewing betel-nuts. He gave account also of the Africans who blackened their eyebrows with antimony, and stained their finger nails red.

The faces of the audience expressed surprise at such unnatural practices; but the old-fashioned fellow in the corner fell to studying the face of a belle present, whitened by some preparation of chalk, and reddened by rouge, and he regarded attentively the teeth of a man discolored by the use of tobacco. He knew, moreover, there were complexions in that audience bleached by eating arsenic, eyes brightened by the use of belladonna, and masses of hair changed by some decoction from the natural tint to a fashionable hue, and he couldn’t, for the life of him, see why the heathen were worse in this respect than these people in a high state of civilization.

The missionary informed his audience that heathen devotees tortured their bodies by unnatural contortions and painful attitudes, thinking to appease the anger of an offended deity.

The faces of the audience indicated pity for such ignorance; but Common Sense glanced over to a man whose boots were instruments of torture to him, and to a woman whose head was poised in an unnatural attitude, shoulders thrown distressingly high, and a waist compressed until her muscles, sinews, diaphragm, heart, lungs, and liver failed to do the work allotted to them by nature; and, reflecting that this bodily contortion was adopted to propitiate the goddess Fashion, he wondered if the missionary might not return to foreign lands with tales of American heathen.

The missionary told his audience of heathen mothers who threw their children into the Ganges, and cast them before Juggernaut, as offerings to their gods.

The audience shuddered convulsively at the monstrous tale, but Common Sense had his eye fixed on a shivering child standing within the cold shadows cast by the church. Its neck and arms were bare, and its little knees, blue with the biting cold, knocked together painfully as the child waited for the nurse who held protracted discussion with a boon companion. Common Sense recognized the child as the representative of a large class given up by their mothers to the absurdities of fashionable dress and the incompetency of servants, until disease and premature death were the result; and he wondered if heathen mothers in their sacrifices were more culpable than American mothers in their neglect.

The missionary told his audience of the divisions of caste. He informed them that the higher orders despised inferior grades; and if a person fell to an inferior rank, his old companions in the former caste had a right to subject him to insult, and put upon him every indignity their scorn might conceive.

Great astonishment was written on the faces of the audience; but Common Sense looked straight at a fashionable woman who shrank from her poor neighbor in the pew, and that very day had refused to speak to a woman whose social position had once been equal with hers, but who, through reverses of fortune, had sunk to a lower station. He thought, with such examples before him, that the orders of caste in heathen society had a parallel in the social divisions of American communities.

The missionary told his audience of the heathen belief in oracles and omens, and their practice of consulting jugglers and priests in important affairs of life.

The audience smiled contemptuously at their folly; but Common Sense thought of the multitudes who consult fortune-tellers and clairvoyants in important affairs, and saw before him men and women who believed in signs and old witches’ fables, and lately had even put faith in a board called Planchette, and he pronounced them not one whit less heathen than the nations in foreign lands.

The missionary horrified his audience by his account of heathen parents who sold their beautiful daughters into slavery, and for a consideration doomed them to a life worse than death.

The audience wept over wickedness like this; but Common Sense remembered a marriage ceremony in that Christian church, where the bride was young and beautiful, and the bridegroom old and ugly. He remembered the smiles of the bride’s parent as he gave away the fair girl to the cruel-visaged foreigner, and the disgust on the bride’s face as she shrank away from the man who claimed her as his wife. “Gave her away” were the words the parent used; but they were not true. Sold her away, he should have said; sold her into slavery for money and position. That parent sat within the house of God that day, and in his heart condemned the heathen bargain; but Common Sense saw, with his clear-sighted vision, that the Christian contract was alike criminal.

The missionary told his audience of the heathen festivals, with their offerings of gold, fruits, and flowers, and sometimes human lives. He described the attendant drunkenness, debauchery, and immorality, in language that made the Christian audience before him shudder.

Common Sense beheld the shudder with a sarcastic smile. He knew of festivals in America with offerings of gold, fruits, flowers, and not infrequently excesses that were suicidal in their nature. He knew that debauchery and drunkenness often marred these social feasts, and that the tone of morality was exceedingly low. He could look around the Christian audience, and see men who, in their club-houses, were no better than the degraded heathen; and women who, in the excesses of fashionable society, violated their marriage vow of love and honor, and sacrificed their true, pure womanliness in the dance and wine-cup until they could not cast the stone of condemnation at their heathen sisters.

The missionary told his audience of the abject condition of many foreign tribes who herded together and lived in miserable huts in an atmosphere of filth and degradation.

The refined Christian audience sickened at the description, and on their incredulous faces was written questioning if such things could be.

Common Sense frowned at the incredulity, and wished they might take a step only a little out of Broadway, where the New York poor huddled in cellars and crowded tenement houses, breathing an air of filth and contamination, and living lives of lowest degradation and crime. It were easier to believe in foreign heathen with such a sight of American heathen.

The missionary talked of the nations who bowed to idols and gods of their own making.

The Christian audience devoutly thanked God that they were not like those poor heathen; but Common Sense was picking out of that Christian audience men and women who bowed to Mammon, Fashion, Pleasure, Ambition, and a thousand gods of their own making.

At the close of the service, the missionary made a powerful plea for foreign missions, and solicited a contribution for ameliorating the condition of the benighted heathen.

The audience responded liberally, for their hearts had been touched, and Common Sense smiled approval. His smile was followed by the suggestion that another contribution double the previous sum be taken for ameliorating the condition of American heathen, and advancing the cause of home missions.

The audience were utterly confounded, and highly indignant. They did not understand Common Sense at all.—Harper’s Bazaar.