Are the False Religions Doing Nothing?
The current view of the present condition of the world's false religions is, that they are in hopeless decline. We are here in a Christian land, and, breathing the air of an active religious life, are accustomed to victory both at home and abroad. Indeed, we have gradually grown into the conviction that all we have to do abroad is to go over and possess the land. The false faiths seem to us to have run their race, and are now in their state of aged despair. But there is another side to the question. We must remember that the missionaries whom we have sent abroad, with all their valor and quenchless zeal, are as one to many thousands. Idolatries of long life and vast wealth stand up to oppose every step of their way. Numbers, and prejudices, and laws, and gold, are all against the men who bear the cross to the ends of the earth. We would not say a discouraging word to them, or of them; and yet it is well that we look the facts squarely in the face. There is much power yet left, in some of the grossest of the Ethnic faiths; and to such an extent does it exist that several of them are making important movements toward the further propagation of their faith. This is no new phenomenon in the history of the church. It seems to be a law of its progress. No sooner do we find it gaining great victories, than we find its foes striking out on new campaigns, and endeavoring to win on new fields what it has lost on old ones. Take Jesuitism as the most remarkable illustration of this very law. When the German Reformation had achieved its brilliant triumphs in the world of thought and in territorial grasp, Roman Catholicism produced Jesuitism, which immediately set to work to recover—in the old seats of the Eastern Church, and at the leading courts of Europe, and over the far-off regions of India and the American continent—what it had lost through the thunderbolt of Luther and his coadjutors. We see the same process going on in offsetting the marvelous triumphs of the gospel in pagan lands. Those faiths are not dying of absolute inactivity. Their devotees are witnessing the triumphs of Christianity, and yet are not sitting down in inactivity, accepting their own decay and extinction as a foregone conclusion. Suppose we take Mohammedanism as an illustration. It has shed blood enough, and ground down millions enough, to have bitten the dust long ago. But such is by no means the case. The Moslem of to-day, despite his great defeat in European Turkey, is a thorough missionary. He is sending out his emissaries into every hopeful field, and is determined to contest with Christianity every inch of the disputed territory. In a late number of the Bibliotheca Sacra we find an array of facts on this point from the pen of Dr. Aiken, of Princeton, which is well calculated to arouse the attention of the whole Christian world. His paper seems to have been suggested by Max Müller's division of the world into two great classes—non-missionary and missionary; Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism being classified under the former head. We have abundant testimony that this lost faith is marching with rapid pace, even in this bright day of Christian faith and progress. A writer in the leading German Missionary serial says of it: “To-day its forward movement is not arrested; instead of this, it is moving toward the interior of Asia and Africa at such a rate that it alone may claim to make as many proselytes as Christianity and Buddhism together.” J. M. Arnold, of long experience as a missionary, says: “None but those who have witnessed the missionary zeal of the modern Arab merchant, would believe what efforts are still being made to proselytize the pagans in the interior of Africa.” Grundemann testifies to the advance of Islam about Gambia, and Sierra Leone, and in the islands of the Indian Archipelago. Von Kremer and Vambery declare that Mohammedanism has every prospect of gaining its lost religious ascendancy in British India. Dr. Ellinwood writes, in 1875, of the Mohammedan training school for missionaries in Cairo, which, in 1838, had declined to five hundred students, that it is now visited by ten thousand students, representing all lands where Mohammedanism is known. There are three hundred and fourteen professors. The students come from Morocco and Algiers, Soudan and Darfour, Zanzibar and the Vale of Yemen, Persia and Turkestan, India and Malaya. They have no lodgings, but roll themselves up in their rough blankets, throw themselves down in the hall-ways to sleep, live on coarse Arab bread, and thus prepare to preach Islamism in the far-off lands. It is well for us here at home to remember that neither gold nor men must be spared to make sure the conquest of the world for Christ. As in his incarnate life, the powers of darkness contested with him the dominion of the world, so now goes on the same warfare. The old faiths of ages are going to hold on as long as they can. Some of them will fall suddenly when they do fall, but let us make the day of their ruin as near in the future as faith and wealth can do.—Christian Advocate.