Sabbath-Schools and Foreign Missions.
In an essay delivered before the Sabbath School Institute at Walworth, Wisconsin, and published in the Sabbath Recorder, the writer, in trying to impress the school with the importance and necessity of Foreign Missions, speaks of the peculiar characteristics and religions of the natives of Hindostan, China, and India in these words:— “They do not worship the one true God, but idols graven by their own hands. They have no knowledge of the divine government, or of the laws of God with regard to sin and its consequences as revealed to us in the Bible. They have, it is true, an idea of some overruling power, for it seems agreeable to the plans of the All Wise that all created intelligences should turn instinctively to a first great cause; and as they have no conception of the true God they imagine the world to be under the control of some reigning deities, who, like themselves, are both ignorant, capricious and wicked. They have likewise a form of religion, but it is the creature of ignorance and superstition, the vain imaginings of a perverted and misguided people. We can hardly feel like calling it a religion, it is so different in all its appointments and effects from the dear religion of Christ which we profess to follow. “But we must remember that as there are gods many and lords many, so also there are religions many, but only one true God and one true religion, the religion of Christ our Saviour. They entertain the most erroneous ideas with regard to the real nature of the present state of existence; they believe that their present good and evil actions are not produced by the volition of their own will, but are the result of the actions of the past birth, and that their present actions give rise to the whole character and conduct of the following birth. They believe in the doctrine of transmigration of soul; therefore, when they die they expect to immediately arise into birth again in some other body, in that of a dog, a cat, or a mere worm, and if they have committed some great crime they expect to fall, for a time, into some one of the awful states of torment described in the ‘Shaster,’ a book containing all the institutions and ceremonies of the Hindoo religion; this book they hold in great reverence, believing it to be of divine origin. So we can see how in their ignorance they would rigorously carry into practice all its requirements. “No Hindoo, unless he has given all his wealth to the priest, or has performed some wonderful act of merit, or unless he drown himself in some sacred river, or perish on the funeral pile, has the least hope of happiness after death. Those who are supposed to attain happiness are said to ascend to the heaven of the gods, where for a limited period they enjoy an unbounded indulgence in sensual gratification. This is the only heaven held out to a Hindoo, and held out to him on such fearful conditions that the mass find it impossible to accept. “In remote antiquity we find that heathen nations lived in fear of some great malignant spirit or spirits, who ruled over the countries where they dwelt, and, to obtain the favor of these deities, they sacrificed whatever was the most valuable, and on great occasions human victims were offered. On one of these times we are informed that Xerxes, the Persian, burned alive nine young men and nine young women, belonging to the country he was traveling through, to obtain the favor of the gods. In this he followed the example of his wife, for she condemned fourteen Persian children, of illustrious birth, to be offered in the same manner to the deity who reigned beneath the earth. The practice of shedding human blood before the altars of their gods was not peculiar to the Persians alone, for the Romans, in the first ages of their republic, sacrificed children to the Goddess Mania. In later periods, numerous gladiators have bled at the tombs of the nobles to appease the ghosts of the departed. “The Carthagenians, when they were defeated by the Tyrant of Sicily, attributed their disgrace to the anger of the gods, and offered two hundred children, taken from the most distinguished families in Carthage. The Spartans, the Gauls, the Swedes and the Danes all had the same heathenish customs.” A plan was also suggested by which all could assist in sending light to these benighted heathens, and that was by appropriating a certain portion of the funds of each school towards supporting some of the heathen children in a Christian foreign school, that they might early read the Bible, and learn from its pages of God and his holy Sabbath.