EVEN THE HEATHEN SEE IT.
By G.
NOTHING has done more, if as much, to make Christianity appear obnoxious to intelligent heathen in acknowledged heathen countries as the claim that certain other nations are Christian nations. Christianity has not received a harder blow in modern times than the official declaration of the United States Supreme Court that "this is a Christian nation." We need not except even Great Britain’s opium and liquor traffic as an accompaniment to her missionary effort. The intelligent heathen know what Christianity purports to be, and the good influence its votaries promise to them when urging them to accept it. Then when they are told that the United States pose as a Christian nation, they naturally look here for the fruit that professed Christians promise to them on condition that they accept Christian doctrine. Being of the world, and having no faith, they naturally walk by sight. They naturally look over here to see the quality of the morality so lavishly promised to them if they will become Christian nations. And it is little wonder that they are disappointed. As illustrative of this point, we submit an extract from an address by Dr. MacArthur, of New York, as reported in the last number of the Converted Catholic:— While riding in a train in India about four years ago, I met a very learned Hindu belonging to Benares. Benares, you know, is the headquarters of Hinduism. It was a city that was old before Rome and Athens were born. It was contemporaneous with Jerusalem in the days of Solomon. It sent many of the ornaments to Jerusalem that decorated Solomon’s palace and court. My fellow-passenger was a learned man, a graduate of Queen’s College, in India. He asked me what I thought of Benares. I told him that I thought it was the filthiest and vilest city that I had seen. I had gone into the temple in which bulls and cows were objects of worship. I had seen these same cattle walking7through the streets of Benares, eating all the vegetables at the stands in the markets, and the vegetable owners did not attempt to drive them away. I had gone into temples where a kind of worship is paid to monkeys. I had also seen the great tank in which the pilgrims bathe, until the top of that tank was covered with a green scum, and then I saw the people dipping their pitchers in that water, thus vile, and carrying it home, because it was holy water. You need not be surprised that they have cholera in Benares. You need not be surprised that when the council of doctors met in Paris—two of them having gone from New York, appointed by President Cleveland—to form plans to prevent the spread of cholera, their whole, or at least their chief, thought was given to Benares. When my friend asked me what I thought of the great city of Hinduism, I said: “It is the vilest place I was ever in. You need a new religion, or else a new municipal administration.” He turned to me with the question: “Did I understand you, sir, to say that you came from New York? Do you mean to say that Benares is any filthier and viler than New York?” I said, “We have a reform administration just now in New York.” Here was a man who was never outside of India in his life, yet he was as familiar with Chicago and Boston and New York as you and I are. He could call the names of all the Tammany sachems, and call them by their nicknames, every one. He finally turned to me, and said—and I tell you his remark was an eye-opener—“If Tammany Hall represents the best that a republican form of government can do in the management of a city, I thank all the gods of heathenism that I belong to an imperial government and not to a democracy.” And then he added, “If Tammany Hall represents Christianity in municipal politics, again I thank all the gods that I am what you call a heathen.” If Tammany Hall were the only American institution to which the Hindu could point to sustain his argument against the so-called Christianity professed by the government of the United States, we might tell him that was only the Judas of the company. But, unfortunately, the inconsistency is not confined to Tammany, nor to any city or State. Nor has experience shown that the so-called “reform administrations”—either municipal or State—have in any permanent manner represented Christianity to better advantage than those they superseded. Often they have been even worse. Again, if it were only the Hindu who sees the great discrepancy between the profession and the practise of national Christianity, we might think possibly he is mistaken. But the intelligent heathen of every persuasion—whether Buddhist, Confucian, or Mohammedan—persistently remind us of the manifest incongruity. But the crowning testimony of all is the Word of Christ Himself, the root of Christian practise, the Golden Rule, which no earthly government can observe; for the very nature and purpose of civil government are compulsory, and compulsion is in no sense an attribute of Christianity. G.