A WRITER undertook to give his friends at home some idea of the trials and difficulties which the missionaries found in their efforts to instruct the heathen in the "evangelical" doctrines of Christianity. He related that, on an occasion when he had been earnestly laboring to enforce the holy doctrine of the trinity and vicarious atonement upon a goodly audience assembled in a grove, one of their leading men came forward and confronted him thus:107
H. You say that Jesus Christ was God?
M. Yes.
H. What, and Jesus Christ die?
M. Yes.
H. Then Jesus Christ couldn't be God; for God never died.
I then, says the missionary, explained to him the mystery of the incarnation of Christ, his double nature, how that God took on himself the nature of man, being born of woman, and that nature suffered and died—when the dialogue was thus renewed:
H. Then you say that Jesus Christ was born of a woman?
M. Yes.
H. Then Jesus Christ couldn't be God, for God was never born of a woman.
M. That wouldn't follow, of course, for many of your gods were born of women, and some of them died.
Then, says the missionary in his letter referred to, they all squalled out, He don't know nothing! he don't know nothing!
And sure enough the letter itself betrays the fact that the missionary "didn't know nothing." The Hindoos had the most common sense on religious matters in general, and they saw he was ignorant of their mythology. They believe in a self-existent, supreme, unchangeable deity, who appoints subordinate petti-gods over different departments of the world's affairs. And these petti-deities were they whom their mythological writings regard as having been born of woman, or begotten by other methods, and having passed through the change called death, and the like. But they understood the missionary's God that he was preaching to them, to be the supreme God. It was so. And of course, this attempt to parry the force of their objection to his theory of God born of a woman, and dying, by referring to their fables concerning their subordinate deities, was either a piece of stupidity, or else of criminal evasion. And the Indians were right in squalling out, He don't know nothing! he don't know nothing!