Material for a Converted World.
Those who are bolstering themselves up in ideas of peace and safety, under the delusive notion of a world's conversion, ought certainly to be treated to all facts which may come to light, bearing upon this question, that they may draw from them all the consolation which such facts are capable of affording. The following startling declarations ought to be sufficient, it would seem, to rouse a person from the deepest sleep into which this opiate belief could possibly lull him. The first relates to pernicious works, and the greediness with which they are devoured by the rising generation. It says: "A secular paper, referring to the great sale of pernicious works, says that if the true amount were known, good citizens would lose hope for the morals and principles of the rising generation. A committee of the English House of Commons in 1851, reported that twenty-nine millions of immoral and infidel publications were annually sold; and were the facts of the sale of such books in this country known, they would be scarcely less appalling." Here is another, showing the character of the foreign heathen, for whose conversion so much is expended, to the neglect of those nearer home: "A missionary of one of the sects, Rev. J. C. Beecher, seaman's chaplain at Hong Kong, expresses his opinion of the Chinese character. He writes to the 'Sailor's Magazine' as follows: 'I am more and more disgusted with Chinese character every day. China is a moral Golgotha for sailors, and physical, too. It is heart sickening to see and hear from day to day the effects of vice and immorality, and mournful to walk over graveyards, where row after row of stoneless graves tell how many friendless wanderers have fallen by the way, and laid their bones in a strange land. The Chinese are a lying, thieving, licentious race, defiling everything which comes in contact with them, deceiving from a natural instinct to deceive. It aggravates me beyond measure to see so much expended here to christianize the Chinese, while in the whole of India and China, so far as I know, Shanghai excepted, sailors, our own people, are all adrift, robbed, deceased, plundered and murdered by these miserable heathens.'—N. Y. Evangelist."