A matter of missionaries commonly is to the fore as a cause of quarrel
with nations which have the hardihood to prefer their own religions
to ours. Missionaries constitute, in truth, a perpetual menace to
peace. I dare say the most of them are conscientious men and women
of a certain order of intellect. They believe, and from the way that
they interpret their sacred book have some reason to believe, that in
meddling uninvited with the spiritual affairs of others they perform
a work acceptable to God—their God. They think they discern a moral
difference between “approaching” a man of another religion about the
state of his soul and approaching him on the condition of his linen or
the character of his wife. I think there is a difference; but I have
observed that the person who volunteers an interest in my spiritual
welfare is the same person from whom I must expect an impudent concern
about my temporal affairs.
No ruler nor government of sense would willingly permit foreigners to
sap the foundation of the national religion. No ruler nor government
ever does permit it except under stress of compulsion. It is through
the people’s religion that a wise government governs wisely—even in
our own country we make only a transparent pretense of officially
ignoring Christianity, and a pretense only because we have so many
kinds of Christians, all jealous and inharmonious. Each sect would
make a Theocracy if it could, and would then make short work of any
missionary from abroad. Happily all religions but ours have the sloth
and timidity of error; Christianity alone, drawing vigor from eternal
truth, is courageous enough and energetic enough to make itself a
nuisance to people of every other faith. The Jew not only does not bid
for converts, but discourages them by imposition of hard conditions;
and the Moslem’s simple, forthright method of reducing error is to
cut off the head holding it. I don’t say that this is right; I say
only that, being practical and comprehensible, it commands a certain
respect from the impartial observer not conversant with scriptural
justification of a less natural practice.
It is only where the missionaries have made themselves hated that there
is any molestation of Europeans engaged in the affairs of this world.
Chinese antipathy to Caucasians in China is neither a racial animosity
nor a religious; it is an instinctive dislike of persons who will not
mind their own business. China has been infested with missionaries from
the earliest centuries of our era, and they have rarely been molested
when they have taken the trouble to behave themselves. (In the time of
the Emperor Justinian the fact that the Christian religion was openly
preached throughout China enabled that sovereign to wrest from the
Chinese the jealously-guarded secret of silk-making. He sent two monks
to Pekin, who alternately preached seriousness and studied sericulture,
and brought away silkworms’ eggs concealed in sticks.)
In religious matters the Chinese are more tolerant than we. They let
the religions of others alone, but naturally and rightly demand that
others shall let theirs alone. In China, as in other Oriental countries
where the color line is not drawn and where slavery itself is a light
affliction, the mental attitude of the zealot who finds gratification
in “spreading the light” of which he deems himself custodian, is not
understood. Like most things not understood, it is felt to be bad, and
is indubitably offensive.
V
At a church club meeting a paper was read by a minister, entitled, “Why
the Masses Do Not Attend the Churches.” This good and pious man was
not ashamed to account for it by the fact that there is no Sunday law,
and “the masses” can find recreation elsewhere, even in the drinking
saloons. It is frank of him to admit that he and his professional
brethren have not brains enough to make religious services attractive;
but if it is a fact he must not expect the local government to assist
in spreading the gospel by rounding-up the people and corralling them
in the churches. The truth is, and this gentleman suspects it, that
“the masses” stay out of hearing of his pulpit because there he talks
nonsense of the most fatiguing kind; they would rather do any one of
a thousand other things than go to hear it. These parsons are like
a scolding wife who grieves because her husband will not pass his
evenings with her. The more she grieves the more she scolds, and the
more diligently he stays away from her. Satan is not conspicuously
wise, but he is in the main a good entertainer, with a right pretty
knack at making people come again; but the really reprehensible part
of his performance is not the part that attracts them. The parsons
might study his methods with advantage to religion and morality.
It may be urged that religious services have not entertainment for
their object. But the people, when not engaged in business or labor,
have it for _their_ object. If the clergy do not choose to adapt their
ministrations to the characters of those to whom they wish to minister,
that is their own affair; but let them accept the consequences. “The
masses” do not really enjoy Sunday at all; they try to get through the
day in the manner that is least wearisome to the spirit. Possibly their
taste is not what it ought to be. If the minister were a physician
of bodies instead of souls, and patients who had not called him in
should refuse to take the medicine which he thought his best and they
his nastiest, he should either offer them another, a little less
disagreeable if a little less efficacious, or let them alone. In no
case is he justified in asking the civil authority to hold their noses
while he plies the spoon.
“The masses” have not asked for churches and services; they really
do not care for anything of the kind—whether they ought is another
matter. If the clergy choose to supply them, that is well and
worthy. But they should understand their relation to the impenitent
worldling, which is precisely that of a physician without a mandate
from the patient, who may not be convinced that there is very much the
matter with him. The physician may have a diploma and a certificate
authorizing him to practise, but if the patient do not deem himself
bound to be practised upon has the physician a right to make him
miserable until he will submit? Clearly, he has not. If he can not
persuade him to come to the dispensary and take medicine there is an
end to the matter, and he may justly conclude that he is misfitted to
his vocation.
I am sure that the ministers and the singularly small contingent of
earnest and, on the whole, pretty good persons who cluster about them
do not perceive how alien they are in their convictions, tastes,
sympathies and general mental habitudes to the majority of their fellow
men and women. Their voices are like “the gushing wave” which, to the
ears of the lotus-eaters,
Far, far away did seem to mourn and rave,
coming to us as from beyond a great gulf, mere ghosts of sound, almost
devoid of meaning. We know that they would have us do something,
but what it is we do not clearly apprehend. We feel that they are
concerned for us, but why, we are imperfectly able to conceive. In an
unintelligible tongue they tell us of unthinkable things. Here and
there in the discourse we catch a word, a phrase, a sentence—something
which, from ancestors whose mother-speech it was, we have inherited the
capacity to understand; but the homily as a whole signifies nothing.
Solemn and sonorous enough it all is, and not unmusical, but it lacks
its natural accompaniment of shawm and sackbut and the wind-swept harp
in the willows by the waters of Babylon. It is, in fact, something of a
survival—the memory of a dream.