Christian Missions Their Agents Their Method and their Results Vol. 1 - nouveau livre

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. THE BIBLE AND THE HEATHEN. Writers of various nations have remarked, with surprise or indignation according to their temper, that the Russian Church, the least distinguished by a missionary spirit of all christian communities, not only fails to convert the heathen tribes subject to the empire, but does not always even wish to do so. It suits, they say, the secular policy of the Czar, for reasons which shall be noticed hereafter, to leave them to their idols. The clergy of Russia ? as Tourgeneff, Haxthausen, and others relate ?have no disposition for such labours; the state ? as Theiner, Dr Moritz Wagner, and many more have shown ? sternly forbids others to supply the defect. Every catholic priest, says Dr Wagner, who attempts to convert an idolater, is threatened with transportation to Siberia. (1) This policy, once adopted by England and Holland in their Asiatic possessions, but long since abandoned by both, is now peculiar to Russia among all the nations of the earth. No similar reproach can be urged, even by those who esteem them least, against the protestant churches of England and America. They have done, during the last fifty years, and are still doing, all which their zeal suggests and their caution permits, to recommend to the heathen world the religious systems which they severally profess. How far they have succeeded in this aim, and!y what methods they have sought to promote it, will sufficiently appear in the following pages. The administration of many of the missionary societies both of Great Britain and America may be compared, as respects the number of their agents and the magnitude of their resources, to the machinery which exists for the government of some of the secondary states of Europe. Their emissaries are reckoned by thousands, ...