Christianity and the Progress of Man; As Illustrated by Modern Missions

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... religion through martyrdoms is normal from the Christian point of view, is not that these, who become converts, immediately thirst for martyrdom and themselves seek the flames. They do nothing of the sort. They go away with guilty consciences to Christian teachers and learn of them. They have been pierced to the quick of the deeper man and, determined to attain that condition of conscience and will which they saw in those martyrs, they persist in learning until they too have won this faith in Christ, and until in them this religious relationship has produced those ethical qualities which always flow from it and which, so far as the heathen world knows, have flowed from it alone. Always from first to last the phenomena connected with the expansion of this religion are spurious, are disowned by the religion itself and its wiser adherents, are found in the long run to affect others with anything but sympathy arid devotion, unless this ethical element is evident in the lives alike of those who bear witness and those who through their witness whether in life or death become convinced and converted. The ordinary notion that martyrdom spreads through the awakening of a kind of physical excitement will not bear the test of comparison with any actual instances. Take the case of the persecution in Madagascar to which reference has been made. Can it be maintained that when that first sufferer, a young girl of attractive appearance, asked to be allowed to pray and was speared as she knelt on the ground, that that scene was likely to arouse a desire in the minds of others to kneel there and be speared in their turn? Yet that was the beginning of a magnif icent series of martyrdoms in that land. We are not told that the people who witnessed those...