Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/205

 have tenaciously retained the mass of our tyrannous propensities. We practise our crimes without confessing them; we indulge our worst desires without even having the honesty to pay for it; and the old, spurious morality, and political barbarism of Rome, are as stanchly maintained by us as ever—while we claim to look back on Popery with horror, and on our present condition as the celestial light of the nineteenth century.

What a glorious thing it would have been, if when the Dutch and English had appeared in America and the Indies, they had come there too as Protestants and Reformed Christians! If they had protested against the cruelties and aggressions of the popish Spaniards and Portuguese—if they had reformed all their rapacious practices, and remedied their abuses—if they had, indeed, shown that they were really gone back to the genuine faith of Christ, and were come to seek honest benefit by honest means; to exchange knowledge for wealth, and to make the Pagans and the Mahomedans feel that there was in Christianity a power to refine, to elevate, and to bless, as mighty as they professed. But that day was not arrived, and has only partially arrived yet, and that through the missions. For anything that could be discovered by their practice, the Dutch and English might be the papists, and the Spaniards and Portuguese the reformed. From their deeds the natives, wherever they came, could only imagine their religion to be something especially odious and mischievous.

The Dutch having thrown off the Spanish yoke at home, applied themselves diligently to commerce; and they would have continued to purchase from the