Page:Colonization and Christianity.djvu/23

Rh Passed off to heaven, translated and not killed; As though he had no wife to pine for him, No God to judge him! Therefore evil days Are coming on us, O my countrymen! And what, if all-avenging Providence, Strong and retributive, should make us know The meaning of our words, force us to feel The desolation and the agony of our fierce doings? Coleridge.

This is the aspect of the Christian world in its most polished and enlightened quarter:—there surely is some need of serious inquiry; there must surely be some monstrous practical delusion here, that wants honestly encountering, and boldly dispersing.

But if such is the internal condition of Christian Europe, what is the phasis that it presents to the rest of the world? With the exception of our own tribes, now numerously scattered over almost every region of the earth, all are in our estimation barbarians. We pride ourselves on our superior knowledge, our superior refinement, our higher virtues, our nobler character. We talk of the heathen, the savage, and the cruel, and the wily tribes, that fill the rest of the earth; but how is it that these tribes know us? Chiefly by the very features that we attribute exclusively to them. They know us chiefly by our crimes and our cruelty. It is we who are, and must appear to them the savages. What, indeed, are civilization and Christianity? The refinement and ennoblement of our nature! The habitual feeling and the habitual practice of an enlightened justice, of delicacy and decorum, of generosity and affection to our fellow men. There is not one of these qualities that we have not violated for ever, and on almost all occasions,