Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/143

 “So then, belovèd ones, this was the glorious mission of Israel”—he referred to the extermination of the inhabitants of Canaan—“and this also is the mission of our own Holland! No, it shall not be said that the light which shines upon us will be hidden under the bushel, nor that we are niggardly in sharing with others the bread of eternal life! Cast your glance upon the islands of the Indian Ocean, inhabited by millions upon millions of the children of the rejected son—and of the rejected son—of the noble and God-beloved Noah! There they crawl about in the loathsome serpent-holes of heathenish ignorance, there they bow the black and frizzy-haired head under the yoke of self-seeking priests! There they pray to God under invocation of a false prophet, who is an abomination in the sight of the Lord! And, belovèd! there are even those who, as though it were not enough to obey a false prophet, there are even those who pray to another God, nay, other gods of wood and stone, which they themselves have made after their image, black, horrible, with flat noses, and devilish! Yea, belovèd—tears almost prevent me from continuing—deeper even than this is the corruption of the Race of Ham! There are those among them who know God, under whatever name! There are those who deem it sufficient to obey the laws of civic society! Those who deem a harvest song, wherein they express their joy at the success of their labours, as sufficient thanks to the Supreme Being by Whom that harvest was allowed to ripen! Out there live lost ones, my belovèd—if so horrible an existence may bear the name of —out there one finds creatures who hold that it is enough to love wife and child and not to take from their neighbour what is not theirs, in order to be able at night to lay down their heads peacefully to sleep! Do you not shudder at that picture? Do your hearts not shrink with terror at the thoughts of what will be the fate of all these fools, as soon as the trumpet shall sound, waking the dead for the sundering of the just from the unjust? Hear ye not?—yea, ye do hear, for from the text words I have read you have seen that your God is a mighty God, and a