Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/389

Rh another field has been a severe one, and as yet without decisive or satisfactory results, in the attempts to Christianize civilized heathen, — those reclaimed from barbarism, but still pagan (as we call them), — and the Orientals who hold to more or less adequate religions of their own. But it is with the efforts to Christianize barbarians, savages, that we are now concerned. We accept at the start the formidable obstacles to be encountered in offering to savage people a religion which had its birth and development under a highly advanced civilization, and which requires and implies a state of society intelligent, refined, and elevated, for its existence and exercise. With a qualification more or less emphatic to be made for the opinions and aims of the Jesuit missionaries, all who have labored in this arduous field have strongly and decidedly affirmed their full conviction that civilization must precede, or step by step accompany, every effort to Christianize our Indians. Of course it was understood that the two agencies were to be mutually helpful. But, as a general rule, the religious lesson, the condemnation of the faith which the savage was supposed to hold, and the urgent proffer of a substitute for it, have preceded any actual redemption of the savage from barbarism to a stage of civilization. The Jesuit view of missionary duty and success consisted with the allowance of a great deal of undisturbed savagery, ignorance, and intellectual torpidity. The Protestant idea has always involved the absolute necessity of civilization for Christianization. Christianity implies a civilized state for man. Its institutions, principles, and occupations of life, — its habits, virtues, charities, can coexist only with civilized people. It first appeared among a civilized community, with letters, arts, and laws, and is vitally dependent upon them. The Christian religion also is eminently, and above all other of its qualities beside those which concern its individual influences, a missionary religion. It once had but a dozen voices to proclaim it, a dozen laborers in its