Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/396

376 as in this respect like the inoculation of persons, one by one, to secure them from a terrible sweeping pestilence, or like the escape of a favored few in the long-boat from a crowded company on a sinking ship. The other class will survey a whole community, and judge of the evidence of the presence and effect of Christianity by the amount of virtue, justice, righteousness, wide-spreading, humanizing, and elevating influences and charities in it.

Now, according as different persons have in their minds the one or the other of these views as to what Christianity means, what it is to effect, and what are the evidences of its presence and influence, will they decide very differently upon the matter of fact as to what has been accomplished by missionary labor in Christianizing the Indians. We can turn to many pages written in a devout, cheering, and hopeful tone, filled with details, statistics, personal narratives and proofs, which confidently assure the reader that a glorious, blessed, and benedictive work has been done by Christian missions among the Indians, crowning them with a success fully proportioned to the faith and cost and toil spent upon them. We can turn to other pages, not always, though it may be for the larger part, written by sceptics, the indifferent, and the worldly, — for some of them come from thoroughly good, sincere, and philanthropic witnesses, — affirming that Christianity has not on any extensive field made any perceptible change in the manners, characters, and lives of savages. Those who are but moderately versed in the missionary literature of recent times are well aware that while the work of which it is the record assures the confidence of its supporters in the generous supply of funds for sustaining it, “men of the world,” so called, are more than dubious about its rewards.

We can refer this discordance of judgment and testimony among discreet and sincere persons only to that radical difference of estimate just stated, as to what is Christianity, its real effective work, and the evidence of