IV.

BRINGING THE MATTER HOME

THE CONDITION OF OUR EUROPEAN ANCESTORS BEFORE THE MISSIONARIES BROUGHT

CHRISTIANITY TO THEM

MINISTERS have made very effective use of the influence of foreign missions upon our own ancestors in Great Britain, referring in a general way to the Britons as not only heathen, but savages. For thinking people in the congregation, it would add greatly to the force of such statements if some definite information could be given, with authority. We print quotations from the Commentaries of Julius Caesar, which contain vivid descriptions of the character and practises of both the Britons and the Gauls before the advent of Christianity. In Caesar's Commentaries (Book V, Chapter xiv), we find some rather uncomplimentary remarks upon the Britons.

"The most civilized of all these nations are they who inhabit Kent, which is entirely a maritime district, nor do they differ much from the Gallic customs. Most of the inland inhabitants do not sow corn, but live on milk and flesh, and are clad with skins. All the Britons, indeed, dye themselves with woad, which occasions a bluish colour, and thereby have a more terrible appearance in fight. They wear their hair long, and have every part of their body shaved except their head and upper lip. Ten or even a dozen men have their wives in common between them, and particularly brothers among brothers, and parents among their children; but if there be any issue by these wives, they are reputed to be the children of those by whom respectively each was first espoused when a virgin.".

This is what Caesar has to say about the French of his day. (Book VI, Chapter xvi.)

"All the Gauls are extremely devoted to superstitious rites; and therefore they who are inflicted with unusually severe diseases, and they who are engaged in battles and involved in

dangers either offer in sacrifice men as victims, or vow that they will sacrifice them, and employ druids to make the offerings. They think that the minds of the immortal gods cannot be made propitious, unless the life of a man be offered for the life of a man; and they have sacrifices of that kind also for national purposes. Others have figures of vast size, the limbs of which, formed of osiers, they fill with living men. Then these are set on fire, and the men surrounded by the flames perish. They think that the offering of men who have been taken in theft, or in robbery, or in any other offense is more acceptable to the immortal gods; but when a supply of that class is wanting, they have recourse to the offering of even the innocent.

"Their funerals, considering the state of civilization of the Gauls, are magnificent and costly; they cast into the fire all things, including living creatures, which they suppose to have been dear to them when alive. At an earlier time, slaves and dependents who were discovered to have been beloved by them were burnt together with them, after the regular funeral rites were completed."

For a description of the religious ideas and habits of the early Germans we turn to Tacitus and in Chapter ix of the Germania learn that Mercury was the god that the Germans especially worshipped, and that on certain days they thought it right to obtain favorable recognition from him by offering human victims. In Chapter x Tacitus tells us how devoted the Germans were to taking auspices and to drawing lots. And his account of their confidence in the warning and presages which the sacred horses give is most interesting. He says they thought that the horses were conscious of the divine will.

The following quotation is from Green's Short History of the English People (Vol. I, page 16), and gives an excellent idea of the religion of the early English people.

"Christianity had by this time (500 A.D.) brought about the conversion of the Roman Empire, but it had not penetrated as yet among the forests of the north. The common god of the English people was Woden, the war-god, the guardian of ways

and boundaries, to whom his worshippers attributed the invention of letters, and whom every tribe held to be the first ancestor of its kings. Our own names for the days of the week still recall to us the gods whom our fathers worshipped in their German homeland. Wednesday is Woden's day, as Thursday is the day of Thor, the god of air and storm and rain. Friday is Freya's day, the deity of peace and joy and fruitfulness, whose emblems, borne aloft by dancing maidens, brought increase to every field and stall they visited. Saturday commemorates an obscure god, Saeter; Tuesday, the dark god, Tiw, to meet whom was death. Eostre, the goddess of the dawn or of the spring, lends her name to the Christian festival of the Resurrection. Behind these floated the dim shapes of an older mythology: Wyrd, the death-goddess, whose memory lingered long in the 'Weird' of the northern superstition; or the shieldmaidens, the 'mighty women' who, an old rime tells us, 'wrought on the battle-field their toil and hurled the thrilling javelins.' Nearer to the popular fancy lay deities of wood and fell, or herogods of legend and song; Nicor, the water-sprite who survives in our 'nixies' and 'Old Nick'; Weland, the forger of weighty shields and sharp-biting swords, who found a later home in the 'Weyland's smithy' of Berkshire; Egil, the hero-archer, whose legend is one with that of Cloudesly or Tell."

Daniel G. Brinton, in his Religions of Primitive Peoples says: "A few hundred years ago the ancestors of the Englishspeaking nations were as savage as the savagest, without temples to their gods, in perpetual and bloody war, untamed cannibals; add a few thousand years to the perspective and man over the whole globe was in the same condition."

PAYING OUR DEBTS

BY REV. WILLARD L. SPERRY

"I BELIEVE in foreign missions because I believe in paying my debts. Since I cannot pay my spiritual debts to my religious creditors of the past, I propose to pay that debt by passing on what I have received to the needy men of the present. For I

never long forget that from the standpoint of the first Christians I am a heathen convert. My forefathers were Gentiles, barbarians, outsiders. Peter, the first great organizer of the church, naturally thought of my ancestors as I now think of African savages. He did not know much about them, but what he knew he deplored. In the actual words of the New Testament, they were 'far off' beyond a partition wall. There was a boundary line where religion ended and where irreligion began, and our people were across the boundary.

"As Anglo-Saxons, even in this new land, we are what we are because of foreign missions. Had it not been for the impulse to missions in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries of our era, what would have been the subsequent history of England? Would ours have been a long process of degeneration, the inbreeding of our vicious weaknesses proving our undoing? Such speculations are as sombre as they are vain. And yet such historical musings keep me humble. For, realizing that once I was nothing but an unconverted heathen, a member of a savage and pagan tribe, living on the outmost fringes of the then known world, I have no mind to be either indifferent or contemptuous toward those who are to-day in like unhappy circumstance. My brother, the Chinese convert in Shansi, and I both stand in the same relationship to the simple and original gospel given by Jesus to his disciples. We are outsiders, men once far off who have been brought near to Jesus through that leavening process which, happily or unhappily, we call 'foreign missions.' The study of history is a discipline in humility and charity. If I assume a separatist and supercilious attitude toward those who are to-day what once I was, men who know nothing about Christianity, I do not thereby greatly exalt myself. If, looking about from my vantageground, I thank God that I am not as the Chinaman or the African, I lay myself open fairly to that most unwelcome of all charges, the charge of pharisaism. For in my self-complacent thanksgiving at my fancied superiority I show at once my provincial snobbery and my dense historical ignorance. I believe in foreign missions, then, because only through them

can I pay my honest debts. I cannot deny the debt; other men labored and I have entered into their labors. I cannot cancel the debt, and being unable to pay the Christian past I would pay the non-Christian present. This is what the first Christian missionary meant when he said he was a 'debtor to the barbarians.' Freely I have received from those who once thought of me as a 'far-off' man, freely I would give to those who are to-day outside the artificial parish boundaries of my immediate world."

V.

"SO MUCH TO DO AT HOME"

THE Commonest objection to foreign missions which we hear in this day is based upon the idea that it is illogical and unfair to be sending money and men for missionary work abroad when there are so many defects in our civilization here at home. This objection is sometimes made with great sincerity and earnestness on the part of those who are devoting their lives in a sacrificial way in connection with home missionary and humanitarian enterprises in our great cities and in the needier parts of our country. At other times the objection is used to cloak an entire lack of missionary zeal, either at home or abroad. The best treatment which we have seen of this objection is by Mr. J. Lovell Murray in his The Apologetic of Modern Missions. Mr. Murray deals with the objection by means of a series of questions which he leaves his reader to answer for himself. Somewhat condensed his questions are as follows:

1. The objection, if it is valid, implies that home needs are being neglected because of the attention which is now being given to the foreign missionary cause. Is this the case?

2. Do those most active in foreign missionary work at home and the foreign missionaries themselves manifest lack of concern regarding the needs at home?

3. Do the local interests suffer in those congregations where the most active interest is shown in the work abroad?