thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once we
would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we come,
not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark
hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of
war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of God, our great
Father, the only living God.'

"The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these
Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened for the
first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to
see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And
there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas, amongst all
those won for Christ, where similar acts of heroism on the part of
converts cannot be recited." John G. Paton, Missionary to the New
Hebrides, An Autobiography, second part, London, 1890, p. 243.

In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many
contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their
impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental
conditions, analogous to the saint's belief in an existent kingdom of
heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness
and are slow leavens of a better order.

The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready
to consider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and
excess. The optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as
I have already said elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church
towards corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of
Alcantara[216] appear to us to-day rather in the light of tragic
mountebanks than of sane men inspiring us with respect. If the inner
dispositions are right, we ask, what need of all this torment, this
violation of the outer nature? It keeps the outer nature too
important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated from the flesh will
look on pleasures and pains, abundance and privation, as alike
irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and experience
enjoyments without fear of corruption or enslavement. As the
Bhagavad-Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are
still inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the
fruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted
in a former lecture Saint Augustine's antinomian saying: If you only
love God enough, y