n clergy. "You may get men," says a writer to the _Times_,[123] "of
average attainments to go abroad as missionaries, just as you get clerks
and engineers. But they who adopt propagandism as a means of living--and
it is no disparagement to the missionaries that they do so--are not
exactly the men to impart a living impulse to the hearts of masses of
people. Xaviers and Bishop Pattesons, indeed, appear at intervals to prove
that the apostolic spirit is not yet extinct among men; but such
exceptional phenomena fail to redeem the common-place character of the
ordinary missionary field-force." 2nd. The Roman Catholic faith, by its
very oneness, by its remarkable similarity to the institutions of
Buddhism, and by its concessions to some of the grosser instincts of the
human mind, no less than by having a united and organized Church behind
it, cannot fail to commend itself more readily to the minds of the heathen
than the more spiritual and independent, but at the same time more narrow
and sectarian, beliefs which are all ranked as branches of the Reformed
Church. "Thinking[124] they are invading a country as soldiers of the
Cross, these young missionaries go forth, denouncing the beliefs, the
traditions, the worship of the people, calling on them to curse all that
they have ever held sacred, and to accept, on pain of eternal perdition,
the peculiar arrangements of beliefs which the missionary has compounded
for them, and of which Christianity is one, but not always a very
perceptible ingredient; and so the poor heathen, hungering, however
unconsciously, for the bread of life, is offered instead the shibboleths
of a very Babel of sects." But though they have failed as yet in the
higher aim which they have set before themselves, the efforts of the
missionaries have been wonderfully successful, though they care not for
this success, in raising the social standard of the people with whom they
are brought into contact. "They deserve infinite praise for the way they
have created written languages where none existed, and for their assiduity
in educating and civilizing thousands of savages."[125]

Our missionaries, then, who deserve every credit for their noble and
self-sacrificing efforts in the cause of Christ, who in the face of
difficulties such as few can appreciate, do their Master's work with
cheerfulness and zeal, in spite of danger and privation, comparing their
own failure with the success of missionaries elsewhere, as, for