Said he: "I guess that man Tanner was right. He did not speak much of the difference between the people of one country and those of another, which rather surprised me. He said nothing of the two great classes, the rulers with much European blood, and the peons, largely or altogether Indian. There must be all sorts of Latin Americans, rich and poor, mixed blood of many strains, Castilian and Aztec and Inca, and whatever other people were here when Columbus set the fashion for American voyages. But this is where this 'missionary father-in-law' hit the heart of the trouble: Latin America has all sorts and conditions of men, but everywhere it has the same church. And it is a church that can't ever make good any more. It might, at the beginning, but it can't now. It has a reputation as fixed as Julius Caesar's. I'm hardly ready to set up as an expert observer, being only a cub salesman on his first trip, but, Mr. Drury, I believe I can see already that the only chance for these people to get religion and everything else which religion ought to produce, is for us to send it to them. Maybe that would stir up the church down here, and help to give it another chance at the people's confidence, though I'm not sure." Our church ought to send doctors; the amount of fearful disease that flourishes among the poorer people is just frightful. If Joe Carbrook were not so set on going to the Orient, he could do a big work here, and so could a thousand other doctors. It would be so much more than mere doctoring; it would be the biggest kind of preaching. And the church should send teachers. You know I believe in conversion; but if the Mexicans I have seen are samples of Latin America's common people, they need teachers who have the patience of Christ a good deal more than they need flaming evangelists who make a big stir and soon pass on. Because these folks have just _got_ to be made over, in their very minds. They are not ready for the preaching of the gospel until they have seen it lived. Long experience has made them doubtful of living saints, though plenty of them pray to dead ones. This is the whole trouble, Mr. Drury, it seems to me. They've known only a church that had got off the track. Any religious work that reaches them now has almost to begin all over again. It has to undo their thinking about prayer and faith and God's love and human conduct and nearly every other Christian idea. They have a Christian vocabulary, but it means very little. They think they can buy religion, if they want it--any kind they want. And if they can't afford it, or don't want it, they don't quite think they'll be sent to hell for that, in spite of what the priest says. They think enough to be afraid, but not enough to be sure of anything. The missionaries have to teach them a new set of religious numerals, if you get what I mean, before it is any use to teach them the arithmetic of the gospel.