Oh, let us turn back! Let us hasten out of this darkness! Let us return to the kisses of the sun and the wind, to the air and the light! To think that the whole world, past and present, has been, is, and will be irrevocably lost, unless it accepts our three hundred years old and much-divided religion! What gentle and refined mind can stand the strain? Who can walk straight under the weight of such crushing pessimism? Is it not fortunate that only one day in seven is devoted to church-going? When I was a Presbyterian minister, one of the hymns we used to sing in church began with the words "From Greenland's Icy Mountains," and went on to speak of "India's Coral Strands" and "Africa's Sunny Fountains," ending with this sentiment.= ````"Where every prospect pleases ````And man alone is vile."= Think of the essentially unmoral mind of the man who could write such a hymn, and of the callousness of the people who can sing it! Think of putting so false, so uncharitable, so conceited, so mean and small a thought into music, and singing it! If they wept over it, if they mourned over it, it would be less incongruous, but to sit in their pews and with the help of organ and piano to sing about the vileness of the earth's greater population seems to me in my haste, to lend considerable support to the doctrine of total depravity. The Christian will trade with the "heathen," he will travel into their country, he will trust them in business, but, on Sunday, when he is in church, when he is kneeling at the altar, in the house of his God, he calls them "vile." If the only way we can appreciate our own morality is by defaming the majority of humanity, how contemptible must our morality he? When we sing that all the Hindoos, the Chinese, the Japanese and the rest of the non-Christian world are "vile,"--that there is no love, no devotion, no patriotism, no honesty, no friendship, no temperance, no philanthropy, no chastity, no truthfulness, no mercy and no honor, in these heathen lands--when we deny that in these parts of the world any virtue can exist, are we not bearing false witness against our neighbors? To preach the brotherhood of man in one breath, and in the next, to call your brothers who do not believe in your creed "vile," has about it the unmistakable air of cant and hypocrisy. Is it any wonder that the "heathen" distrust the Christian nations of Europe and America?