But I am not really so exacting and narrow-minded as I seem. I am not seriously asking that a people should adopt our whole individuality at the same time as our faith. I am willing to admit that it should reject our way of thinking and strike out quite a different one. Well then! let me see our negro, at the moment when he opens his eyes to the light of the Gospel, suddenly realizing that his earthly path is as dark and perplexed as his spiritual life was before. Let me see him creating for himself a new social order in his own image, putting ideas into practice that have hitherto rusted unused, taking foreign notions and moulding them to his purpose. I will wait long for the work to be finished; I merely ask that it may be begun. But it has never been begun; it has never even been attempted. You may search through all the pages of history, and you will not find a single people that has attained to European civilization by adopting Christianity, or has been brought by the great fact of its conversion to civilize itself when it was not civilized already. On the other hand, I shall find, in the vast tracts of Southern Asia and in certain parts of Europe, States fused together out of men of very different religions. The unalterable hostility of races, however, will be found side by side with that of cults; we can distinguish the Pathan who has become a Christian from the converted Hindu, just as easily as we separate to-day the Russian of Orenburg from the nomad Christian tribes among which he lives. Once more, Christianity is not a civilizing power, and has excellent reasons for not being so. CHAPTER VIII DEFINITION OF THE WORD “CIVILIZATION”; SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT HAS A TWOFOLD ORIGIN Here I must enter on a digression vital to my argument. At every turn I am using a word involving a circle of ideas which it is very necessary to define. I am continually speaking of “civilization,” and cannot help doing so; for it is only by the existence in some measure, or the complete absence, of this attribute that I can gauge the relative merits of the different races. I refer both to European civilization and to others which may be distinguished from it. I must not leave the slightest vagueness on this point, especially as I differ from the celebrated writer who alone in France has made it his special business to fix the meaning and province of this particular word. Guizot, if I may be allowed to dispute his great authority, begins his book on “Civilization in Europe” by a confusion of terms which leads him into serious error. He calls civilization an _event_.