Look at the proportion of _ministers_ who go abroad. In the United
States the number of preachers, of all denominations, is perhaps not far
from one to a thousand souls. This is in a land already intelligent and
Christian; in a land of universities, colleges, and schools; in a land
of enterprise, of industry, and of free institutions, where the arts
flourish, and where improvements are various and unnumbered; and more
than all, in a land where more than a million and a half of the people
are professed Christians, and ready to aid the ministers of Christ in
various ways. On the other hand, even if missionaries from all
Christendom be taken into the account, there is not more than one
minister to a million of pagan souls, with almost no intelligent
Christians to assist as teachers, elders, catechists, and tract
distributers; no physicians, artists, and judicious legislators, to
improve society and afford the means of civilized habits; no literature
worthy of the name; no colleges, or even common schools of any value; no
industry and enterprise, and every motive for it crushed by arbitrary
and tyrannical institutions: the mind degraded and besotted,
inconceivably so, and preoccupied also with the vilest superstition, the
most inveterate prejudices, and the most arrogant bigotry. Who can
measure the vast disproportion? What mind sufficient to balance extremes
so inconceivably immense? On the one hand a minister to a thousand
souls, with many helpers and a thousand auxiliary influences in his
favor; on the other, one minister to a million of souls, with no helpers
and no auxiliary influences, finding out an untrodden track amidst
unnumbered obstacles, and penetrating with his single lamp into the dark
and boundless chaos of heathenism. This is the manner in which
Christendom shows that she loves her neighbor as herself; and in view of
it, judge ye, whether American Christians go as much as they ought to
instruct and save the benighted nations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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