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Handout #248 |
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The birth of missionary romanticism |
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The Genius of Christianity influenced the
whole of missionary literature during the nineteenth century and sometimes
even beyond:
The cults of idols have known nothing of the divine enthusiasm which animates the apostle of the gospel. The ancient philosophers themselves never left the avenues of Academe and the delights of Athens to go on a sublime impulse to humanize the savage, instruct the ignorant, heal the sick, clothe the poor and sow concord and peace among enemy nations. That is what Christian religious have always done and still continue to do. Neither seas, nor storms, nor polar ice, nor tropical heat stop them: they live with the Eskimo in his seal-skin; they feed on whale-oil with the Greenlanders; they traverse the solitary wastes with the Tartar or the Iroquois; they mount the Arab's dromedary or follow the Kaffir into the burning deserts; the Chinese, Japanese and Indians have become their neophytes. These is no island or reef in the Ocean which has managed to escape their zeal. And just as informer times there were not enough empires to satisfy the ambition of Alexander, so the earth is not enough for their charity. Chateaubriand, Le Genie du christianism (1802), Part Four, Book 4, Chapter 1. |
