| wi ay Y KITH AND KIN IN INDIA. No. III. CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. BY THE REV. J. A. KERR BAIN, M.A, LIVINGSTONE—LATE OF RANGOON ; AUTHOR OF “‘THE PEOPLE OF THE PILGRIMAGE;” ““¥OR HEART AND LIFE;” ETC, SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES BY THE REV. JOHN FORDYCE, LATE OF CALCUTTA AND SIMLA; AUTHOR OF “‘TRIED AND TRUE,” ETC. +. > fa CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM. HERE is a well-known hyperbole of Paul’s, and a tremendous one, which stands as evidence that his patriotic concern for his Jewish kindred was apt to gather to a passion. He “could wish,’ he writes aboansie ix. 3), “that he. himself were anathema from Christ for the sake of” his own countrymen, his “brethren,” his ‘ kinsmen according to the flesh ;”—this man, to whom “to live was Christ,” and ie whom “to die was far better” thant to live, because it .was more of Christ. And all the while, let us remember, the lieart of Paul was as large as the known world, and his earnest good-wishes were as wide as the human race. This remarkable utterance of lis has principles wrapt up in it, therefore, which are worth our | unfolding. I. The widest Christian well-wishing acknowledges the kindredhood of race. The relationships which providence has set in the ~ aed SW sca heart of human existence, widening and weakening as they do from that of the family to that of humanity universal, are all of them valid, and all of them fraught with moral obligation. Midway among these is the relationship of country. This relationship is Divinely intended to have its own sentiments and its own duties. Nationality is not a mere human fiction, but a thing of providential meaning and mercifulness, fitting itself to the working-out of the general interests of mankind. Patriotism was never abolished nor even discredited by Christianity; rather, Christianity has hallowed and employed patriotism, and owes more to this senti- ment, though it is apt to be a limiting one, than men commonly imagine. From Paul’s day till now, the most patriotic of men have been those who had regard to all men for Christ’s sake, and the most largely Christian of men have been the most patriotic of men. It has been so in Britain. It is to the most earnestly Christian of the men and women of the past that our own country owes nearly everything, as a country of whose history and liberties and world-wide power we have some reason to be proud. And, to-day, the most Christian man among us may have the proudest affection for his country. His own land: his eye EY coe rests with pleasure upon the spot on the map which it makes, and kindles with emotion when it catches sight of the headlands of its storied coast after months or years of unrest among scenes which some may esteem more fair. His own country’s flag: he hails its homely features like the smiling face of a friend wherever he sees it waving to him from some mast-head upon the lone ocean, or fluttering at leisure on the breeze upon some strange shore that our countrymen have won. His own country’s tongue, the tongue of his fathers, the speech he learned on his mother’s hearth, he finds imperish- able in the best of literatures: his ear greets its accents when he hears them in some strange-speaking region, and they go to his heart like the song of a bird of home. His own fellow-countrymen : they may not always be what they ought to be, they may not always bring us honour, they may not always live as becomes their birth and privileges ; but he remembers they are Britons, and his heart warms at the thought | that our national history is theirs, and our national institutions are theirs, and our national land is theirs. After all, they are his “brethren,” his “ kinsmen according to the flesh,” wherever he meets them, or wherever he knows them to be. | So the Christian man may feel, and may have the Beets wee. approval of his Lord upon the feeling. He who “‘made of one blood all nations of men,” but did not make of one nation all the world of men, expects the feeling, and makes provision for its outflow. It does not bound the sympathies of a man; it only fosters them at a middle point, and gives them order and rank and practicable field. Patriotic affection need not narrow a Christian heart— not more than domes- tic affection does. A man’s sympathies ought to be domestic and more, patriotic and more. And just as we would have the best reason for despising the Christian philanthropy of a man whose heart was too great to trouble itself about the paltry circle of his own household, so Christians had need to beware how they throw off the sentiment of national brother- hood in the imagined interests of Christian or universal brotherhood. The interests of Christian brotherhood have found, by long experience, that the Christian brotherhood which seeks expansion by this means is a brotherhood which has great need of expansion by all means—needs first to get the length of a true Christian patriotism itself, that by-and-by it may have the chance of perhaps getting beyond it. It will get beyond it by keeping it the nearer to its heart, and by having it as one of the inner circles of those concentric areas by which Les! Gees Christian affections spread themselves out over Christ’s world. For here comes in a grave consideration. The man who is shedding off his patriotic sentiment, or declining it, is shirking patriotic duty, or refusing it. The sentiment may go, but the duty abides. The sentiment, rather, is the duty in its gaseous state, asking to be condensed by conscience, and set to solid work by will. A man is my fellow-country- man: that man, wherever he be, has more claim upon me and upon what I can do for him, other things being anything like equal, than a man of any other country has. If we have got out of the feel- ing of this, we have not got above it, but below it, And patriotic duty needs the aid of patriotic feeling. The sentiment may go: yes, but it takes with it the God-provided motive which makes the duty easy, and the discharge of it both rich and true. That Christ- ianity is weak, and is probably spurious, which deliberately dispenses with anything in which a hint | of duty is. It lies near to the singular greatness of our destiny as a nation among the nations of history, that many of our countrymen reside in regions far beyond our own shores. Tens of thousands of them are — sojourners here or there within the vast boundaries i A a of our Indian Empire—sojourners, yet perhaps for half a lifetime. Thousands of these are not only cut off from the associations of home-life, but are severed from the surroundings of Christian civilisation. They are our countrymen still: their isolation, the mere sprinkling that they are among the dense masses of the native people, even accentuates their kindred- hood. They are more to us than the men and women of those swarthy millions among whom they are dispersed : they have more claim upon us than they. Is it extravagant to suggest, that our first duty is to them, and our second to the natives of the land? I never was chargeable with the heartless whim of despising Asiatic blood; for this, I think, is to demoralise patriotism. It leaves me the more free to disown the sentimentality which sets the native of India before the British resident in India. I do not speak of Indian administration, but of the interest which the men of the one race and of the other ought to have for British hearts, and of the claim which the men of the one race and the other naturally bring upon our practical benevolence. These Anglo-Indian men and women are of us still ; no new nationality has absorbed them: better or worse, most of them will be with us again. They are exiles, and many of them in trying circumstances SPR = 9 < —not physically only, but morally too. The absent children of a household, if they are shut off from good and kindly influences, are not those who have least of the household interest. “The absent sons and daughters of Britain in India, if they are shut off from good and kindly influences, are not those for whom we in Britain should care little. II. The widest Christian well-wishing concentrates its interest upon the religious welfare of kindred. That interest could not be other than in great part a religious one. The well-wishing is itself a product of the religion of religions, the religion of Christ. It springs from religion, and it would shrivel up if religion were to exhale away. All this is according to reason. If a soul has gotten its sympathies widened thus, it largely owes that widen- ing to a supernatural amendment of its powers of vision. And one thing which it now sees very impressively is this—that spiritual concernments | transcend all others, as the heavens transcend the earth. Keep your eye, then, upon a large-hearted Christ- ian of good sense and good intelligence, and you will note that his interest, across all the widening circles — of its range, is still above all a religious interest, aby 1 pear strengthening inwards from circumference to centre. To him the supreme wellbeing is religious wellbeing ; the supreme prosperity of his countrymen is their spiritual prosperity. The welfare of our scattered countrymen in India is a thing of many aspects. It is a thing that may awaken interest in the breast of every man who wishes his country and his countrymen well. Their social comfort, their moral integrity, the strength of their influence over the subject races, their mercantile good-fortune, their professional success, their intellectual wellbemg—all these are matters which touch our interest, as we think of those men and women who are dispersed in groups or units through the length and breadth of that tropical empire. But the more we think of those fellow- countrymen of ours, and the more we know of them, the better we will apprehend, that what claims our interest in them above all things is their religious welfare. This would be so, even if there were nothing very exceptional in their religious circum- stances. But there is much that is exceptional in these. Unspiritual influences beset them on every side. An unchristian atmosphere is around them; people of anti-Christian religions abound as 1000 to 1; there is scarcely such a thing as a Christian public Cees sentiment within reach of them ; temptations, made strong by the unhomely nature of their life, lie in wait for them ; the exigencies of the climate encour- age irregularity of habit, and discourage all earnest- ness beyond what is demanded by the urgent affairs of secular life. Now, all this is serious enough for spiritual welfare when the ordinances of grace and the ministries of Christian counsel are at hand. What is it, then, when they are far away—perhaps never seen from monsoon to monsoon and from year to year? These are our “ kinsmen according to the flesh,” and their spiritual welfare, we may assure ourselves, is hard bestead, or is in the utmost jeopardy. They are no mythical needs that the Anglo-Indian Evangelisation Society sets itself so patriotically to meet, when it does all in its power to bring the outlying districts of India under some Gospel oversight. We might keep before us the simple certainty, that the Society would wholly meet those needs if the interest of Christians | at home were an interest in the best welfare of our fellow-countrymen in India such as the interest of this Society for twenty-five years has been. IfI. The widest Christian well-wishing is ready to make sacrifices for the religious welfare of kindred. =| jas It would be unwise to expect that any of us will ever be aflame with the magnificent unselfishness that glowed in the heart of Paul. But it is really this which is Christianity. Something of this we ought to look for in each other, and to demand in ourselves. At the least, something of it might be expected to reach out as far as to embrace the spiritual wellbeing of our Indian fellow-countrymen. A deplorably large proportion of these, most of them young and promising and well-trained, are being lost to Christianity and to good, or are thirsting for privi- leges which it would be right blessed to be able to give them. And we could give them these.