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 BY 
 
 MRS. ANGIE F. NEWMAN. 
 
 “ Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which 
 shall believe on me through their word.” 
 
 CINCINNATI : 
 
 PRINTED BY HITCHCOCK & WALDEN. 
 
 1878. 
 
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(i 
 
 HEATHEN AT HOME.” 
 
 
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 -4V V 
 
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 BY 
 
 MRS. ANGIE F. NEWMAN. 
 
 “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe 
 on me through their word.” 
 
 CINCINNATI: 
 
 PRINTED BY HITCHCOCK & WALDEN. 
 
 1878. 
 
COPYRIGHT BY 
 
 MRS. ANGIE F. NEWMAN. 
 1878. 
 
jN the preparation of these pages I have 
 had a twofold purpose. To the unin¬ 
 itiated it may seem a work of supereroga¬ 
 tion. In my own experience in the work of 
 the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, ex¬ 
 tending through many of the Western States, 
 I have found both ministry and laymen affected 
 with the strange delusion of “Heathen enough 
 at home.” Whether winding up the narrow 
 canons of the Rocky Mountains to the villages 
 on the plateaus, or rushing down and out to great 
 throbbing commercial centers—all along the line this 
 morbid sentiment has reared itself as a huge bowlder 
 
 
 
 in my pathway, threatening to crush the foot so bold 
 as to approach it. My own heart has stood still in 
 its presence until I have crept away into the shadow 
 of the Great Rock. “For it was not an enemy that 
 reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither 
 was it he that hated me that did magnify himself 
 against me; then I would have hid myself from him: 
 but it was thou , . . . mine equal, my guide, 
 
 and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel 
 together and walked to the house of God in com- 
 
 3 
 
4 
 
 Preface. 
 
 pany. . . . He hath delivered my soul in peace 
 
 from the battle that was against me.” But “there 
 were many zvith me.” 
 
 This western theory, I am persuaded, is but an 
 echo of eastern thought. Therefore, in full assur¬ 
 ance that the position is indefensible, I have striven, 
 
 1. So to adjust the camera of God’s truth to the 
 soul of the objector, as to photograph his error. 
 
 2. I plead with him to change his position ere a 
 divine hand is laid upon the plates for a final 
 impression. 
 
 Doubtless there are many writers who could have 
 produced a more vivid picture. But trained hands 
 know no leisure; hence, discarding any attempt at 
 artistic effect, I send forth these pages freighted with 
 prayer, that they may supply a felt need of the 
 “Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society.” 
 
 A. F. N. 
 
Part I. 
 
 HE great American public of to-day is a self- 
 constituted jury for the trial of Woman. In 
 the ecclesiastical courts she is charged with 
 embezzlement. In deference to her sex, doubt¬ 
 less, the indictment reads: 
 
 “Creating an uproar in the Church, with false state¬ 
 ments concerning an unknown country, with consequent 
 diversion of the funds of said Church from legitimate to 
 ‘heathen’ uses.” 
 
 One among the arraigned, in behalf of my 
 sisters, of “felonious intent,” I, Angie F. New¬ 
 man, plead “ Not guilty ,” and submit the following 
 
 DEFENSE. 
 
 “©fjc ©ro ss, tl)c jFIag: not jsjmonsms, but snim&tnt anti 
 
 xonsqucnt.” 
 
 Thus often spake my good father, of blessed memory, 
 and trained my child-eyes to see upon every hill-top of this 
 fair land, glistening in sunlight or shadow, the cross of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ; just beneath it, in the valley, the 
 stars and stripes,—stars, as the firmament, to go no more 
 out, because set by the stripes of blood. Before each 
 emblem the inscription, “Whosoever will, let him come.” 
 
 Hereby was I made to believe that whoever fleeing 
 
 5 
 
6 
 
 “ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 from bondage in other lands, though they touch our 
 shores with feet never so bound and bleeding, if straight¬ 
 way they gave allegiance to these symbols of our national 
 greatness, their chains should snap asunder, their wounds 
 heal. My child-lips were thus taught to bless the dear 
 All-giver, that he had granted me birth and such heritage 
 in such land. I grew to womanhood strong in the 
 father-faith. 
 
 June was the morning. Nature had dressed herself 
 royally, as if for a coronation. Unwisely? Crowns are 
 often woven ere Submission has passed the outer Geth- 
 semane gate. 
 
 A whole regiment, and our noblest, were drawn up 
 in line. They were going away to strike for freedom’s 
 altar, then sleep in southern morasses. There was an¬ 
 other line, of fair, fragile ones; each of whom, in steady¬ 
 ing this cup of sacrifice to other lips, had herself drank 
 the dregs. But we 
 
 “ Crushed the coming tears back, 
 
 With the whispered word, He knows;” 
 
 and with hand-clasp, which tightened in its loosening— 
 apprehension, blessing in the lingering pressure — hearts 
 uttered farewells, lips refused. We caught the last flash 
 of the glistening bayonets. My heart leaped with love 
 for the flag they bore,—because it waved above my fa¬ 
 ther; because it was the emblem of God’s country; be¬ 
 cause to die to preserve its luster was but to lend a hand, 
 to hold ajar the gates of religious freedom until the mill¬ 
 ions of fugitive pilgrims who could enter heaven through 
 no other channel should have passed in. 
 
 Pardon the fancy, reader. If any thing material may 
 survive the wreck of death, it seems to me, it should be 
 the old flag. The hands which clutched it in the death- 
 
“ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 7 
 
 chill should in their immortality find it, and without 
 sacrilege be permitted to drape the eternal entrance, that 
 the redeemed from benighted lands might for a moment 
 gaze upon it as they forever passed 
 
 “The rock waste and the river.” 
 
 Later, when it was told me they had laid away my 
 father in a grave I might not see, I said, though heart 
 was dumb with grief; ’T is well. His tomb shall form a 
 part of that great cross to which a nation was nailed 
 until it bowed its head in agony. Our fathers are dead; 
 liberty is risen. 
 
 Years lapsed. Then came a tale across the seas (the 
 winds had been contrary, and it was late) of mothers (in 
 multitude such as no man could number) in bondage so 
 bitter that out of the very depths of mother-love they 
 were tossing their babes from breast to billow, lest inno¬ 
 cence wear chains; a bondage physical, so weird, so 
 terrible, so unrelenting, words shrivel before it; a bondage 
 of mind so absolute the very name of woman was a toy 
 to be kicked aside at the caprice of him who wearied of 
 her; a bondage of soul, such as might have been a spear 
 to pierce a Savior’s side. 
 
 A few brave men from England and America, moved 
 by a divine bravery which sea-waves could not jostle, 
 having set the home loves away in the heart’s holy of 
 holies, had dared perils and defied death to make possible 
 the emancipation of enslaved and enslaver. They had 
 endured long toil, weary vigils, nights of prayer. Re¬ 
 doubts had been taken. But woman , the voiceless, the 
 unresisting, tortured, bound, was still beyond the pale of 
 man’s effort. Shut in the tower of the centuries, she 
 might not come forLh, even to execution. Man’s most 
 
8 
 
 “Heathen at Home.” 
 
 subtle device availed nothing to effect secret entrance. 
 He could construct no ladders to scale the heights. 
 
 At last it was found—how, we know not; perchance 
 the Great Liberator whispered it; there was a duplicate 
 key. It was lost in the Dark Ages. It rusted in the 
 massive lock at the Eastern gateway. There was a single 
 hand, divinely guided, could move it, Christian woman’s. 
 
 Ann Hasseltine Judson touched it; the key clicked in 
 the lock; the hinges turned with a creak which startled 
 the world. Mrs. Judson passed in. The damp air from 
 festering wounds chilled her, and she fell. But she had 
 set up the brazen image, and Sorrow’s eyes peered toward 
 it from grated windows. 
 
 Another and another heroic woman stepped steadily 
 into the breach, to grow pale with anguish that she had 
 but one pair of hands to loosen fetters, one tongue for 
 the ministry of words; and in the excess of effort perish. 
 One was hurried away, only to find entombment by the 
 island grave of the French exile. (Did God suffer it, 
 that the place of banishment should be visited with the 
 ministry of tears?) Another slept beneath the yew-tree’s 
 shade. Many in that vast martyr-vault which the angels 
 guard, called “Nameless.” 
 
 Some came back across the parted waters, stood in 
 Christian amphitheaters, and with lips wasted to thinness 
 by the fever of the heart, proclaimed the hunger and the 
 want of the imprisoned legions, and shouted, “Rouse ye, 
 Christian sisters; pluck these thorns from Sorrow’s crown, 
 and place them as stars in your own.” 
 
 Women redeemed from spiritual bondage by the blood 
 of the Only Son, women redeemed from civil thralldom by 
 the blood of their own sons, the very fibers of whose souls 
 trembled with the price of liberty, counted the cost, and 
 said, We are able. So the reform came, at first low and 
 
“ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 9 
 
 sweet, like the voice of angels. By them told at the inner 
 gate. A little band of eight, without money, without ships, 
 without agents, met together and adjusted a plan, and 
 assumed a name, “ W. F. M. S.” Mystic initials, sug¬ 
 gestive to the eight rather of absence of strength than 
 repleteness of possibility. Eight, and “God with us.” 
 
 So they multiplied. By divine arithmetic zero, raised 
 to the highest power, became a ftoivcr from which many 
 roots were extracted. These roots were expanded again 
 and again, resultant at length in a working force of such 
 magnitude as to be felt. 
 
 To that phase of the work known as “organizing 
 auxiliaries,” in localities in metropolitan dialect styled 
 “the borders,” the writer was assigned. I went forth 
 with strong confidence in a theme the most prolific, possi¬ 
 bilities the most far-reaching, of time past or time to come. 
 
 I announced the miracle of the ages : the door of the 
 charnel-house of the world had swung upon its hinges by 
 woman’s delicate touch. At no other had the stone, the 
 watch, or the seal stirred. This door was bolted and 
 sentinel-guarded, even when our Savior pillowed his 
 throbbing temples upon the pitying rocks, amid the night- 
 dews of the Judean hills. These bars shut in women and 
 babes, guilty of no offense save that in their sepulchral 
 home the sob of the crucifixion, the chorus of the ascen¬ 
 sion, were alike inaudible; women whose ancestry, like 
 themselves, through all the ages had traversed a vale of 
 sorrow, forever moaning, “Father, if it be possible, let 
 this cup pass from me.” To this vast multitude, in this 
 golden era —our day —is woman sent to loosen the napkin 
 and bid the dead come forth to resurrection and life 
 eternal. 
 
 How my own blood leaped in my veins! How 
 clearly I saw the pulse of the Church jut up to fever heat 
 
IO 
 
 “ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 as she listened to the thrilling facts! For, verily, had not 
 the King said: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one 
 of the least of these, ye have done it unto me.” “I was 
 an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty, and 
 ye gave me drink; sick, and ye visited me. I was in 
 prison , and ye came unto me.” “Come,” therefore, 
 “inherit the kingdom.” 
 
 Toiling not long, I suddenly awakened to a bewil¬ 
 dered sense of incongruity of conditions. My brothers 
 and sisters, with whom I had often sung: 
 
 “ Shall we, whose souls are lighted 
 With wisdom from on high, 
 
 Shall we to men benighted, 
 
 The lamp of life deny? 
 
 Salvation, O Salvation ! 
 
 The joyful sound proclaim, 
 
 Till earth’s remotest nation 
 Has learned Messiah’s name; ” 
 
 from whose lips I had often heard the petition: 
 
 “My gracious Master and my God, 
 
 Assist me to proclaim, 
 
 To spread through all the earth abroad, 
 
 The honor of thy name,” 
 
 repulsed this appeal, assured me I was chasing a delusion, 
 wasting my own energies, and would divert those of the 
 Church. I need not stretch my puny arms across the seas 
 to .touch idols. There were “heathen enough at home” 
 (whose home deponent saith not). 
 
 Women, filling the sacred office of motherhood, and 
 teaching child-lips to whisper, “Thy kingdom come,” 
 spurned the message and the Spring-tide in their own 
 wave of opportunity, and said, virtually, Tell the Lord 
 of the harvest my own grapes need pruning, (as though 
 he were unconscious of the fact). 
 
“ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 i x 
 
 Men of marvelous chivalry, when the goddess of their 
 own liberty sat on a tottering throne, now said of her, 
 “She is a ‘home’ queen. Her policy is non-aggressive. 
 Her ‘sphere’ has boundaries which must not be enlarged 
 lest her ‘home’ luster be destroyed. All men are created 
 free and equal, never mind the women.” 
 
 My heart sickened; am / the fanatic, the dreamer? 
 In this land of Christian freedom is love for freedom a 
 misnomer? Must I question at last the sublime faith in 
 God’s country, which glorified the death of my good 
 father? Was the sweet trust of my sainted mother a 
 farce ? Do I really breathe the heavy air of a heathen 
 land ? 
 
 To strengthen my own staggering faith and silence my 
 objectors, I summoned an illustrious line of witnessess 
 whose lives went out as a fragrance diffused mid noxious 
 vapors. 
 
 William Carey, name standing as a gateway to the 
 Orient. 
 
 Adoniram Judson, peerless man, who gave thirty years 
 of toil to the translation of the entire Bible into the Bur¬ 
 mese tongue—a master-stroke for liberty, which paralyzed 
 a master-hand. Then strangers gave him sea-sepulture, 
 lest his great heart have unrest in narrower grave. 
 
 Harriet Newell, the first woman-martyr stretched upon 
 death’s altar, a voluntary offering for India. “Greater 
 love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life 
 for his friends.” 
 
 Our beloved Bishop Thomson, who said: 
 
 “Indian idolatry has touched bottom. As I stood in 
 the holy city of Benares, contemplating the odiousness, 
 the obscurity, the discord, the beastliness of that center 
 of pagan worship, I thought surely it can get no lower 
 without opening the mouth of hell. . . . As I looked 
 
12 
 
 “ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 upon a fakir seated by the Ganges, naked, haggard, worn 
 to a skeleton, and covered with ashes, I thought I knew 
 what it was to be damned. . . . This great moral 
 
 pest-house, this Babel of devils, God has put into the 
 power of one of the most enlightened Christian nations 
 on earth. . . . The railways she has constructed are 
 
 so many iron arteries pumping Christian blood through 
 the native veins. Her schools are so many batteries 
 thundering at the crumbling battlements of error; her 
 missions are so many brains thinking new and better 
 thoughts. . . . As to take Richmond is to shake out 
 the rebels of the United States from the Potomac to the 
 Rio Grande, so to christianize India, owing to its key 
 position in heathendom, is to shake out the idols from the 
 face of the whole earth. ... I looked down upon 
 the plain of the Ganges and I knew that in the mountains 
 on the one side there beat six hundred thousand hearts, 
 and in the plains, on the other, fifty millions, and I said, 
 ‘These all belong to Christ.’ ‘Ask of me and I will give 
 thee the heathen for an inheritance.’” 
 
 A prophecy to be realized in the crystallized civiliza¬ 
 tions of the East. 
 
 “But,” continued the Bishop, “Satan need not trouble 
 himself about Adam after he had captured Eve, nor 
 will India be retaken from him until we imitate his tac¬ 
 tics. . . . Hath not God commanded and shall not 
 
 we obey? India brought to Jesus may lie like John in 
 the Master’s bosom. Though no man hear and no man 
 pity you must plead , though you tell your truth and 
 sorrow to the stones.” 
 
 Bishop Kingsley: he had traversed the land of the 
 Yang-tse. He said of her civilization: “All China has 
 been walking backward for centuries, in order to see 
 what is behind her.” 
 
“Heathen at Home.” 
 
 13 
 
 Of her classic faith: “Confucius declined saying any 
 thing about a future state, though besotig/it to do so.” 
 
 Of general education: “Taking the whole country 
 together, not more than one man in fifty can read a Chi¬ 
 nese book, and not one woman in five hundred.” 
 
 Of her social customs: “A fashionable Chinese lady 
 is a cripple for life. It would be less a calamity and 
 involve vastly less suffering to have her feet cut off at 
 once in infancy, and have some wooden feet fitted up to 
 suit the absurd fashion.” 
 
 “Females in China never appear in public gatherings 
 until after they become Christians. Even then it takes a 
 long time to overcome the prejudice of ages.” “Shall 
 we go into the houses of the natives and tell them the 
 story of the cross.” “They would much sooner admit 
 the fatal cobra.” “No man, not even one of their own 
 countrymen, is permitted to come into the presence of 
 their wives.” . . . “Let those reformers who seek to 
 
 elevate women by turning their backs upon Christianity, 
 beware 1” 
 
 Upon landing in Yokohama the Bishop wrote: “We 
 are now, for certain, in a heathen land. The Jap¬ 
 anese coolies, men and women, the former almost entirely 
 naked, the women with a single rag of a garment from 
 the hips down, are employed to move freight to and 
 from the ships. . . . Not one in a million in Japan 
 
 is Christian, but the Japanese acknowledge the superior 
 civilization of Christian nations, and are anxious to 
 improve.” 
 
 Traversing the Ganges, he wrote: “Probably not one 
 female to a thousand males is seen in a trip through 
 India, and these are the lower castes.” “With both Hin¬ 
 doos and Mahommedans women are regarded as the 
 ignorant, unquestioning slaves of their lords.” 
 
14 
 
 “ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 The Bishop passed from these to other scenes. He 
 stood amid the ruins of the Holy City. He knelt in 
 Gethsemane’s vale. The Spirit fell upon him. He went 
 out upon the housetop; gazed mutely upon the ever to-be 
 visible footprints of the Lamb. Then his vision leaped 
 beyond the land of sacrifice to the limitless plains he had 
 just left where, under the very shadow of Calvary, sorrow 
 had held high carnival for eighteen centuries. The wail 
 of the dying in chains swept in, blended with the re¬ 
 quiem which had hung upon the Palestine air since the 
 starless night, smote upon his soul, and his great heart, 
 too human to bear its agony, beat against its cage, and 
 he—was—dead. 
 
 The sainted Dr. Eddy, whose memory is a fragrance, 
 whose lips muttered in the death chill, “Tell the Church 
 to lay down her gold for the cause of God and of 
 missions.” 
 
 Dr. Butler, who, surviving the horrors of Lucknow and 
 Cawnpore, came back to tell the horrible tale, display the 
 instruments of slaughter of three hundred and one brave 
 women, and plead as one pleads for the life of his friend—• 
 for prayers, and pennies to save their murderers. Then 
 he wrote “The Land of the Veda,” and drew such a pic¬ 
 ture as the eye of civilization had never seen, of woman 
 from the cradle of innocence to the more welcome cradle 
 of death, the tyrant superstition swaying above her the 
 Hindoo scepter as she slept, or thrusting a lance into her 
 vitals at any symptom of awakening. 
 
 “Ye happy American mothers,” wrote the Doctor, “it 
 will be a satisfaction to you to reflect that the lady mis¬ 
 sionaries whom your societies are now sending to that 
 land, and who carry right into the center of these homes 
 your Christian sentiments and feelings, may be designed 
 of God to work out a remedy for an evil which has hith- 
 
“ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 i5 
 
 erto defied human law and all that man alone could do 
 for its extirpation.” 
 
 With these testimonies, and many others from silent 
 or living lips, I went again upon my mission, believing, 
 though the multitude heeded not my broken utterances, 
 these voices from the blessed dead or the beloved living 
 would be a Imu unto the Church they serve. 
 
 “Alas for the rarity, 
 
 Of Christian charity.” 
 
 The dissonance of that mysterious refrain, “There are 
 heathen enough at home,” grated afresh upon my soul. 
 “This foreign work is a very misty affair; it savors of dis¬ 
 tance, of doubt, of probable failure. We hold these 
 statements as gross exaggerations.” (To think the grand¬ 
 est men of the Christian world could be so arraigned.) 
 Then the withering look the Church fastened upon me, 
 which needed no interpreter to declare, “You are your¬ 
 self a demented vagrant, who ought to be under surveil¬ 
 lance ‘at home.’” 
 
 I hurried away with crushed spirit, and soliloquized, Is 
 then the old flag, the blessed stars and stripes, which 
 have often given peace to my aching heart, only a mis¬ 
 nomer? Does it signify only civil oppression and religious 
 bondage? Is the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, as a 
 national ensign, only an illusion ? Mothers gave their 
 first-born, wives their husbands, maidens nameless treas¬ 
 ures for its defense. Is this blessed emblem only a rack 
 to which women also must be nailed? 
 
 I was suffocated, I went out under the quiet stars and 
 sought Him who had said, “Take heed to yourselves that 
 your heart be not deceived and ye turn aside and serve 
 other gods.” “And then the Lord’s wrath be kindled 
 against you, and he shut up the heaven that there be no 
 rain, and that the land yield not her fruit, and lest ye 
 
i6 
 
 “ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 perish quickly from off the good land which the Lord 
 giveth you.” “The idols of the heathen are silver and 
 gold, the work of men’s hands.” “But where are thy 
 gods that thou hast made thee ? Let them arise, if they 
 can save thee in the time of thy trouble.” 
 
 Kneeling in suppliance, I asked to be taught of the 
 Unerring. If the idols I would assist to crush in foreign 
 lands had being in my own, and we were idolaters, I 
 might be given spirit-vision to discover their hiding places. 
 
 I arose. In reverie wandered. As one becomes con¬ 
 scious of a presence when his own atmosphere is invaded, 
 yet sees nothing, I suddenly halted, sight strained to sever¬ 
 est tension. The moon suddenly burst its swaddling- 
 clothes, clear beams fell vertically, I saw, and shuddered, 
 a huge idol! There was no mistaking it; a brazen image 
 of colossal stature, resting on a base of solid gold. As I 
 drew near, it seemed instinct with life; its terrible eyes 
 shot lightnings, its arms were distended as if to embrace 
 a worshiper. Jewels glistened in the flickering starlight 
 from its bony fingers; its feet, though delicately molded, 
 wore the hoofs of time; a deep, cavernous voice broke in 
 upon the awful silence, and I heard the words, “If thou 
 wilt fall down and worship me I will give thee all the 
 kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” 
 
 Transfixed I stood amid the shadows. A venerable 
 man drew near, knelt and poured incense—days, months, 
 years, yea, a life-time, to full measure. He received, what? 
 a hundred millions! But no fragment of time to utter a 
 prayer for the repose of his soul! 
 
 I saw another. His form was bent, but not with 
 years; his step was hurried and there was a strange fire 
 in his eye. He deposited quickly his offering —consciencel 
 The idol clutched it, a murmur of delight broke from his 
 crimson lips, ran along his massive frame till it vibrated 
 
“ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 i7 
 
 like an aspen, as he gave the kneeling victim a scroll. 
 By the light of a falling star I read one word, “Fame.” 
 
 Again, and, lo, a great multitude. These came with 
 agile step, stretched their full palms toward the shrine, 
 and each tossed a soul! A strange, new fire kindled in 
 the eyes of the idol, as he threw to each a shining man¬ 
 tle, tinseled and embroidered, with the words “Earthly 
 Pleasure” inwrought. I saw, because I stood in the 
 shadow, they in the rays, what they heeded not, that it 
 was moth-eaten as a sieve. 
 
 Again a motley crowd surge toward the pedestal. 
 Young men fresh from a mother’s knee, the halo of her 
 prayers still enshrouding them, middle-aged men with 
 brows the impersonation of thought, men venerable with 
 a nation’s trust, kneel together, and lay at the monster’s 
 feet the elective franchise of a Christian nation. My 
 pulse stood still. For what purpose was this richest liba¬ 
 tion of liberty poured ? My blood darted anew with 
 anguish as I saw all hands extended to receive an equiv¬ 
 alent. Some grasped a parchment, with the single word, 
 “Position;” others clutched a silver coin, the “almighty 
 dollar.” But I saw each moved away with an unsteady 
 step, as though a leaden plummet were suspended about 
 his neck. 
 
 I might not follow them, for another eager crowd 
 pressed to the front, reckless and jubilant. They poured 
 the choicest vintage of Bacchus. The trenches over¬ 
 flowed, and there was delirium in the very air. The 
 worshipers themselves partook of the intoxication. The 
 leaders moved away in chariots of gold, with steeds richly 
 caparisoned, and shouted, “Long live King Gambrinus!” 
 I saw, and, lo, their chariot-wheels drave heavily, for 
 they dragged and crushed innocent women and babes, 
 
 2 
 
i8 
 
 “ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 who sent up such a wail of anguish as terrified the steeds 
 in their gilded trappings, and they dashed suddenly down 
 that broad, flower-gemmed avenue, whose terminus is the 
 abysm of hell. 
 
 Slowly I turned again toward the incense-altar. A 
 long line of devotees approached. To my horror, I dis¬ 
 covered in the front ranks my own personnel. The 
 pageantry drew on. The countenance of some wore an 
 air of self-assurance. They had evidently just returned 
 from Vanity Fair, bearing a few trinkets, carefully la¬ 
 beled “Sacrifice,” which they laid complacently upon the 
 altar. Others wore broad phylacteries, with the inscrip¬ 
 tion, “Holiness to the Lord.” Still others came, laden 
 with heavy bundles of parchment, which, being unrolled, 
 I saw were formulas of prayer, whose cohesive attraction 
 had been overcome by much use, and they fell at the 
 feet of the idol as ashes. At sight of this, the Christian 
 Church at his feet, this inanimate Baal, as if in the intox¬ 
 ication of conscious sovereignty, suddenly raised his huge 
 right arm, thrust aloft a banner inscribed with the single 
 word, “ Victory ,” and shouted, with cavernous intonat¬ 
 ion: “It is enough. Depart in peace.” 
 
 As line after line of the kneeling devotees arose, I 
 saw each carried away a little golden seal. Creeping 
 close to the altar, my own treacherous fingers grasped 
 one of them. I drew back into the light, and read the 
 mystic word, “ E-a-s-e—Ease.” 
 
 My senses came; my nerves shook. Verily, then, / 
 was an idolater. These, my countrywomen, my kinsfolk 
 in the flesh, were worshipers at one common shrine. As 
 by intuition, I rushed forward and sought a position 
 where the fast-receding rays of the full moon fell upon 
 the idol, and read, what before had been concealed, the 
 
“ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 19 
 
 name of this great god of the Ephesians: four little letters, 
 a monosyllable, “ S-e-i-f—Self.” 
 
 A sense of dizziness overpowered me. I reeled. 
 What befell me, or whence the crowd, or where this 
 brazen image, I knew not. When I awoke the light of 
 a new day was bursting in the horizon. With the dark¬ 
 ness had passed away the dread panorama of the night. 
 I arose, shook from myself the paralysis of the hideous 
 drama, and resolved to go forth, to cry out against this 
 idol of the night and obscurity. 
 
 Lo, my hands were heavy; and I perceived the golden 
 seal of my dreams had turned to stone—a weight too 
 heavy. By tremendous impulse, as though death were in 
 the balance, I dashed it upon the rocks by the wayside. 
 It shivered into fragments, which I trod into the yielding 
 soil out of sight forever; then turned, with elastic step 
 and bounding spirit, to tread again the arena of toil. 
 For though verily I had looked upon the brazen image, to 
 which with my kinsmen I had rendered unconscious hom¬ 
 age, I had now seen its hideous deformity, and learned 
 the u>orship was voluntary. 
 
 Therefore, though as I went I would cry aloud against 
 the idolatry of my own people, yet would I plead the 
 more earnestly for the myriads beyond the seas, who are 
 idolaters from necessity, because they have no choice of 
 other shrines. If they turn away from the idols of 
 wood and stone, the work of men’s hands, they are 
 without a shrine, without a hope, tossed on the great 
 sea of universal sorrow, without the anchorage even 
 of a false faith, drifting into the great unknown, where 
 rock and shoal and maelstrom engulf all but the King’s 
 fleet. 
 
 For this cause, therefore, with a noble army of Chris- 
 
20 
 
 “ Heathen at Home.” 
 
 tian women, my sisters, who, having flung away their 
 own golden seals into the vault of the past, are coming 
 from the shores of either ocean in solid phalanx, a com¬ 
 bination known as the “Woman’s Foreign Missionary 
 Society,” I come, valiantly to labor, so long as this right 
 hand holds her “cunning,” for the overthrow of the false 
 gods of all the limitless Orient. 
 
 Judges, jurors, you have heard the Defense. 
 
Part II. 
 
 u Seated) at Son^e.” 
 
 Hrjjumcnt. 
 
 ❖ 
 
 l^r'0)'\Y chemical analyses, the base of a given mix- 
 tiire is precipitated, the foreign elements lib- 
 crated. A skillful analyst of moral forces 
 « ff may effect kindred results in spiritual science. 
 IE; Ourself skilless, our only hope is so to define the 
 f crude substances which enter into the above for- 
 1 mula that the unwary may beware of the “poison.” 
 
 In our examination of this subject some stand¬ 
 ard authority is essential to an intelligent discussion 
 \y of terms. We have chosen Webster. He defines 
 x “Heathen:” “One who worships idols, or is unac- 
 X quainted with the true God; a Gentile. In the 
 Scriptures, the word seems to comprehend all na¬ 
 tions except the Jews or Israelites, as they were all 
 strangers to the true religion.” The term, as in general 
 use, has more or less of local significance. Among the 
 Mormons all non-Smithites, of whatever nationality, are 
 termed Gentiles, all such being “strangers to the true 
 religion.” FTotnc ,Webster defines as “One’s own country, 
 the place of constant residence.” Foreign —“Not of the 
 country in which one resides.” Foreigner —“A person 
 
 21 
 
22 
 
 Heathen at Home: Argument. 
 
 born in a foreign country; or without the jurisdiction of 
 which one speaks.” 
 
 By these definitions we find home and foreign to be 
 merely relative terms, whose import is determined by the 
 location of the speaker. In India and China, our mis¬ 
 sionaries, by the natives among whom they labor, are 
 currently denominated “Foreign Devils.” God’s resi¬ 
 dence is ubiquity. With him, therefore, there is no 
 change of relation. 
 
 Heathen —“One who worships idols.” Idol, in its 
 literal sense, signifies : i. A representation or figure (the 
 work of men’s hands). 2. Men, animals, the heavenly 
 bodies, or natural elements, consecrated as objects of 
 worship. 
 
 “Home,” in this connection, must have its boundary 
 set by the water lines which girdle the United States. 
 
 No one familiar with the facts will, we think, attempt 
 to substantiate the claim of idol worship, in its literal 
 sense, within this limit.' But since we have found the 
 creed of the Church quite as firm upon the “heathen at 
 home” as that of non-communicants, we will examine the 
 subject in its varied phases. The argument of substitu¬ 
 tion, whereby professing Christians set up for themselves 
 a shrine and offer incense upon other altar than that 
 of the living God, we have discussed in Part I. 
 
 The second clause of the definition, “strangers to the 
 true religion,” to a casual thinker, may appear forceful, 
 as applied to the multitudes crowding the slums of our 
 great cities, wandering as vagrants or perishing in prisons. 
 In the higher social strata, to the people whose mental 
 and moral worth are elements of strength in the social or 
 commercial fabric, who nevertheless have not acknowl¬ 
 edged Christ as their personal Savior. We question 
 if these people would relish the classification “ heathen,” 
 
Heathen at Home: Argument. 
 
 2 3 
 
 either as worshipers of idols or strangers to the true relig¬ 
 ion. For the sake of the argument we place them here, 
 and examine the latter clause of the charge. 
 
 “True religion.” The divine platform of this faith is, 
 “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, 
 and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all 
 thy strength.” Its corollary, “Do unto others as ye 
 would that they should do unto you.” 
 
 Enter with me, caviler, the denominational class¬ 
 rooms of the Christian Church. Seat yourself dispassion¬ 
 ately, note-book in hand. Take carefully the testimony 
 of those who claim to have reached this sublime spir¬ 
 itual altitude; go abroad with me into business circles 
 and submit your notes; see if your gathered testimonies 
 are not arraigned; observe how many crucibles are ad¬ 
 justed for your mixture; allow the test, and see how little 
 “gold” will be eliminated after the standard, “By their 
 ftnits ye shall know them.” Decide for yourself if the 
 “world” are “strangers” to the “true religion.” Mark 
 you how its very simplest formulas are as familiar to the 
 man of “stocks” or of letters as the blanks of his bank 
 account, or the theorems of his special science. Whence 
 comes this knowledge ? 
 
 Again follow me: We have passed the massive gate¬ 
 way—the long corridor, the iron bars. We stand alone 
 with the prisoner; his eyes meet yours furtively, as 
 though he read, “Holier than I.” Question him con¬ 
 cerning his crime. He answers stolidly; parries every 
 effort to probe his conscience. Speak to him of the great 
 future, the final tribunal. He sits in grim silence or 
 answers nervously. Speak to him of his boyhood—a 
 ray from the sun setting bursts up the horizon of his 
 thought, blazes along the night of years. By its light he 
 is traveling swiftly back. Ah ! me, he is a child again; 
 
24 
 
 Heathen at Home: Argument. 
 
 innocence lives. Break in upon his dreams with the 
 whispered word, “mother.” The child bursts into tears; 
 the criminal bows his head upon his crimson hands and 
 groans audibly. The great deep of his soul surges to and 
 fro. Speak softly now to him of our “Father who art in 
 heaven.” Memory dashes past the walls of his narrow 
 cell. He kneels again in an upper chamber at his 
 mother’s knee, and repeats the unforgotten prayer, “Now 
 I lay me down to sleep.” Ha! his lips move. Drop 
 silently beside him, caviler; blend your petition with 
 his; he knows the way to the throne. Come away, leave 
 him with his God, he is no “stranger” to the “true 
 religion.” 
 
 Out again into the pure air; there’s inspiration in it. 
 “Surely this is God’s country.” Not so hasty your 
 decision, my friend. We will pass these stately mansions, 
 massive churches, educational institutions, asylums of be¬ 
 nevolence, whose many turrets are so many fingers index¬ 
 ing the royal road of Christian civilization. Enter this 
 narrow way, no trace of Christ is here, for the Scriptural 
 declaration is inverted, “and many there be who go in 
 thereat.” But let us follow. The sunlight recedes; these 
 tumbling walls frown upon us. The very waifs at our 
 feet hurl blasphemies. The air is murky with the vapors 
 of sin—seething in caldrons beneath our feet. Cling 
 close to me, ascend this broken staircase. There, breathe. 
 The landing will support you, it is trod by heavier feet. 
 Venture again up another, darker and narrower. Does 
 your courage fail ? Weaker hands have felt along this 
 passage-way. There, we have touched the latch. 
 
 Is it the soughing of the wind? the lone sentinel in this 
 place of woe? Verily it is a voice, “Come;” not as of 
 the living, yet the dead speak not. Crouch low as we 
 enter, lest the walls strike at you; move toward the pallet. 
 
Heathen at Home : Argument. 
 
 25 
 
 “Mary, are you still here?” 
 
 “Oh, yes; is it you come again? I thought it was 
 the angel. Last night he came. My babe had moaned so 
 long for the nourishment which was not,—I cried, ‘Jesus, 
 send food.’ My vision came—light, with a presence. He 
 took my babe. He sang to me. Was it the harpsichord 
 of heaven, think you? He sang: ‘They shall hunger no 
 more, neither thirst any more; for the Lamb which was 
 in the midst of the throne shall feed them.’ My babe is 
 quiet now, fed by the angel.” 
 
 Turn back the sheet, O caviller. Look once upon 
 the still face. Leave it with the angel. The angry touch 
 of a drunken father can not jostle it from the new embrace. 
 ’T is safe. But, “Mary, Mary, is the way clear?” 
 
 “Clear? Ah, sir, it is a shining track. The chariots 
 and the horsemen are many; and ‘ I saw a new Jerusalem 
 coming down from God out of heaven as a bride adorned 
 for her husband, and I heard a great voice out of heaven, 
 saying, And God shall wipe away all tears from their 
 eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, 
 nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the 
 former things are passed away.’ Tell him, when the 
 liquor is off, there is forgiveness with Jesus. I will wait 
 for him at the beautiful gate.” 
 
 My friend, the sun is low; we may not travel farther. 
 But think you crumbling walls can shut out the true 
 religion? The very air which steals through broken 
 panes to cool the fever-scorched cheek bears on its bosom 
 the moan of Calvary. The soul of the sufferer catches 
 the cadence, and believes “He died for me.” Go where 
 we will, read the heart’s secret of whomsoever we may, 
 in dungeon, arena, plain, or wilderness, ’t is a name 
 written on the soul’s inner tablet,—“ Rabboni.” Heap 
 
 3 
 
26 
 
 Heathen at Home: Argument. 
 
 gold never so high above it, fancy it buried from sight 
 forever. Touch the pile, the gold crumbles, the inscrip¬ 
 tion remains. Poverty and tears only heighten its outline. 
 
 Oh, exalted privilege to be an American citizen 1 For 
 as well might one strive to chain the lone sunbeam which 
 strays in pity across Pain’s pillow as bind the message 
 which floats to us from the Judean hills. The echo of a 
 far-away footstep, of One who himself trod alone the 
 vales of sorrow, may be heard to-day at couch or stone- 
 bed of sufferer or criminal who bids it. Oh, beautiful 
 home-land! no adventurer can wander so far, or climb 
 so high the mountain summits, but in the canon’s awful 
 silence he may walk with the Lord in the cool of the 
 day. Within thy sheltering fold no mother need watch 
 alone her dying child. The fire may burn low in the 
 grate; the hand which was altar-pledged may have slipped 
 from hers to link itself to crime; the light of the lamp 
 refuse longer to show the fever flash or the lips’ pallor; 
 no physician may be near,—but, ah 1 amid the darkness, 
 the chill, the anguish, she talks with the Great Healer. 
 Lo, at the gray dawn of morning the fever has crept 
 away; an invisible ministry has been hers. 
 
 In all thy border-lands, O exalted America, if one die 
 of cold or hunger upon the Plains, in the very fury of 
 the storm which congeals him will he hear a whisper of 
 the land beyond 
 
 “The frost-chain and the fever.” 
 
 From the rifted clouds will drop a hand to lift him to the 
 Summer-house of heaven. 
 
 No “Schiller” pushing from thy shores can bear her 
 living cargo so far out to sea, or sink them so deep, but 
 beneath the waves their stiffening fingers may find a cross 
 which shall become to them a barge, and on it they may 
 
Heathen at Home: Argument. 27 
 
 float outward and onward, and into the celestial harbor. 
 Oh, blessed land of the leal! To be a citizen within 
 thy borders is greater than a king! 
 
 It may be claimed that missionary work distinctively 
 “foreign” is urgently demanded among the representa¬ 
 tives of other nations, who crowd our western coast and 
 south-western territories. Our answer is, These fields are 
 being occupied, through the various enterprises of the 
 Church, as rapidly as the benevolence of the Church will 
 warrant. The fact still remains, if one perish upon 
 American soil or in American waters without Christ, it is 
 because he will. Nor is this universal religious atmos¬ 
 phere purely American. It is common to all lands 
 dominantly Christian. 
 
 A striking confirmation of our position is furnished in 
 the following extract from a speech given by that prince 
 of orators, John B. Gough, at the Chautauqua Assembly. 
 The speech was reported for the November number 
 of the Lucknow (India) Witness , a copy of which, for¬ 
 warded to the writer by brother F. M. Wheeler, of the 
 India Conference, was received in January (the land of 
 our labors can not be so very far from home): 
 
 “In the borough of Dundee, in Scotland, the Right 
 Honorable Lord Kinnaird and his lady, who were real 
 philanthropists, asked me if I would address an audience 
 of outcasts, and I said, ‘ If you can get me such an 
 audience I will speak to them.’ They said: ‘Oh, we 
 will get you such an audience. The town missionaries 
 will bring in such an audience if you will give us a 
 night.’ We named Saturday night. On that Saturday 
 night I faced an audience of eight hundred men and 
 women. You never saw an audience of outcasts, in rags 
 and filth, and it seemed as if the last lingering trace of 
 
28 
 
 Heathen at Home: Argument. 
 
 human beauty had been dashed out by the hoof of de¬ 
 bauchery; the image of God wiped out, with the die of 
 Satan stamped in its place. It is an awful sight to see 
 eight hundred men and women in such a degraded con¬ 
 dition, mentally and physically. When we came in, the 
 Rev. Alexander Hanna, who came in with George Ruff, 
 the provost of the borough, said to me, ‘You have fire in 
 the house to-night.* Said I, ‘What do you mean?’ Said 
 he, ‘ Do you see that tall woman seated by the platform?’ 
 I said, ‘Yes.’ Said he: ‘Her name is “Hell-fire.” She 
 is known by no other name in the vicinity of her resi¬ 
 dence. She is the most abandoned woman in the city 
 of Dundee. Fifty-six times she has been arrested, and 
 there is no policeman on the force can take her. She is 
 a strong, muscular woman, and hits right and left; and 
 sometimes it will take three men to drag her before me, 
 with the blood streaming down her face; and the power 
 of her tongue in blasphemy is so awful that men who can 
 stand almost any amount of it will run away. Now, if 
 she is in humor, you will see such a row to-night as you 
 never saw before in your life. If she is come ripe for 
 mischief, you will see something of a row.’ I expected a 
 row, and I did not like it; and as I saw the countenances 
 of these men and women I expected trouble. So I began 
 to talk to them easily and pleasantly; told them what I 
 believed God meant they should be, what I believed they 
 were, what I believed they might be. As I went on 
 talking, not as to brutes nor things nor beasts, I saw a 
 naked arm and hand raise, and somebody cried out, ‘ O 
 my God, man, that is all true!’ The woman got on her 
 feet; she waved her naked arm and hand to the audience, 
 and she said it was all true—every word of it was true. 
 When I sat down she got on the platform. I did not 
 know but she was going to tackle me. I did not like 
 
Heathen at Home: Argument. 29 
 
 the looks of the woman. I do not like to come in con¬ 
 tact with such strong-minded women, I assure you, and 
 she looked at me with her hands on her hips. ‘Well, 
 take a good look at me, man, I am a bit of a beauty, 
 arn’t I?’ And as she stepped forward, I stepped back. 
 I did not like it. She said, ‘Take a good look at me,’ 
 and I do not know as I ever came face to face with a 
 more brazen-faced woman in my life. Presently she made 
 one swift step, and came so near me that her breath 
 was all in my face, hot, reeking with strong drink. Said 
 she : ‘Would you give a body like me the pledge?’ ‘Yes, 
 ma’am.’ One of these very,prudent men came up to me 
 and said: ‘Don’t; no, no, no, don’t give her the pledge.’ 
 ‘Why?’ ‘She won’t keep it.’ ‘How do you know?’ 
 ‘She can’t keep it.’ ‘How do you know?’ ‘Why, she 
 is fooling you; she will be drunk before she goes to bed.’ 
 I said, ‘ Madam, here is a gentleman who says if you 
 sign that pledge you can not keep it.’ ‘I can’t keep it! 
 show me the man!’ [Laughter.] ‘Ah, but,’ said I, 
 ‘Madam, can you keep it?’ ‘Can I keep it? If I will, 
 I can.’ ‘Say you will, then.’ ‘I will.’ ‘Give me your 
 hand.’ She put her burning hand in mine. ‘Sign the 
 pledge.’ She signed it. It looked like dipping a fly in the 
 ink and setting it to run across the paper. Said I, ‘Give 
 me your hand again; you will keep it?” ‘ I will,’ she said. 
 ‘I will come and see you before I go back to America.’ 
 ‘Come and see me when you will, I will keep it.’” 
 
 “Some years after, in Dundee, before I went to 
 America, I saw the woman, and I was introduced to her 
 as Mrs. Archer, no longer ‘ Hell-fire.’ I went to her house. 
 Part of what she told me was this, and I wish I could 
 tell you what she told me. ‘Ah, Mr. Gough, I am a 
 poor, ignorant body; what little I have known has been 
 knocked out of me by the staves of the policemen, and 
 
 . 
 
 j 
 
3 ° 
 
 Heathen at Home: Argument. 
 
 they beat me about the head and have knocked pretty 
 much all the sense out of me. But sometimes I have a 
 dream, and I dream I am drunk, and I dream that the 
 policemen have got me again, and I dream I am fighting, 
 and then I get out of my bed, sir, and I go down on my 
 knees, and I never go back to my bed again until the day¬ 
 light comes, and I keep saying, ‘God keep me. I can’t 
 get drunk any more.’ Her daughter said to me, ‘I have 
 seen my mother at the dead of night, in the bitter Winter 
 weather, on the bare floor crying, ‘God keep me,’ and I 
 said, ‘Mother, come to your bed;” and she said, ‘No, I 
 have had a dream, and I can’t get drunk any more.’ 
 That woman is seen at all times, in all kinds of weather, 
 going to the house of God. George Ruff, the provost of 
 the borough, sent to me a photograph in a letter, in 
 which he said she had kept the pledge for eighteen years. 
 [Applause.] She has become a godly woman, and all her 
 spare time is expended in rescuing abandoned women. 
 She has gone down to the depths to bring them up. She 
 has taken young girls out of the streets, kept them in 
 her own little room for a week to save them from tempta¬ 
 tion. Now, my friends, total abstinence could not make 
 that woman a Christian; total abstinence removed the 
 hinderance to her hearing the truth, which must be heard 
 to be believed, and must be believed to affect the life. 
 When Jesus went to the tomb of Lazarus there was a 
 stone by the mouth of the tomb. He could have, removed 
 it if he saw fit, but he used human agency. They took 
 away the stone. They rolled it away. Jesus spoke, and 
 Lazarus came forth.’* 
 
 These are stirring facts, but their name is legion. 
 
 We turn to the consideration of the implied charge 
 in the statement, “Heathen enough at home,” to-wit: 
 That admitting the general prevalence of religious truth, 
 
Heathen at Home: Argument. 
 
 3 X 
 
 the agencies employed to lead men to accept the truth 
 should be multiplied, and, until this end is accomplished, 
 we should export neither sympathy nor money. 
 
 This argument can have validity only with the super¬ 
 ficial thinker; a careful examination of the records of 
 religious benevolence throughout this land will satisfy a 
 receptive mind. Figures are more convincing than fan¬ 
 cies. Without attempting to collate general statistics we 
 will give the “home” facts: 
 
 The site of the present city of Lincoln, Nebraska, 
 twelve years ago was a treeless, trackless plain. With a 
 population of seven thousand we now have fourteen evan¬ 
 gelical Church organizations, as many Sabbath-schools 
 and weekly prayer-meetings, supplemented every year by 
 weeks or months of special Church service to persuade 
 men to accept salvation. 
 
 In the interests of education we have a thorough 
 public-school system and a State University of high grade. 
 
 For city missionary work, the Young People’s Chris¬ 
 tian Association; the Ladies’ and Pastors’ Christian Union 
 in the Methodist Episcopal Church, and a similar society, 
 with diverse titles, in each of the city churches. 
 
 Added to these: The City Aid Society, one Odd-fel¬ 
 low, one Knights of Pythias, and three Masonic orders, 
 whose care for the stranger and the dying is noteworthy. 
 
 For the rescue of lost women, “The Female Guardian 
 Society.” 
 
 The temperance work has representation in the follow¬ 
 ing societies, organized to teach civilized (?) men it is 
 barbarous to dig their own graves with their own hands, 
 and that aforetime: One Good Templar Organization, 
 one Sons of Temperance, two Juvenile Temperance Or¬ 
 ganizations, one Temple of Honor, one Red ribbon Club, 
 one Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. 
 
32 
 
 Heathen at Home : Argument. 
 
 For the demented and the criminal our State Lunatic 
 Asylum and Penitentiary. 
 
 For exclusive foreign missionary work we have one 
 auxiliary. 
 
 With the above corps of workers we have nearly or 
 quite a personal attendant upon every man, woman, and 
 child who needs physical or spiritual counsel. To mul¬ 
 tiply agencies would be simply to increase the machinery 
 without adding motive power. 
 
 We are upon the plains. Since the formative periods 
 of society are least fortunate for Christian enterprise, our 
 summarizing does not indicate the maturity of effort 
 common to older cities. The fact is easily established, 
 that as we approach the metropolis, the ratio of agencies 
 or workers is as the increase of population. Before 
 such philosophy of fact, O caviler, be silent. Verily, if 
 this nation perish without Christ, well may the Judge say 
 of her at the last assize, “ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, 
 which killest the prophets, and stonest them that are sent 
 unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children 
 together, as a hen doth gather her brood under her 
 wings, and ye would not. Behold your house is left unto 
 you desolate.” 
 
 k 
 
Part III. 
 
 ftcatl|ci] adi'o^ tl\e 
 
 "2U in tontcr fact anjofocrtllj to inti, so tfje ijtnrt of man to man.” 
 
 ♦ 
 
 S we enter upon this chapter, dear reader, 
 suffer us to solicit your soul thought, divested 
 of the prejudice into which you may have 
 
 CT been unconsciously snared. We have been to the 
 M. dear Father about it. We have asked that the 
 ,1 M breath of the Spirit hallow these pages, that the 
 
 " trembling, skilless hand which traces these lines 
 
 o may be moved by the impulse of that Great 
 
 O Heart which gave forth “water and blood” for 
 
 the world's healing. We have asked for you, O 
 
 reader, that the blindness which comes from the 
 very glare of otir sunny lives might be turned lo 
 sight in the mellow twilight which steals upon us 
 when Jesus of Nazareth passeth by. If you have heard 
 his footstep, if his unseen touch hath healed the hurt of 
 your own heart, in memory thereof, listen well if in the 
 tale which follows you hear not the undertone of the 
 Spirit, “Do this in remembrance of me.” 
 
34 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 / 
 
 To give even the briefest synopsis of the burning 
 terror of the word “Heathen,” in its unlimited foreign 
 sense, is beyond the scope of these pages. Its analysis 
 has filled many volumes, and the half has not been told. 
 A judicious selection from known authors will serve only 
 to give the faintest outline of the dark colors which 
 master hands have painted. But we trust hereby to 
 stimulate such as have been too busy with home scenes 
 to examine this foreign canvas, to look at least upon the 
 cross-pinioned Sufferer in the foreground, whose reproach¬ 
 ful eyes, heavy with the thorn-crown’s weight, say unto us, 
 “ Inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the least of these , 
 ye did it not unto me.” 
 
 Let us return to the general definition of the word 
 “Heathen,” “one who worships idols,” etc. 
 
 All history establishes the fact that idol worship, in its 
 literal sense, in one or more of its multiform phases, is 
 universal throughout the Orient. The homes of the 
 people are crowded with miniature images of the larger 
 deities of the temples. 
 
 Confucianism, the classic faith of the Chinese, does 
 not strictly involve idol worship. It is rather a code of 
 morals, limiting its chief concern to time. Its cardinal 
 tenet is the worship of Confucius,—as a sequence, ances¬ 
 tral worship. Later, the system deteriorated until the 
 earth, its elements, the solar system, and other objects, 
 received the adoration of even his literary followers. 
 Tauism and Buddhism have “multiplied the gods of 
 China until they have run up to thirty thousand.” The 
 “god-makers advertise their wares as the potters do >heir 
 pitchers.” 
 
 Mohammedanism, originally claiming to be the “pro¬ 
 test of the prophet against idolatry,” with the Koran as 
 a supplement to the Gospel of Christ, is a virtual substi- 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 35 
 
 tution of Mohammed as the Savior of men. Its observ¬ 
 ance by one hundred and eighty millions of people is a 
 round of penances and prayers whereby the devotee 
 works out his own salvation. 
 
 Brahminism and Buddhism, the great idol faiths of 
 India, have respectively three hundred and one hundred 
 and fifty millions of adherents. The objects of worship 
 in the two systems are so varied the gods of the country 
 are more numerous than the men. One can not travel a 
 public thoroughfare but he is constantly shocked with 
 odious objects of worship. 
 
 “The deities of Hindooism,” said Bishop Thomson, 
 “are worshiped in shapes in which they are supposed to 
 have become incarnate. The popular theology is founded 
 upon the Code of Menu and the Puranas. The latter, 
 eighteen in number, are a collection of legends concern¬ 
 ing the gods, who marry, quarrel, sin, suffer, and are 
 thirty millions strong.” 
 
 The permanence of idol worship in all its horrid 
 features is secured by the priesthood. They are the un¬ 
 faltering conservators and executors of all the unnatural 
 and legendary laws of their sacred writings. The rite of 
 suttee is authorized by the Puranas, which say, “She is 
 alone loyal and pure who burns herself with her hus¬ 
 band’s corpse.” Its element of perpetuity resides in the 
 Brahmin priesthood, who officiate at the appalling cere¬ 
 mony, and are the recipients of the fortune and jewels 
 of the immolated widow. 
 
 Infanticide gathers its prestige from the “infernal 
 association ” known as Thuggism. The goddess Kalee, 
 whose “appetite for blood is delighted for a thousand 
 years by a human sacrifice,” is the patroness of the 
 Thugs. “So popular is the worship of Kalee,” says Dr. 
 Butler, “that even the English Government can not keep 
 
3^ 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 the public offices open during the term of ‘ Durga-Poojah,’ 
 holidays from the first to the thirteenth of October, for 
 all Calcutta then runs mad upon this idolatry. I have 
 seen her image, larger than the human form, painted 
 blue, with her tongue represented as dripping with gore 
 upon her chin, her bosom covered with a necklace of 
 human skulls, and her many arms each bearing a mur¬ 
 derous weapon, carried in proud procession through the 
 streets of Calcutta during these holidays, accompanied by 
 bands of music and tens of thousands of frantic followers.” 
 “These professional murderers (Thugs), when their victim 
 is in the agonies of strangulation beneath their knees on 
 the ground, are engaging in acts of prayer, offering to 
 Ivalee the life that is passing away. And to this abomi¬ 
 nation, thus said to feed on the human soul, have the 
 mothers of India for ages immolated their daughters.” 
 
 The fakirs, another class of Hindoo priests, instituted 
 and keep up the great annual Melas of India, at which 
 they enact barbarities the most loathsome and horrible. 
 Bishop Kingsley described one of these Melas which he 
 attended, where were present eight hundred thousand 
 people, and thirty-nine thousand of these priests. Here 
 the priests “made their annual collections and performed 
 their feats.” “The more outlandish they behave, the 
 more unlike other human beings they can act or look, 
 the greater is their power over the masses. . . . All 
 
 these miserable creatures, as far as I saw them, went 
 naked, with the single exception of the rag alluded to, 
 which they laid aside on extraordinary occasions. Their 
 bodies were daubed all over with mud of different colors; 
 some yellow, some a whitish clay, some blue, or whatever 
 shade would seem to give them the most filthy and hid¬ 
 eous appearance. Their hair, which they never comb, 
 and which is full of vermin, they stick together with dis- 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 37 
 
 gusting compounds, which give it a wholly unnatural 
 color, as well as a most loathsome aspect. They eat, as 
 a proof of extraordinary sanctity, the most disgusting ma¬ 
 terials it is possible to conceive, but not decent to relate. 
 They lie about naked and look for hours together at the 
 sun.” After describing various modes of self-torture the 
 writer adds: “When these wretched devotees have per¬ 
 formed all that I have described, and yet worse things 
 that I dare not name, the deluded Hindoos will then do 
 any thing they tell them, esteeming it an infinite privilege 
 to drink the water in which they have washed their 
 filthy feet ” 
 
 These loathsome vagabonds are the only men, aside 
 from the husband, brother, or father, who have access to 
 the homes of India. Their prerogative is to capture inno¬ 
 cence under the guise of sanctity. One’s better nature 
 revolts at thought of giving to the general reader all the 
 terrible import of the Eastern word, “heathen.” 
 
 We clip from the Central Advocate, just at hand, the 
 following item from the pen of B. H. Badley, of our 
 India mission, which indicates some of the softer features 
 of idol worship: 
 
 “A famine relief officer in South India has thought fit 
 to favor the public with the following pen-sketch : 
 
 “‘On the edge of a lake stood a stone temple, the 
 relic of a bygone superstition with its shafts and columns 
 scriptured with gods and goddesses, and here at the foot 
 of the steps lay three ghastly human shapes—a man, 
 woman, and child stone dead, with their shriveled limbs, 
 sunken eyes, and protruding ribs telling of the sufferings 
 they had undergone, before death had given them a 
 happy release from pain. Here they had come, proba¬ 
 bly from a distance, to beg for aid from their gods when 
 all earthly help had failed them—sublime, but unavailing 
 
3^ 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 faith—glorious, but childishly simple belief! And the 
 rigid hand of the man still clutched a paper in which was 
 wrapped some red lead with which he had probably 
 intended to touch up his deity as a propitiatory prelude 
 to his prayers. What a ghastly mockery of religion it 
 seemed! There was the hideous image to which the 
 sculptor had given a stony stare, and a sickly grin daubed 
 over with red, and there at its feet three dusky human 
 corpses, three grinning skulls, a whole family now a fes¬ 
 tering mass of putrefaction, already the prey of the earth¬ 
 worm, the vulture, and all Death’s ghastly crew.’ 
 
 “To the above picture we would add a series of pic¬ 
 tures representing the man and woman as year by year 
 rendering thanks to this hideous idol for the bounties of 
 providence, and for preservation from innumerable dan¬ 
 gers and evils, during all the days of their lives; ascrib¬ 
 ing the honor of all to the wretched caricature of deity 
 represented by the idol; and sedulously teaching their 
 little one to worship it .—Bombay Guardian. 
 
 “To us the very saddest thought in connection with 
 this great India famine (now, thank God, so nearly at an 
 end) is that the thousands who are daily perishing from 
 hunger are going Christless to the grave. How many 
 groups like the one above described have made their way 
 to the accustomed place of worship to find there only a 
 grave : how many others have perished on the way lifting 
 up unavailing hands and sending forth pitiful cries to 
 their various deities! Along many a roadside and under 
 many a shady palm-tree they have fallen, unable to go 
 further, and with ‘ Ram—Ram !’ upon their parched lips 
 have ended their earthly probation. No sweet promises 
 of eternal blessedness, no comforting words of a loving 
 Savior sounding in their hearts; no pleasing visions of a 
 glorious inheritance reserved in heaven for them; no 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 39 
 
 bright anticipations of a hearty welcome home on the 
 further side of the river of death; no songs, no cheer, no 
 hope—but silence, darkness, death !” 
 
 Heathen birth to woman is itself a curse, which the 
 Mohammedans express in the following proverb: “The 
 threshold weeps forty days when a girl is born.” 
 
 Rev. Ross C. Houghton, in his recent work, “Women 
 of the Orient,” says: “ A Hindoo father often waits in an 
 agony of suspense the birth of a child, until the announce¬ 
 ment of sex is made, and an utter desolation of soul has 
 come upon him when he has heard the words, ‘It is a 
 girl.’” This author describes the preparation for child¬ 
 birth as follows: “In all Hindoo families in easy or 
 affluent circumstances, a room is set apart for the birth- 
 chamber. This is quite generally a small shed, used for 
 stabling the family cow, and the floor is raised a step or 
 two above the ground. . . . When a woman takes 
 
 possession of these quarters a mat is stretched across to 
 separate her from the cow, and a bed is prepared by 
 spreading a mat upon the well-swept cement floor. Even 
 in high caste and wealthy families every child must be born 
 in this place; and there mother and child must remain 
 until the child is twenty-eight days old. ... In the 
 mean time no person of the same or higher caste must 
 touch the mother, not even her own nearest relations. 
 No matter how sick she may be, or how she may suffer, 
 no kind hand is permitted to stroke her throbbing tem¬ 
 ples or perform any little offices of affection for her. Her 
 food, and all she may need, is brought to her by some 
 poor coolie woman employed for the purpose. If the 
 child is a girl, or dies in a few days, it is hardly thought 
 worth while to provide even this one attendant, and food 
 is brought to the polluted mother upon a plaintain leaf 
 (which can afterwards be thrown away as defiled) and laid 
 
40 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 within reach by some member of the household. All the 
 time a fire of charcoal or buffalo-dung is kept burning in 
 the shed, no matter how hot the weather is. Of course, 
 poor women of the lower castes do not receive any such 
 attentions as these.” 
 
 The second act in the tragedy is the disposition of the 
 child. If sons have already been born in the family, 
 if the child be needed for manual service, or there be 
 prospect of propitious marriage, the girl may be permit¬ 
 ted to live. Once again listen, O ye happy American 
 women, whose early hours of motherhood are filled with 
 blissful dreams of the prophetic future of the sweet baby 
 girl whom you are sure to take back to paradise with you : 
 “Men and women whose business it is to recruit the 
 dens of licentiousness which abound in every city, are 
 always on the watch to purchase infants whose parents are 
 willing to sell.” To this darkest of all crimes their lives 
 are committed by the voluntary act of the parents. If 
 the verdict of death be passed upon the child, the modes 
 are various. “In India,” says the author just quoted, 
 “a skillful pressure on the neck or a small pill of opium 
 will quietly accomplish the purpose. Often a strong piece 
 of cloth is bound tightly around the chest so that the 
 lungs are unable to perform their function.” To be 
 buried alive “ is a method quite likely to insure the birth 
 of a son on the next occasion.” In China the child is 
 often thrown out by the highway-side, where it quickly 
 falls a prey to cold or starvation or dogs.” Another and 
 most common method is by drowning in a tub of water. 
 “Sometimes the murderer does not even take the trouble 
 to see that there is sufficient water to quickly end the 
 tragedy, but casts the innocent babe into a tub in which 
 there is so little water that its death struggles are pro¬ 
 longed for hours.” 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 41 
 
 Life to the unfortunate child, in the most fortunate 
 circumstances, is a prolonged agony; marriage its ultima¬ 
 tum. The first duty of the parents is to arrange the 
 betrothal—the earlier, the more propitious. To annul the 
 contract is impossible. The legitimate age for its con¬ 
 summation is indicated by the Hindoo law, which holds a 
 father guilty of a crime equal to that of murder for 
 every month he suffers the daughter to remain single 
 after eleven years of age. If at that age he has failed to 
 find a husband, she is then given in marriage to a temple 
 idol; takes up her residence in the temple, subject by 
 law to the caprice of the daily worshiper. 
 
 O my Christian sisters, who have suffered yourselves 
 to be beguiled into the assertion, “We have heathen 
 enough at home,” by all the unutterable love you bear 
 the innocent baby-girl who has flitted into your home as 
 a stray bird of paradise, to whose song you are to give 
 the cadence which shall trill through eternity, let me en¬ 
 treat you, never, never throw dishonor upon your exalted 
 home land or life by its repetition. 
 
 To return. Under this marriage regime , education is 
 impossible. There is no childhood in which to be taught. 
 In China, where nuptials are later celebrated, the inter¬ 
 vening years are utilized in the cruel torture of foot¬ 
 binding. In aristocratic circles two and one-half inches 
 is the prescribed length of a foot which entitles woman 
 to the claim of respectability. Among the poorer classes 
 this is a bridge over the chasm of caste unknown in 
 India. If a poor man can afford to support his daughter 
 through the years of suffering and helplessness essential to 
 such reduction of the foot, she thereby becomes eligible 
 to marriage in affluent castes. 
 
 The universal law that ignorance is the only conserva¬ 
 tor of servitude is thoroughly grafted into the Hindoo 
 
 4 
 
42 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 mind. The prevalent sentiment is expressed in the reply 
 of an intelligent Hindoo, when the general education of 
 women was urged upon him: “It certainly would be 
 impossible for Hindoos to keep their wives in subjection 
 if they were educated. Our women are not like yours. 
 If educated they would be refractory, and would no 
 longer carry burdens and collect cow’s dung for fuel.” 
 This reply indicates some of the channels of toil for the 
 women of the lower classes, the only class who are ex¬ 
 empt from the life-long seclusion of the zenanas. Said 
 Mrs. Hauser, in her admirable work, “The Orient and 
 its People: “When a piece of ground is to be leveled, 
 or it is necessary to convey earth from one place to an¬ 
 other, women are employed. They will carry dirt all 
 day, in baskets on their heads, for three cents. 
 
 Every morning numbers of women may be seen along 
 the roads, in the fields, gathering all the manure they can 
 find. If a woman is the happy possessor of a donkey or 
 two, the donkey carries the load; if not, the woman car¬ 
 ries the manure in a round, shallow basket on her head. 
 When she reaches home she works the mass well over 
 with her hands, making it into cakes such as she can 
 easily grasp with her hand, and with one sharp pat sticks 
 them one by one on the side of her house, leaving the 
 prints of her fingers on each cake. In a few days the 
 sun and heat have dried the cakes, and then the woman 
 stacks them up for sale or home consumption. For one 
 hundred and sixty pounds of this fuel, which has cost a 
 month’s hard work, they realize the sum of fifty cents.” 
 
 “The women of the second class,” or wives of the 
 trades-people, “are allowed on one morning in the latter 
 part of June to go to bathe in the river, as they believe, 
 to wash away their sin.” Some of them go in covered 
 vehicles to the great religious fairs held on the banks of 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 43 
 
 the Ganges in Autumn. But “ thousands and thousands 
 of these women, though they may live within half a mile 
 of green fields and rare gardens for months and years, 
 do not see more than an occasional tree in a court-yard.” 
 
 In the third caste it is the highest eulogy to say of 
 woman, “She has never seen the face of any man but 
 that of her husband.” A missionary who had spent 
 many years in India said that he “knew of women who 
 had not been outside of their houses for fifty years.” 
 
 To give even an intelligent outline of zenana life is 
 a difficult task. In Indian literature there is no such 
 word as home. In domestic circles there is nothing sug¬ 
 gestive of home in a Christian sense. No wife sits at the 
 table with her husband. He would be polluted were she 
 to dine in the same room. Her highest prerogative is to 
 learn what food is permissible in his given caste, and how 
 to cook it, to dress in jewels and gay clothing, and pro¬ 
 tect her lord from the flies and musquitoes while he eats; 
 then steal away like a guilty creature, and eat with the 
 children. 
 
 Without attempting to disclose the secret wounds of 
 the zenana wife, which have long since passed into the 
 gangrene state, we will quote Dr. Butler’s translation of 
 the “Shaster,” as a general index to the brighter features 
 of domestic life: 
 
 “If a man goes on a journey, his wife shall not divert 
 herself by play, nor shall laugh, nor shall dress herself 
 in jewels or fine clothes, nor hear music, nor shall sit 
 at the window, but shall fasten well the house-door, and 
 remain private; and shall not eat any dainty food, and 
 shall not blacken eyes with powder, and shall not view 
 her face in a mirror. She shall never amuse herself in 
 any such agreeable employment in the absence of her 
 husband.” 
 
44 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 “When in the presence of her husband, a woman 
 must keep her eyes upon her master, and be ready to 
 receive his commands. When he speaks she must be quiet, 
 and listen to nothing else besides. When he calls she 
 must leave every thing else, and attend upon him alone.” 
 
 “A woman has no other god upon earth but her hus¬ 
 band. The. most excellent of good works that she can 
 perform is to gratify him in the strictest obedience. 
 Though he be aged, infirm, dissipated, a drunkard, or a 
 debauchee, she must still regard him as her god. She 
 must serve him with all her might, spying no defects in 
 his character, and giving him no cause for disquiet. If 
 he laughs, she must also laugh; if he weeps, she must 
 also weep; if he sings, she must be in ecstasy.” 
 
 (It is just possible that this latter “heathen” supersti¬ 
 tion may overthrow our whole argument.) 
 
 Hindoo law seems to expend its fury upon woman in 
 her hours of physical suffering, hours when Christian 
 woman is the recipient of the most tender sympathy lov¬ 
 ing friends can bestow, hours when she learns lessons the 
 deepest, purest, the Holy Spirit ever writes upon human 
 hearts. If mother or daughter be ill, no male physician 
 may be permitted to diagnose her case. If he prescribe 
 at all, it is after the bungling statement of symptoms 
 given by the husband. With no personal knowledge of 
 disease or remedy, the sufferer resorts to charms and 
 incantations for the removal of the malady. The paws 
 of lions, the bones of tigers, pieces of human flesh, com¬ 
 pounds the most disgusting or expensive are usual as 
 remedies. 
 
 The finger nails of the high-caste Chinese women are 
 permitted to grow to enormous length. If by accident 
 these are broken off, they are then pulverized and bring 
 their weight in gold. 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 45 
 
 If death approach, the victim is hurried away on 
 stretchers or in carts without springs, through the burning 
 sun, often at a varying temperature from 140° to 160°, 
 many miles to the sacred rivers. Instead of loving hands 
 to soothe the throbbing temples of pain, still alive, she is 
 pushed off into the river by her eldest son, who fills 
 her mouth and nostrils with mud, and commits her to 
 the vultures and alligators. If, by any chance, she sur¬ 
 vive, her caste is broken, the god of the river has dis¬ 
 carded her, her friends will not receive her, she is an 
 outcast. 
 
 Mothers of America, whose high privilege it is to 
 mold the sons of this republic into pillars of strength and 
 beauty for the royal archway of the nations through which 
 you and the generations to follow may pass upward to 
 the throne-room of King Immanuel, have you no min¬ 
 istry of deeds to such mothers, to such sons ? When 
 you approach into the Presence to ask for blessing upon 
 your own, can you hope the golden scepter will be 
 extended if you have done it not unto such as these ? 
 
 It were well if here we could draw the napkin over 
 the silent lips of the heathen wife, and leave her with 
 God. But oh, cruel faith, she must return to live again 
 upon the earth, in the form of insect, beast, bird, or 
 serpent, through repeated transmigrations for many thou¬ 
 sand years, the grade of animal which receives her spirit 
 being determined by the degree of obedience to the hus¬ 
 band during life. 
 
 At this point of woman’s history we see the first 
 genuine token of a husband’s affection. Not infrequently 
 men are found keeping with great care and expense the 
 hog or baboon which has become the earth tenement of 
 the departed wife. Among certain tribes it is customary 
 for friends of the dying woman to see that a hog be 
 
46 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 driven as near the chamber of death as possible, that the 
 dark journey be shortened, and the skull of the gasping 
 victim is cracked to let the spirit out. 
 
 Add to this picture the many frightful ills which caste, 
 polygamy, polyandria, and all forms of social vice entail 
 upon women—subjects which space forbids us to touch 
 upon, ills often so revolting the missionaries scarcely dare 
 whisper them each to the other, and we have a very 
 vague conception of the term “heathen” as applied to 
 the women of the East. 
 
 Of widowhood we have refrained to speak. It is a 
 cancer upon Oriental society, whose probing would give 
 forth virus. So much to be dreaded by those who have 
 been nurtured in sorrow, that millions of women refuse to 
 learn to read, because of the popular superstition if they 
 do so, they will become widows. Hundreds of monu¬ 
 ments erected to the memory of Suttee women testify to 
 the fact that multitudes have chosen the shorter agony of 
 slowly roasting upon the funeral pile of the deceased 
 husband, to the prolonged torture of widowhood. To 
 this has been added the incentive urged in the shasters, 
 of purifying the family sins for three generations, and 
 snatching him who has been her tormentor from the Hell 
 he so richly deserves. 
 
 We turn from the sad scene, of which we have had 
 only a surface glance. . . . Shall we withdraw to the 
 
 sanctity and safety of our Christian homes, where wife 
 and children are the jewels men wear upon their bosoms; 
 open the shutters, woo the sunbeam and the jewels 
 flash? The night draws on apace. In the distance a 
 muffled footstep. It nears your threshold— mine , dear 
 reader. We shall go to our rest in possession of our 
 treasures; we shall awaken to find them clay. We shall 
 be startled from our reverie by the echoing tread of this 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 47 
 
 bearded monster, who with voracious maw swallows up 
 the loves of a human soul as though it were the joke 
 of a day. He will come again, lay his bony finger upon 
 our own heart pulse, wrest from our palsied hands the 
 leaves of the book we have thoughtlessly written o’er. 
 We may plead; but he is deaf. No pencil touch erasure 
 or addenda will he suffer. “To whom much is given, 
 of such is much required.” That which we have written 
 must be submitted to the test of life amid the activities, 
 the possibilities of this, the grandest of all centuries. Are 
 we just ready to answer? 
 
 The present is a workful era. It is distinctively 
 woman’s era. All the forces of Christian civilization have 
 correlated to make possible the emancipation of the 
 women of the" Orient by the pen stroke of Christian 
 woman. An earthquake of religious thought has shaken 
 ajar the prison-doors and we may enter if we will. The 
 nations have heard of our birthright, our freedom song, 
 our culture, our Redeemer from the plague of sin. They 
 invite our ministry. “The measure of our responsibility 
 is equal to the possibilities of our usefulness for God.” 
 Our national emblem, the grand old stars and stripes, 
 whose very name has melody, speaks to the national 
 heart of the achievement, the grandeur, the strength of 
 the nation which bears it. But when it appeals to our 
 individual consciousness, we recall a night of darkness 
 and agony when the fever-thirst ravaged our darlings, 
 when their wounds lay festering for lack of ministry, and 
 we recognize the price of liberty. The cross of Christ is 
 the only staff from which such an emblem may justly float. 
 It suggests the actual or prophetic grandeur of every 
 nation under the sun which rears it. To woman, it has 
 deeper significance; she remembers the day of her chains 
 and captivity, the night when other and innocent fingers 
 
48 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 were pinioned thereto, that her own might be fetterless. 
 To her it is more than emancipation, it is culture, rank, 
 equality, home, heaven. Measuring, therefore, its value 
 by the sweetness which may be extracted from all of 
 these, what is our obligation ? Obligation to the civiliza¬ 
 tions of the East. Alas for a civilization which builds 
 itself upon other than the one foundation. Obligation to 
 the literature of the East. Said the Duke of Wellington : 
 “Educate them without Christianity, and you educate a 
 race of devils.” Said Dr. Butler: “Native education 
 owes more to Macaulay, Dr. Duff, and Trevalyn than all 
 the Brahmins of India for the past five hundred years.” 
 Obligation to the Christian Church, whose policy is 
 aggressive, availing herself of new channels of labor. A 
 little more than two hundred years ago, under the very 
 shadow of the Vatican, impious hands had chained Italian 
 thought. The fingers of Infallibility held together the 
 eloquent lips of Galileo; but he had uttered those won¬ 
 derful words, “ The world turns” and no papal edict 
 could call them back. The very winds which cooled his 
 fever, bore the message to the murmuring sea; the sea 
 whispered it to the cliffs which skirted its shores; the 
 cliffs re-echoed it from peak to peak; and the earth 
 was girdled with the startling announcement, “the world 
 turns.” Verily it turns in this our day. The last revolu¬ 
 tion brings woman to the front. Through all the centu¬ 
 ries, under no system of religious faith has woman been 
 accounted an important moral factor for the propagation 
 of truth, if we may except the Catholics. With them 
 woman’s work has been rather the passiveness of the 
 cloister than the activities of life. Under the Christian 
 faith woman’s great reserve power has not been laid 
 under tribute except in isolated cases. The Christian 
 Church has been attempting to do all her work “with 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 49 
 
 only half her machinery.” Having at last reached a 
 boundary line beyond which she could not pass without 
 the agency of woman, she turns and says, “Come.” 
 
 Again: what is our obligation to the heroic men and 
 women upon whom fell the vision of prophecy, until they 
 saw the far-off day when the nations of the earth should 
 know the Lord Jesus, saw God’s diagram of plans by 
 which it was to be accomplished, saw the part he com¬ 
 mitted to their hands, and without hope of living to see 
 the fruition of labor, said of themselves: 
 
 “Ours not the reason why, 
 
 Ours but to do and die;" 
 
 said to us by their sublime example, in the pregnant lan¬ 
 guage of Livingstone: “I go to open the door. It is 
 probable I may die there. I pray you, see to it that the 
 door is never closed 
 
 Obligation to advanced American thought, whereby 
 medical science has revealed her mysteries to woman, 
 committed to her hands the leaves of healing, and sent 
 her to the incarcerated legions of the East, who else might 
 never know release from the tyranny of pain; obligation 
 to One who, with flesh already quivering with agony, 
 withheld not his tender palms from the cruel nails, that 
 in these wounds woman’s hands might later be so hidden 
 fetters could not chain them; for his sake, obligation to 
 the myriads of women, by man’s device long bound, who 
 in the darkness and the charnel air grope vainly for the 
 infinite palm. 
 
 Reader, sum up, weigh, these obligations; add thereto, 
 if you will, with the scales in God’s-hand alone, the 
 balmy air which you inhale, made miles in depth for 
 every human creature, the green fields, the song of birds, 
 the sweeter songs of home, the voice of prayer, the 
 chorus of praise; open the fountain of your own soul, 
 
 5 
 
so 
 
 Heathen across the Seas. 
 
 take from its depths the purest affection, the holiest vows, 
 the restful smile of your slumbering babe (reflected radi- 
 diance which the hovering angels lend),—bring these. 
 Lastly, the soul’s e7notion when, as your trembling fingers 
 just touched the hem of His garment, the melody of that 
 strange refrain, “Peace, my peace I give unto you; not 
 as the world giveth give I unto you,” thrilled you. Lay 
 these in the balance, and receive from his lips who 
 weighs, if you can bear it, the measure of your respon¬ 
 sibility to the “heathen” who are not “at home.” 
 
 Yet again, O reader, ere we part, know ye the num¬ 
 ber now living upon the earth, beyond your blessed 
 home-land, who are “bone of your bone, flesh of your 
 flesh;” whose ears never yet caught the symphony of 
 that word of all words, “Jesus?” Arrange them in close 
 procession, singly. Stand at a given point, and count 
 them hour after hour, night and day, without rest or food 
 or sleep. Your shoes would crumble to ashes where you 
 stand, your feet wither, your lips shrivel, eyes grow sight¬ 
 less, the very vultures feed on your wasting flesh, the bones 
 knock together your lone funeral requiem; and yet the pro¬ 
 cession passeth, unnumbered still. Count them you may 
 not. Stand, if you will, for Christ’s sake, for humanity’s 
 sake, for your soul’s sake; thrust into some hand, as it is 
 stretched to you, a parchment bearing the words: 
 
 “God so loved the world he gave his only-begotten 
 Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, 
 but have everlasting life.” “Believe, and be saved.” 
 
 On the banks of the River Jumna, in the city of 
 Agra, stands the Taj-Mahal, a mausoleum built by the 
 mogul (emperor), Shah Jehan, to preserve the fading- 
 casket whence had vanished his treasure, the Empress 
 Moomtaj. Its erection involved an outlay of sixty million 
 
Heathen across the Seas. 51 
 
 dollars, and the labor of twenty thousand men for twenty- 
 two years. The cost of the embellishments are beyond 
 computation. “The entire Koran is inlaid upon the 
 building in the Arabic language, in black marble on the 
 outside, in precious stones within.” Its “architectural 
 glory has no equal on earth.” The tomb, of snow-white 
 marble, is inlaid with flowers so delicately framed they 
 . look like embroidery on white satin, so exquisitely is the 
 mosaic executed, in cornelian, blood-stone, agates, jasper, 
 turquoise, lapis lazula, and other precious stones. The 
 floor is of polished marble and jasper.” Its effect upon 
 the beholder is further described by Dr. Butler in the 
 reply of an English lady, who, as she retired from the 
 splendor of the scene, was asked what she thought of the 
 Taj. “I can not tell you what I think, but I can tell 
 you what I feel. I would die to-morrow, to have such 
 another put over me.” 
 
 Amid all this dazzling beauty, we find the plague-spot 
 of heathenism. Upon the sarcophagus which contains 
 the empress rests a tablet of marble; upon that of the 
 emperor, who now sleeps beside her, a hand grasping a 
 pen. The dual significance is the embodiment of the 
 germ-thought of Oriental religion : 
 
 Woman’s heart is a tablet on which man may write 
 what he pleases. 
 
 In this afternoon of the nineteenth century, under 
 Christian tutelage, this order is reversed. Christian 
 woman holds the pen,—the world her tablet. Reader, 
 what I say unto you I say unto all, 
 
 1 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 I