Look at the Fiji Islands : fifty years ago pagan and cannibal, but now
redeemed and sitting in the beauty of the King.
There is no moral destitution, no moral desolation on the face of
the earth, that for a moment begins to compare with that which broods
over the lands of heathenism. I am not saying that^every heathen mind
is as dark as every other; I speak of the general fact, whether in
India, China, the Islands of the Sea, or darkest Afi-ica. Go to darkest
London, it is hideous enough ; it should be impossible in a Christian
city. Go to darkest New York ; it should be impossible in the light
of this nineteenth century and in America. But darkest London set
down in China would shine like a candle of light in the darkness that
is about it. Darkest New York set down in Africa would be shedding
abroad, by comparison, the light of the Kingdom in the midst of that
dark land. In England, in London, in New York, in America,
Christianity is dominant; it breathes through all literature, through
all public sentiment ; it is expressed in architecture, in art of every
form, in life, in institutions. But in Africa there is nothing like that,
in China there is nothing like that ; it is a great wide sea of human life
apart from God, hopeless, sinking down in death and dark despair.
Those who come the nearest to it know best what an abyss it is ;
those who have lived among it come back to us to tell how stifling it
is to live in the midst of heathenism, how nothing but the grace of
Jjod enables a man to labor in the hope of the coming Kingdom.
