VIICHRISTENDOM AND THE WARTheeffect of the war of 1914-18 upon modern Christendom would not concern us here if the scene of this narrative were not a Moslem country to which Christendom, beginning with Old Greece and running west to the country towns of the United States, has adopted an attitude of superiority. I do not need to say that the subject of Christianity itself is very far removed from the realm of controversy, but its communicants are human beings and are not only subjects of legitimate controversy but of entirely healthy controversy.Moslems are usually hospitable to all foreigners and they frequently respect missionaries personally. They use mission hospitals and occasionally they avail themselves of the advantages of foreign schools. But for missionaries as Christians, engaged in spreading a gospel of peace while their contemporaries at home invent poison gas, Moslems have neither understanding nor respect. In their Christian capacities, missionaries are tolerated as long as they do not offend.The older missionaries know these things. They know that in their effort to spread Christianity, their greatest enemies have been the Christians, and most of their work in the Ottoman Empire has been an effort to convert Eastern Christians to a Western interpretation of Christianity. But this their supporters in the United States have to this day never realized. Americans at home have assumed that the wordChristianis an all-sufficing label, that the communicants of the Orthodox and Gregorian Churches in the East are Christians as Western Protestants understand the term, that Eastern Moslems are heathen in the Western meaning of the word; and on this assumption they have built up out of the mutual tragedies of racial and religious disentanglement in the Ottoman Empire, their Christian martyr-legend and the sorry butcher-legend which they have attached to the Turks.The missionaries’ supporters at home are firm believers in prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and Western Christians, protected under the Capitulations by Christian Governments. Yet so habitual has the Christian attitude of superiority become, that American churchmen have actually gone to Constantinople within these last four years and have come away unhumbled. The city of Islam has been under the Christians’ control for four years and the sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern Christendom of the Middle Ages. Americans at home have not yet learned that European Governments have sometimes accepted Christianity “in principle” rather than in fact, and that only when the Christians themselves, from British Foreign Secretaries down to the humblest Greek dive-keepers in Galata, have been converted to the practice of Christianity, will the missionaries gain the understanding and respect of Islam.I am attempting to speak plainly upon a subject which can be no more than suggested here for it carries us quickly outside the proper scope of this narrative, but it is necessary to touch upon it if our subject is to be plumbed to its depths. I believe that American Protestantism and British Nonconformism have their greatest task still ahead of them and that that task lies nearer home than Islam. I believe that task is nothing less than the salvage of the practice of Christianity from the wreck the Christians themselves have made of it.
Theeffect of the war of 1914-18 upon modern Christendom would not concern us here if the scene of this narrative were not a Moslem country to which Christendom, beginning with Old Greece and running west to the country towns of the United States, has adopted an attitude of superiority. I do not need to say that the subject of Christianity itself is very far removed from the realm of controversy, but its communicants are human beings and are not only subjects of legitimate controversy but of entirely healthy controversy.
Moslems are usually hospitable to all foreigners and they frequently respect missionaries personally. They use mission hospitals and occasionally they avail themselves of the advantages of foreign schools. But for missionaries as Christians, engaged in spreading a gospel of peace while their contemporaries at home invent poison gas, Moslems have neither understanding nor respect. In their Christian capacities, missionaries are tolerated as long as they do not offend.
The older missionaries know these things. They know that in their effort to spread Christianity, their greatest enemies have been the Christians, and most of their work in the Ottoman Empire has been an effort to convert Eastern Christians to a Western interpretation of Christianity. But this their supporters in the United States have to this day never realized. Americans at home have assumed that the wordChristianis an all-sufficing label, that the communicants of the Orthodox and Gregorian Churches in the East are Christians as Western Protestants understand the term, that Eastern Moslems are heathen in the Western meaning of the word; and on this assumption they have built up out of the mutual tragedies of racial and religious disentanglement in the Ottoman Empire, their Christian martyr-legend and the sorry butcher-legend which they have attached to the Turks.
The missionaries’ supporters at home are firm believers in prohibition, but the missionaries themselves know that the liquor traffic in the Ottoman Empire has been in the hands of native and Western Christians, protected under the Capitulations by Christian Governments. Yet so habitual has the Christian attitude of superiority become, that American churchmen have actually gone to Constantinople within these last four years and have come away unhumbled. The city of Islam has been under the Christians’ control for four years and the sight of it has been such a rebuke as Christendom has not suffered since the great Moslem reformation first purged the decadent Eastern Christendom of the Middle Ages. Americans at home have not yet learned that European Governments have sometimes accepted Christianity “in principle” rather than in fact, and that only when the Christians themselves, from British Foreign Secretaries down to the humblest Greek dive-keepers in Galata, have been converted to the practice of Christianity, will the missionaries gain the understanding and respect of Islam.
I am attempting to speak plainly upon a subject which can be no more than suggested here for it carries us quickly outside the proper scope of this narrative, but it is necessary to touch upon it if our subject is to be plumbed to its depths. I believe that American Protestantism and British Nonconformism have their greatest task still ahead of them and that that task lies nearer home than Islam. I believe that task is nothing less than the salvage of the practice of Christianity from the wreck the Christians themselves have made of it.