What about killing African tribes by the thousand with the vile stuff that we call rum, and send to them in exchange for their poor commodities?  What about introducing new diseases, the offspring of vice, into the South Sea Islands, decimating and all but destroying the population?  Is it not true that, as the prophet wailed of old about a degenerate Israel, we may wail about the beach-combers and other loafers that go amongst savage lands from England—­’Through you the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles.’  A Hindoo once said to a missionary, ’Your Book is very good.  If you were as good as your Book you would conquer India in five years.’  That may be true or it may not, but it gives us the impression that is produced by godless Englishmen on heathen peoples.  We are taking away their religion from them, necessarily, as the result of education and contact with European thought.  And if we do not substitute for it the one faith that elevates and saves, the last state of that man will be worse than the first.

We can almost hear the rattle of the guns on the north-west frontier of India to-day.  There is another specimen of the injuries inflicted.  This is not the place to talk politics, but I feel that this is the place to ask this question, ’Are Christian principles to have anything to do in determining national actions?’ Is it Christian to impose our yoke on unwilling tribes who have as deep a love for independence as the proudest Englishmen of us all, and as good a right to it?  Are punitive expeditions and Maxim guns instalments of our debt to all men?  I wonder what Jesus Christ, who died for Afridis and Orakzais and all the rest of them, thinks about such conduct?

Brethren, we are debtors to all men.  Let us do our best to influence national action in accordance with the brotherhood which has been revealed to us by the Elder Brother of us all; and let us, at least for our own parts, recognise, and, as much as in us is, discharge the debt which, by our common humanity, and by our possession of the universal Gospel we owe to all men, and which is made more weighty by the benefits we receive from many, and by the injuries which England has inflicted on not a few.  Else shall we hear rise above all the voices that palliate crime, on the plea of ‘State necessity,’ the stern words of the Master, ’In thy skirts is found the blood of the souls of poor innocents.’  We are debtors; let us pay our debts.

THE GOSPEL THE POWER OF GOD[1]

   ’I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ:  for it is
   the power of God unto salvation to every one that
   believeth.’—­Romans i. 16.