But it is hard to move a new English acquaintance
when he is by himself, or when the company present
is small and new to him. He is on his guard
then, and his natural reserve is to the fore.
This has given him the false reputation of being
without humor and without the appreciation of humor.
Americans are not Englishmen, and American humor is
not English humor; but both the American and his humor
had their origin in England, and have merely undergone
changes brought about by changed conditions and a new
environment. About the best humorous speeches
I have yet heard were a couple that were made in Australia
at club suppers—one of them by an Englishman,
the other by an Australian.
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling
him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy
who said “Faith is believing what you know ain’t
so.”
—Pudd’nhead
Wilson’s New Calendar.
In Sydney I had a large dream, and in the course of
talk I told it to a missionary from India who was
on his way to visit some relatives in New Zealand.
I dreamed that the visible universe is the physical
person of God; that the vast worlds that we see twinkling
millions of miles apart in the fields of space are
the blood corpuscles in His veins; and that we and
the other creatures are the microbes that charge with
multitudinous life the corpuscles.
Mr. X., the missionary, considered the dream awhile,
then said:
“It is not surpassable for magnitude,
since its metes and bounds are the metes and
bounds of the universe itself; and it seems to me that
it almost accounts for a thing which is otherwise
nearly unaccountable—the origin of
the sacred legends of the Hindoos. Perhaps
they dream them, and then honestly believe them to
be divine revelations of fact. It looks
like that, for the legends are built on so vast
a scale that it does not seem reasonable that plodding
priests would happen upon such colossal fancies
when awake.”
He told some of the legends, and said that they were
implicitly believed by all classes of Hindoos, including
those of high social position and intelligence; and
he said that this universal credulity was a great
hindrance to the missionary in his work. Then
he said something like this:
“At home, people wonder why Christianity
does not make faster progress in India.
They hear that the Indians believe easily, and that
they have a natural trust in miracles and give them
a hospitable reception. Then they argue
like this: since the Indian believes easily,
place Christianity before them and they must believe;
confirm its truths by the biblical miracles, and they
will no longer doubt, The natural deduction is,
that as Christianity makes but indifferent progress
in India, the fault is with us: we are not
fortunate in presenting the doctrines and the miracles.
