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* The Popular Notion, However, Of The Primitive Church
Is Perhaps Not Very Accurate.
Those societies especially
which consisted of converted Gentiles - men who had been accustomed
to the vices and immoralities of heathenism - were certainly
any thing but pure.
In spite of their conversion, some of them carried
the stains and vestiges of their former state with them when they passed
from the temple to the church. If the instructed and civilized Greek
did not all at once rise out of his former self, and understand and realize
the high ideal of his new faith, we should be careful,
in judging of the work of missionaries among savage tribes,
not to apply to their converts tests and standards of too great severity.
If the scoffing Lucian's account of the impostor Peregrinus may be believed,
we find a church probably planted by the apostles manifesting
less intelligence even than modern missionary churches. Peregrinus,
a notoriously wicked man, was elected to the chief place among them,
while Romish priests, backed by the power of France, could not find
a place at all in the mission churches of Tahiti and Madagascar.
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We can not fairly compare these poor people with ourselves,
who have an atmosphere of Christianity and enlightened public opinion,
the growth of centuries, around us, to influence our deportment;
but let any one from the natural and proper point of view behold
the public morality of Griqua Town, Kuruman, Likatlong, and other villages,
and remember what even London was a century ago, and he must confess
that the Christian mode of treating aborigines is incomparably the best.
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