386 RELIGIOUS WORK 



devout. He lamented freely the degenerate condition of the 

 Indians, and said that " their ignorance and wickedness has so 

 troubled him sometimes that he had felt driven to the woods " in 

 the solitariness of his distress for them. At length he said, " God 

 comforted his heart and showed him what he should do," when he 

 would return to his associates and love and labor for them as never 

 before. While Brainerd was discussing with him at times, he 

 would say, " Now that I like, so God taught me." This reformer 

 had a doctrine that " departed souls all went southward, and that 

 the difference between the good and bad was this, that the good 

 were admitted into a beautiful town with spiritual walls, or walls 

 agreeable to the nature of souls, and that the latter would forever 

 hover near those walls, and in vain attempt to get in." Brainerd 

 testifies that this man was sincere, honest, and conscientious, 

 according to his own religious opinions, as no other pagan he had 

 seen. He labored earnestly to banish the drinking habit from the 

 Indians; but by his followers, for the most part, he was regarded 

 as " a precise zealot," and his efforts were unwelcome. It would 

 thus appear that in the heart of this nature-taught savage was 

 the spirit of faith existing with most limited light. It needed 

 further instruction to give it such form and power as would enable 

 it to grasp the large concept of "salvation" salvation for 

 himself and others, but the germ in " the righteousness of faith " 

 evidently was there, before the missionary with his message came. 

 It was the function of the missionary to develop that germinal 

 faith, that it might grow to intelligence and power. How far even 

 Brainerd did this, we are not told. Doubtless multitudes of 

 instances among so-called heathen peoples similar to this exist, 

 if they were only known. If so, it is evidence of the at-homeness 

 of Christianity among all men everywhere. Christianity, in fact, 

 is a religion which cannot be apprehended by the intellect merely, 

 but requires for its realization the right use of other faculties of the 

 soul as well, such as the conscience, the feelings, the imagination, 

 and, above all, the will. The entire composite soul must be open. 

 Even the living God cannot vindicate himself to the mere fragment 

 of a man, even though that fragment be his majestic reason. In 

 the mere action of the understanding, the executive soul puts itself 

 outside the truth, and simply speculates upon it from without. 

 One needs to move by an act of will inside the truth, with all the 

 love of the heart, and with all the moral sense of the conscience. 

 He who does this touches reality. The agnosticism of the world 

 is only the outcome of a mistaken intellectual self-sufficiency, a 

 species of intellect worship. The biographer of Romanes tells us 

 that as he drew near the end of life he reproached himself for 

 what he called " sins of the intellect, mental arrogance, and undue 



