196 HENRY HILL GOODELL 



Or, once more, shall I tell you of the land itself, its 

 products and resources, the people and their ways, their 

 lives and occupations, their various methods of gaining 

 their daily bread? 



It has seemed to me that perhaps this last was the more 

 appropriate. And yet I almost despair of giving you an 

 adequate idea of a country and a people where everything 

 is done in a manner so exactly opposite to our own. The 

 distinction they make between the religious and the moral 

 character is very singular. With us there can be no religion 

 without morality; but with them the religious has nothing 

 to do with the moral character. The pirate committing 

 murder on the high seas, and taken red-handed, refuses to 

 eat meat on Friday and thus imperil his soul, even while his 

 hands are yet wet with his brother's blood. The robber 

 stripes you to the skin, takes everything you possess, mal- 

 treats and threatens you with death, and then calmly 

 ejaculates as he leaves you, * May God save you, my lamb, 

 if in danger! I give you into His keeping." 



No one is ever supposed to be the less covetous, the less 

 a cheat, a gambler, a liar, a defrauder, a robber, a murderer, 

 because he prays. Nothing is further from his own thoughts 

 or the thoughts of the bystanders, than that his prayers 

 should exert any transforming influence upon his own char- 

 acter. And why should they? For when they have busi- 

 ness to transact with their neighbors on temporal matters, 

 they use a language which all can understand, but whenever 

 they have any business with their Maker about their eternal 

 interests, it is always done in a language they do not under- 

 stand. Outwardly pious and sincere, inwardly they are 

 whited sepulchres and full of dead men's bones. The 



