FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES 53 



ning? and where did the doctrines and dogmas of Christianity 

 spring up? It was in the very focus of all the highest and 

 most ancient civilizations of the world — the Jewish, the 

 Egyptian, the Assyrian, the Greek, and the Roman. These 

 peoples had already gone through the long process of mental 

 development which the savage has not even begun. The 

 doctrines (of Christianity) grew among them, as they do not 

 grow among savages, because they were adapted to the mental 

 state in the one case, but are not in the other. 



" What savage nations have (as he asserts) been raised out 

 of their degradation by Christianity? The Abyssinians are 

 a good case to show that Christianity alone does nothing. 

 The circumstances have not been favourable to the growth of 

 civilization in Abyssinia, and therefore, though they have had 

 Christianity as long as we have (or longer), they are scarcely 

 equal morally to many pagan and certainly inferior to some 

 Mohammedan nations. This is a crucial instance. 



" He says the Britons did not arrive at any ' great moral 

 elevation ' under the Romans. But will he point out any 

 savages who have arrived at a ' great moral elevation ' in the 

 same time under Christianity? I know of none. No doubt 

 there has been often a superficial improvement, as in some 

 of the South Sea islands; but it is an open question how 

 much of that is due to the purely moral influence of a higher 

 and more civilized race. 



" Of course, if you claim all virtue as Christian virtue, and 

 impute all want of goodness to want of true Christianity, you 

 may prove the value of any religion. The Mohammedan 

 argues exactly the same (see Lady Duff Gordon's ' Letters 

 from Egypt '). Your friend would no doubt impute whatever 

 scraps of goodness there may exist in myself to the Christianity 

 in which I was educated; but I know and feel (though it 

 would no doubt shock him to hear) that I acted from lower 

 motives than I do now, and that I was really inferior morally 

 as a Christian than I am now as, what he would call, an 

 infidel. 



" I look upon the doctrine of future rewards and punish- 

 ments as a motive to action to be radically bad, and as bad 



