Who Is Mark Twain? by Twain Mark

Author:Twain, Mark [Twain, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2010-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE MISSIONARY IN WORLD-POLITICS

To the Editor of the Times.

SIR: I think you will grant that the source of religion and of patriotism is one and the same—the heart, not the head. It seems established by ages of history that none but the weakest and most valueless men can be persuaded to desert their flag or their religion. We regard as a base creature the man who deserts his flag and turns against his country, either when his country is in the right or when she is in the wrong. We hold in detestation the person who tries to beguile him to do it. We say loyalty is not matter of argument but of feeling—its seat is in the heart, not the brain. I do not know why we respect missionaries. Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors. We have lacked the opportunity of hearing a foreign missionary who has been forced upon us against our will lauding his own saints and gods and saying harsh things about ours. If, some time or other, we shall have these experiences, it will probably go hard with the missionary.

History teaches us that there is no capable missionary except fire and sword or the command of a king whose subjects have no voice in the government. Christianity, like Mohammedanism, has made its conquests by force, not persuasion. The Christendom of to-day is the result, solely, of the sword in some cases, and of royal mandate in the others. Since these two missionaries retired from the field the industry has stood still. Persuasion has accomplished nothing. Nothing, for the reason that for every convert it has made, more than a thousand pagans have been born to fill up his place. If the missionary trade had been a commercial enterprise, its sane and practical board of directors would have seen, two centuries ago, that there was no profit in it and no profit possible to it on this side of eternity, and they would have gone into liquidation, paid ha’pence in the pound, and taken in their sign; reporting to the stockholders that “the balance of trade being 1,000 to 1 against us we have considered it wise to retire from the enterprise and apply our energies to something worth while.” But mission-propagators are apparently not open to (business) logic. They have paid out millions upon millions of pounds to add an almost invisible Christian fringe around the globe’s massed heathen billions; they are aware that the body of the fabric increases in bulk a thousand times faster than the fringe; they know that a convert is by far the most expensive bric-a-brac in commerce; they know that if he is a grown-up convert he is as a rule a poor thing and always a traitor, and was not worth harvesting at any figure.

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