a little in receiving a part of the testimony, when the chief said
with great emphasis, "Oh! you may believe what he says: he tells the
truth: _he has never seen a white man before_!" In Southey's Wesley
there is an account of an Indian whom Wesley met in Georgia, and who
thus summed up his objections to Christianity: "Christian much drunk!
Christian beat man! Christian tell lies! Devil Christian! Me no
Christian!"[K] What then? All other religions show the same disparity
between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude
the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its
high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood
begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the
flood-tide of your own.

There is a noble and a base side to every history. The same religion
varies in different soils. Christianity is not the same in England and
in Italy; in Armenia and in Ethiopia; in the Protestant and Catholic
cantons of Switzerland; in Massachusetts, in Georgia, and in Utah.
Neither is Buddhism the same in China, in Thibet and in Ceylon; nor
Mohammedanism in Turkey and in Persia. We have no right to pluck the
best fruit from one tree, the worst from another, and then say that
the tree is known by its fruits. I say again, Christianity has, on the
whole, produced the highest results of all, in manners, in arts, in
energy. Yet when Christianity had been five centuries in the world,
the world's only hope seemed to be in the superior strength and purity
of pagan races. "Can we wonder," wrote Salvian (A.D. 400), "if our
lands have been given over to the barbarians by God? since that which
we have polluted by our profligacy the barbarians have cleansed by
their chastity."[L] At the end of its first thousand years,
Christianity could only show Europe at its lowest ebb of civilization,
in a state which Guizot calls "death by the extinction of every
faculty." The barbarians had only deteriorated since their conversion;
the great empires were falling to pieces; and the only bright spot in
Europe was Mohammedan Spain, whose universities taught all Christendom
science, as its knights taught chivalry. Even at the end of fifteen
hundred years, the Turks, having conquered successively Jerusalem and
Constantinople, seemed altogether the most powerful nation of the
world; their empire was compared to the Roman empire; they were
gaining all the time. You will find everywher