in America has all sorts and conditions of men, but
everywhere it has the same church. And it is a church that can't ever
make good any more. It might, at the beginning, but it can't now. It has
a reputation as fixed as Julius Caesar's. I'm hardly ready to set up as
an expert observer, being only a cub salesman on his first trip, but,
Mr. Drury, I believe I can see already that the only chance for these
people to get religion and everything else which religion ought to
produce, is for us to send it to them. Maybe that would stir up the
church down here, and help to give it another chance at the people's
confidence, though I'm not sure."

Our church ought to send doctors; the amount of fearful disease that
flourishes among the poorer people is just frightful. If Joe Carbrook
were not so set on going to the Orient, he could do a big work here, and
so could a thousand other doctors. It would be so much more than mere
doctoring; it would be the biggest kind of preaching.

And the church should send teachers. You know I believe in conversion;
but if the Mexicans I have seen are samples of Latin America's common
people, they need teachers who have the patience of Christ a good deal
more than they need flaming evangelists who make a big stir and soon
pass on. Because these folks have just _got_ to be made over, in their
very minds. They are not ready for the preaching of the gospel until
they have seen it lived. Long experience has made them doubtful of
living saints, though plenty of them pray to dead ones.

This is the whole trouble, Mr. Drury, it seems to me. They've known
only a church that had got off the track. Any religious work that
reaches them now has almost to begin all over again. It has to undo
their thinking about prayer and faith and God's love and human conduct
and nearly every other Christian idea. They have a Christian vocabulary,
but it means very little. They think they can buy religion, if they want
it--any kind they want. And if they can't afford it, or don't want it,
they don't quite think they'll be sent to hell for that, in spite of
what the priest says. They think enough to be afraid, but not enough to
be sure of anything. The missionaries have to teach them a new set of
religious numerals, if you get what I mean, before it is any use to
teach them the arithmetic of the gospel.

"I'm beginning to see that everything among the Latin Americans runs
back to the need of Christian living. The wrong noti