LESSON X.
From consideration of our previous lesson, we should make the deduction that Christianity is incompatible with savage life. The Christian can no longer be a savage, notwithstanding the habits of civilization may be yet too weakly established to guaranty against lapses to former habits. The habits of the savage must be changed so as to approximate civilized life before Christianity can be successfully taught him. Hence one error into which the missionary and the teacher of the Negro sometimes fall. They confine their labours to instructions concerning the more abstruse doctrines of Christianity; but the savage has no capability to comprehend them: his mind has never been prepared for their reception.
The child can never comprehend the laws of astronomy till he has first learned mathematics. The savage must first be made to comprehend the necessity that individual wants must be supplied by individual labour, and all the consequent attendants of such a state of things, before the possibility can exist that he will comprehend the higher moral duties. Because, without that, he remains passive under such teachings; and in such case, the more familiar such lessons are made to him the less they affect him. Instances are not wanting where such a state of facts exists in circles of society where it would seem they should be the least expected! and from whence the great truth is deducible, that mental and physical idleness is a most deadly poison to good morals and intellectual improvement, and the conduct of such men is always found searching the way back to a deteriorated condition.
The animal propensities require to be forced into habits contributive to the relations and duties of civilized and Christian life. The mind must be made to comprehend what our relative duties are, both experimentally and habitually, and also the impossibility of their being dispensed with, before it will be able to perceive the laws which bind our action to their performance. And it may be here remarked, that a perception of these laws sufficiently strong to influence the conduct of a man will at least place him in the position of Agrippa before Paul. The history of man does not point to an instance where an individual has regenerated himself from the depth of human degradation, except under the pupilage and control of a superior wisdom.
Upon this state of facts was founded the necessity of a Saviour for the children of men.