“2. No idea of a Spiritual Personality, whether human or divine. Emphasis is placed on mind and intellect to the exclusion of will and feeling. Hence Buddhism is a philosophy rather than a religion, a theory of existence rather than a motive force.
“3. No true sense of relationship of man to man or of man to God, in the absence of spiritual personality. Everything is ego-centric, each for himself. Hence incomplete ideas of love, faith, sin, holiness, suffering; in the absence of hope fear dominates life.
“4. The greatest fundamental error is the assertion of the Karma law as the sole principle that explains all (the law of ethical causation, by which the merit or demerit of every act in this life effects the future life). This leads to a denial of personality and to fatalism, formality, trust in the individual’s merit, denial of forgiveness and self satisfaction.”
But if the work at that stage had few numerical results to display, yet a keen discernment would show that other larger results were being accomplished. Mr. George B. Bacon, in his volume on Siam, shows a true appreciation of what missions had accomplished up to that time:
“At first sight their efforts, if measured by count of converts, might seem to have resulted in failure.... But really the success of these efforts has been extraordinary, although the history of them exhibits an order of results almost without precedent. Ordinarily the religious enlightenment of a people comes first and the civilization follows as a thing of course. But here the Christianisation of the nation has scarcely begun, but its civilisation has made much more than a beginning. For it is to the labours of the Christian missionaries in Siam that the remarkable advancement of the kings and nobles, and even of the common people in general is owing....
“When Sir John Bowring came in 1855 to negotiate his treaty ... he found the fruit was ripe before he plucked it. And it was by the patient and persistent labours of the missionaries for twenty years that the results which he achieved were made not only possible but easy.”
But there is evidence of even more subtle effect of the gospel. No one who reads of the notable changes in the social customs and political institutions introduced by the young King Chulalongkorn can resist the conclusion that it was the religious support of these ancient practises that had given way under the disintegrating light of the Christian Gospel. Even that earlier attempt of Chao Fah Yai to modernise the religious teachings among his followers shows that the religious philosophy of Buddhism could not stand before the truth of Jesus.
LITERARY WORK
In the literary field Dr. House was receptive rather than creative. He was a lover of books but not of writing:
“How irksome and difficult the labour of composition has been to me,” he says, “I’d rather be a ditch digger and shovel mud. The getting of a certain amount of writing done by a given time is out of the question in my case.”