“‘How do you know it?’ said I.
“‘Because he is drunk.’ Hadijah, not being yet converted, and judging from appearances and from the evidences of his eyesight, associated the ideas and thought that in some way drunkenness was an evidence of Christianity. That belief is largely shared by all heathen people.
“And then I open your Holy Book and find it written, ‘No drunkard shall inherit eternal life,’ and I say to myself, What does it mean that these holy people over the seas, who try so hard to convert us, should send whiskey, and Bibles, and missionaries to us all packed in one great ship?”
Sez I—“The nation don’t mean to do it.” Sez I, “It don’t want to do any sech harm.”
“But I hear of the great power of this nation, could it not prevent it? If it could not prevent it, it must be a weak government indeed. And if truly this great country is so weak and so wicked as to set snares for the heathens—trying to lead them into paths that end in eternal ruin—I think why not keep their missionaries in their own land? They must need them even more than we do.”
Sez I—“Don’t talk so, poor creeter, don’t talk so. Missionaries go out to your land fired with the deathless zeal to save souls—to bring the knowledge of the Christ to all the world.”
“But if they bring the knowledge in the way I speak of, so the heathen honestly believes drunkenness is the sign of Christianity, is it not making a mockery of what they profess to teach?”
I wuz dumbfoundered. I didn’t know how to frame a reply, and so I sot onframed, as you may say.
“I heard the missionaries say, and I read it in your Holy Book, that the liar shall have his portion in the lake that burns forever. The same curses are on them that steal and on them that commit adultery.
“I thought the country that sends these missionaries, rebuking these sins so sharply—I thought their country must be pure and peaceable and holy in its ways. I come here, as I say, seeking the Great Light to guide me. I come here to hear the Great Voice, so I could go back and carry its teachings to our own people. For I thought there must be some mistake, and that the lessons failed in some way to carry the idea of your great government. So I come, I study; and I find that not only was your great government willing to have my poor people enslaved by the drink habit, but it was a partaker in it. It sent over the accursed whiskey and brandy and took a portion of the pay—a portion of the money spent by my poor people for making themselves unfit for earth, and shutting them forever out of Heaven.