The Doctor having thrown down his pipe and commenced walking the floor, here interrupted his enthusiastic guest:
"O, if you go to taking up the Roman Catholic calendar of Saints, you will find plenty of fish in illimitable waters; but that is out of our line of coasting, you must know; and we are not in the habit of associating St. Paul with any of these latter-day Saints."
"Please allow me, Dr. Adams, you know I am a privileged person. My last-named Saint, Bernard, lived at least four hundred years before Luther and John Knox, and Wilfred and Benedict much nearer to Christ than to us, the latter having been separated in time but four centuries from his Lord; but let us not contend upon this point; I cheerfully admit my own superior admiration for the converted persecutor of the Christians."
"If his like has not been seen through eighteen hundred years, we may not look for it in the nineteenth century," remarked the Doctor.
"I still insist, however," said the indomitable Mr Chase, "that he has had many imitators; and that brings us back to the subject whence we have strayed, and upon which I have not said all that I had intended. I was going to remark, after asserting that missionaries should leave their wives at home, that the success of Catholic missionaries illustrates the truth of this."
"I beg you to remember," interposed the Doctor, testily, "that we do not wish to be compared in any way, shape, or manner with the Catholic missionaries. You might just as well compare us to the heathen who worship idols."
Mr. Chase continued, a little more mildly than before:
"The question is not, my dear Doctor, a comparison between your religion and theirs. I understand very little indeed about their religion. But their object and yours is the same; by every means in your power to induce souls ignorant of the Saviour to believe and accept the truths you hold out; this is your mission, and this is theirs. You come with your families, you make a home—you stay there—waiting for the heathen to come to you; your wife is nervous, she likes not the uncouth looks and ways of your barbarians; she is neat and she does not like her white floor to be soiled by the dirty feet of your savages. Nervous, neat, and timid herself, she meets their gaze anything but smilingly—even savages are human, and know well enough how to take a hint. Her involuntary dislike is returned with interest, and her husband's influence and usefulness is at an end, even before being established."
"You judge us harshly," complained Dr. Adams, glancing at the dissatisfied countenances of his younger friends, "some missionaries have most excellent wives."
"Do not understand me as saying one word against any missionary's wife; far be it from me. As a class, I have no doubt they are most estimable. But women are women all the world over, and experience convinces me that in the place they occupy as wives of missionaries they are only greatly in the way. Now the Roman Catholics—and I am no friend to their religion, as you very well know—as missionaries, are those only who have met with success. They attribute it to the grace of God following their efforts, in accordance with the divine promise, 'Go teach all nations, and lo, I am with you to the end of the world.' I have visited their missions in every part of the world; in North and South America, in Africa, Europe, Asia, and many islands of the sea—and in fact this really did confound me, though I have been almost everywhere under the sun, these missionaries were already there, working away as for dear life—well, as I was saying, I have been in many a place where, to get the least comfort at all, I was compelled to put up with them; and, I always went away soothed, refreshed, and consoled. I assure you it is wonderful; they go among the natives, and to a certain extent become one of them; they win their confidence, treat them kindly, share with them food and drink, sleep in their houses and tents, and by and by insensibly have become their masters. Then how easy to teach them anything! Now they couldn't do this with troops of women and children along; so I came to the conclusion that their remarkable success in the conversion of heathen nations was to be attributed to the absence of these hindering appendages."