PROTESTANT MISSIONS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume II, Issue 99, 20 March 1875, Page 11

PROTESTANT MISSIONS.

Some plain truth about Protestant Missions is told by the ' Catholic Review ' of Brooklyn. The ' Eeview ' takes for its thesis the following : — Protestant teaching never has converted, and never can convert any people. Then the writer goes on to say : — This remark, innocently made, has called upon us some rather severe denunciation, from various quarters. Among others, the ' Congregationalist' remonstrates, but without pointing to any fact which would invalidate the position taken. Nobody doubts that within the present century Protestantism has made efforts of great magnitude in the cause of foreign missions. The various sects have used money enough, Bibles and tracts enough, and men and women enough to have accomplished a great deal in the way of Christianizing pagans, if men, women, books and money had been used in the one way in which alone they could have been of service. Unfortunately the missionaries have been of the kind of whom the Holy Ghost declares that He " has not sent them and yet they run." If their labor when measured by the material used seems barren enough, the fault is not, we suppose, in the intention nor always in the character of the workmen, though a Goble in Japan or a Van Meter in Rome are not calculated to excite admiration in the unprejudiced. The charge we made could hardly be other than irritating to the good people who remain at home to edit journals, preach missionary sermons and collect money for the missionaries. But would it not be more fairly answered, if answered at all, by a reference to some one people which has really been converted to the Protestant imitation of Christianity by Protestant missionaries, than by any other method of reply ? They were Papal missionaries who brought all Europe into the Christian fold. And when schism and heresy devastated some of the European nations, does any one pretend that " Protestant preaching " wauld have availed to pervert them if the Popes would have allowed such unbridled license to the civil rulers x as was complacently accorded by the Protestant reformers ? Was it Protestant preaching, or was it the rack, the gibbet and the quarterer's block which made England Protestant ? Where is the effect of Protestant preaching on Catholic Ireland, or what is it that makes Protestant city missionaries here in New York fly off to Rome, like "Van Meter, or up town like most of the others, when Catholicity nourishes so abundantly down town ? Why go to " convert the Mikado of Japan" before making one hearty and combined attack upon that more easily accessible dignitary, the Archbishop of New York ? For our own part, we have never heard of any people Christianized by Protestant preaching. Has the * Congregationalist ?'