The Naturalization of Christianity in the Far East

Extract

It is sometimes said that Christianity has been so long identified with the West, it has so thoroughly become a Western religion, that it is not adapted to take a great place in the mind and life of the Eastern nations. It is not intended in this remark to overlook the fact that Christianity is itself by origin an Oriental faith, an outgrowth of Judaism. Nor is it denied that, in considerable numbers, men of Oriental race, mainly within the borders of the present Turkish Empire, have from of old confessed Christianity in forms familiar to us in the Greek churches. But these Oriental Christians sustain rather than disprove the judgment which was above expressed. Not only have they shown since before the rise of Mohammedanism no perceptible zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith among other Orientals, but they have reacted powerfully against the propaganda on behalf of Western forms of the Christian faith in their own midst.