It may be that insight into and sympathy with the struggles of men who
are groping after God, if haply they may find him, will shorten the
polemic sword of the professional converter whose only purpose is
destructive hostility without tactics or strategy, or whose chief idea
of missionary success is in statistics, in blackening the character of
"the heathen," in sensational letters for home consumption and reports
properly cooked and served for the secretarial and sectarian palates.
Yet, if true in history, Greek, Roman, Japanese, it is also true in the
missionary wars, that "the race that shortens its weapons lengthens its
boundaries."[6]
Apart from the wit or the measure of truth in this sentence quoted, it
is a matter of truth in the generalizations of fact that the figure of
the "sword of the spirit, which is the word of God," used by Paul, and
also the figure of the "word of God, living and active, sharper than any
two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of the soul and
spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and
intents of the heart," of the writer to the Hebrews, had for their
original in iron the victorious _gladium_ of the Roman legionary--a
weapon both short and sharp.
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