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Max Havelaar
ment is eternal:—there the flame licks with a never-satisfied tongue the screaming victims of unbelief:—there the worm dies not that gnaws their hearts through and through without destroying them, that there may always remain a heart to gnaw in the breast of the God-forsaken. Look how they strip off the black skin of that unbaptized child, that, scarcely born, was slung away from the breast of its mother into the abyss of eternal damnation”[1]
[Now, at this moment a woman fainted away.]
“But, beloved,” continued Dominé W., “God is a God of love. It is not His will that the sinner should perish, but that he should be saved by His mercy in Christ, through faith! And therefore Holland has been selected to save as many as can be saved of these miserable creatures. Therefore He has given power to a country small in extent, but great and strong by the knowledge of God,—power over the inhabitants of those regions, that they may be saved from the torments of hell by the holy, never sufficiently to be praised Gospel. The ships of Holland navigate the great waters, and bring civilisation, religion, Christianity, to the erring Javanese. No, our happy Holland does not desire salvation for itself alone;—we wish to communicate it to the unfortunate creatures on far-off strands, that there lie bound
- ↑ Dominé Wawelaar and the Holy Willie of the Scottish poet Burns appear to have been brought up in the same school of theology.
