CHAPTER VII
CHRISTIANITY NEITHER CREATES NOR CHANGES THE CAPACITY FOR CIVILIZATION
After my arguments on the subject of institutions and climates, I come to another, which I should really have put before all the rest ; not that I think it stronger than they are, but because the facts on which it is based naturally command our reverence. If my conclusions in the preceding chapters are admitted, two points become increasingly evident : first, that most human races are for ever incapable of civilization, so long as they remain unmixed ; secondly, that such races are not only without the inner impulse necessary to start them on the path of im- provement, but also that no external force, however energetic in other respects, is powerful enough to turn their congenital barrenness into fertility. Here we shall be asked, no doubt, whether the light of Christianity is to shine in vain on entire nations, and whether some peoples are doomed never to behold it at all.
Some writers have answered in the affirmative. They have not scrupled to contradict the promise of the Gospel, by denying the most characteristic feature of the new law, which is precisely that of being accessible to all men. Their view merely restates the old formula of the Hebrews, to which it returns by a little larger gate than that of the Old Covenant ; but it returns all the same. I have no desire to follow the champions of this idea, which is condemned by the Church, nor have I the least difficulty in admitting that all human races are gifted with an equal capacity for being received into the bosom of the Christian Communion. Here there is no impediment arising from any original difference between races ; for this purpose their inequalities are of no
account. Religions and their followers are not, as has been
