The Missionary and Comparative Religion
Students of "Comparative Religion," as it is called, have insisted upon the "study of the ancient religions," that thereby we may understand what Max Muller styles "the divine education of the human race." Poets have taken their old and romantic legends and woven them into attractive stories, where the constant implication is that just as the good and beautiful and true are conjoined in Christianity, so are they in the faiths which it proposes to displace. Very sage advice is often tendered to Christian missionaries by all-knowing editors and writers of articles for magazines, in which they are counseled to hunt out the good things which are embosomed in these old religions, and found their instruction on them, and not prejudice their cause and offend the people by demanding the instant and utter abandonment of their traditional faiths. It certainly adds to the discouragements of the Christian missionary that he is forced to the conviction that while he is confronting the dark and terrible systems of error in the lands where they are dominant, a latent skepticism behind him is imbuing the public mind, and to some extent the Christian mind, with the thought that his work is needless and therefore valueless, and that he is doing no service to the poor men whom he persuades to surrender their hereditary faith and accept the new gospel which he brings.—Sel.