he favored
son of a king may enjoy his special advantages and yet admit that the
less favored are equally sons. The name of Christianity only ceases to
excite respect when it is used to represent any false or exclusive
claims, or when it takes the place of the older and grander words,
"Religion" and "Virtue." When we fully comprehend the sympathy of
religions we shall deal with other faiths on equal terms. We shall
cease trying to free men from one superstition by inviting them into
another. The true missionaries are the men inside each religion who
have outgrown its limitations. But no Christian missionary has ever
yet consented to meet the men of other religions upon the common
ground of Theism. In Bishop Heber's time, the Hindoo reformer Swaamee
Narain was teaching purity and peace, the unity of God, and the
abolition of castes. Many thousands of men followed his teachings, and
whole villages and districts were raised from the worst immorality by
his labors, as the Bishop himself bears witness. But the good Bishop
seems to have despaired of him as soon as Swaamee Narain refused
conversion to Christianity, making the objection that God was not
incarnated in one man, but in many. Then came Ram Mohun Roy, forty
years ago, and argued from the Vedas against idolatry, caste, and the
burning of widows. He also refused to be called a Christian, and the
missionaries denounced him. Now comes Keshub Chunder Sen, with his
generous utterances: "We profess the universal and absolute religion,
whose cardinal doctrines are the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood
of Man, and which accepts the truths of all scriptures, and honors the
prophets of all nations." The movement reaches thousands whom no
foreign influence could touch; yet the Methodist missionaries denounce
it in the name of Christ, and even the little Unitarian mission opens
against it a battery of a single gun. It is the same with our
treatment of the Jews. According to Bayard Taylor, Christendom
converts annually three or four Jews in Jerusalem, at a cost of
$20,000 each. Nothing has been more criticised in the course of the
Free Religious Association than its admission of Jews as equals on its
platform; and yet the reformed Jews in America have already gone in
advance of the most liberal Christian sects in their width of
religious sympathy. "The happiness of man," says Rabbi Wise, in
speaking for them, "depends on no creed and no book; it depends on the
dominion of tru