re and Free Religion. All told there are not, probably, among the
eighty millions of our people, more than a million and a half who are
not either traditionally or nominally Christians.

Our contact with the Orient, on our western frontier, is likely,
however, to bring us into close relations, in the near future, with
other ancient forms of faith. The Christian church in modern life will
be compelled to meet questions raised by the presence of Buddhists and
Confucians and Mohammedans, and to prove its superiority to these
religions. The study of comparative religion has had hitherto purely an
academic interest for most of us; in the present century it is likely to
become for millions a practical question. Many a young man and young
woman will be forced to ask: "Why is the religion of my fathers a better
religion than that of my Hindu associate or my Japanese classmate?" The
answer, if wisely given, may be entirely satisfactory, but the question
must not be treated as absurd or irrelevant. In the face of the great
competitions into which it must enter, our religion must be ready to
give an intelligent account of itself.

One of the first questions to be asked when we take up this inquiry is,
What is the attitude of our religion toward the other religions? Perhaps
it is better to put the question in a concrete form and ask, What is the
attitude of the Christian people toward the people of other religions?

The answer to this question may not be as prompt and confident as we
could wish. Many, people who profess and call themselves Christians are
not so broad-minded or so generous hearted as they ought to be, and they
are inclined to be partisans in religion as well as in art or politics;
they think that all the truth and all the goodness are in the
institutions with which they are allied, and that all the rest are of
the evil one. But such people are not good representatives of
Christianity. They never learned any such judgment from him whom they
call their Master. And we may safely claim that those who have the mind
of Christ are tolerant and generous toward those whose opinions or whose
religious practices differ from their own. They do not forget that their
Master treated with the greatest sympathy men and women whose faiths
greatly differed from his own; that some of those who received his
strongest testimonies to the greatness of their faith, like the Roman
centurion and the Canaanitish woman, were pagans; that one o