em twenty-two centuries ago."

I need hardly say, in closing, that it is not necessary to borrow from
the heathen systems of to-day as extensively as the Fathers did from the
systems of Greece and Rome, and it would be discordant with good taste
to illustrate our sermons with quotations from the Hindu poets as
lavishly as good Jeremy Taylor graced his discourses with gems from the
poets of Greece. But I think that we may so far heed the wise examples
furnished by Church history as to face the false systems of our time
with a candid and discriminating spirit, and by a more adequate
knowledge to disenchant the bugbears with which their apologists would
alarm the Church.

We are entering upon the broadest and most momentous struggle with
heathen error that the world has ever witnessed. Again, in this later
age, philosophy and multiform speculation are becoming the handmaids of
Hindu pantheism and Buddhist occultism, as well as of Christian truth.
The resources of the East and the West are combined and subsidized by
the enemy as well as by the Church. As in old Rome and Alexandria, so
now in London and Calcutta all currents of human thought flow together,
and truth is in full grapple with error. It is no time to be idle or to
take refuge in pious ignorance, much less to fear heathen systems as so
many haunted houses which superstitious people dare not enter--as if the
Gospel were not as potent a talisman now as it was ages ago. Let us
fearlessly enter these abodes of darkness, throw open the shutters, and
let in the light of day, and the hobgoblins will flee. Let us explore
every dark recess, winnow out the miasma and the mildew with the pure
air of heaven, and the Sun of Righteousness shall fill the world.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 20: _The Norsemen_, Maclear.]

[Footnote 21: The Druid bard Taliesen says: "Christ, the Word from the
beginning, was from the beginning our teacher, and we never lost His
teaching. Christianity was a new thing in Asia, but there never was a
time when the Druids of Britain held not its doctrines."--_St. Paul in
Britain_, p. 86.]

[Footnote 22: Uhlhorn's _Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism_.]

[Footnote 23: The same dualism of the male and the female principle is
found in the Shinto of Japan. See Chamberlain's translation of the
_Kojiki_.]

[Footnote 24: The late George Eliot has given expression to this grim
solace, and Mr. John Fiske, in his _Destiny of Man_, claims that the
goal