t pantheism in which the deity within us supplants all
individual personality, and not only excludes all joy, but all
responsibility.

Professor W.G.T. Shedd has clearly pointed out the fact that the modern
missionary has a harder task in dealing with the perversions of the
heathen mind than that to which the Apostles of the Early Church were
called, owing to the prevalence in India and elsewhere of that pantheism
which destroys the sense of moral responsibility. He says: "The Greek
and Roman theism left the human will free and responsible, and thus the
doctrine of sin could be taught. But the pantheistic systems of the East
destroy free will, by identifying God and man; and hence it is
impossible to construct the doctrine of sin and atonement except by
first refuting the pantheistic ethics. The missionary can get no help
from _conscience_ in his preaching, when this theory of God and the
world has the ground. But St. Paul appealed confidently 'to every man's
conscience in the sight of God,' and called upon the ethics and theology
of the Greek and Roman philosophers for a corroboration. The early
Apologists, Tertullian and others, did the same thing."

The testimonies which have been given within the last few years, by the
most intelligent and observing missionaries in Eastern lands, are of
such peculiar significance and force, that I shall be justified in
quoting a few at some length. Rev. George William Knox, D.D., of Tokio,
Japan, in accepting an election to an honorary membership of the
American Society of Comparative Religion, wrote, December 17, 1890: "I
am deeply in sympathy with the objects of the Society, as indeed every
missionary must be. We have practical demonstrations of the value of
research into the ethnic religions. Even at home the value of such
research has already been great, but in these non-Christian lands it is
indispensable. It is true that non-Christian systems, as found among the
people, rarely exhibit the forms or the doctrines which we learn from
books, but I presume the same would be said by an intelligent Asiatic,
were he to study our sacred books and then compare results with much of
the religion which calls itself Christian in the West. And yet for the
study even of the most debased forms of Christianity in South America or
Mexico, let us say, we must needs begin with our sacred books. And so
it is with debased Buddhism in Japan. The Buddhism of Ceylon and of the
books is unknown to this