lan is fraught with disadvantages. What is
needed is a thorough preparation in all missionaries, and that involves
an indispensable knowledge of the forces to be met. The power of the
press is no longer a monopoly of Christian lands. The Arya Somaj, of
India, is now using it, both in the vernacular and in the English, in
its bitter and often scurrilous attacks. One of its tracts recently sent
to me contained an English epitome of the arguments of Thomas Paine. The
secular papers of Japan present in almost every issue some discussion on
the comparative merits of Christianity, Buddhism, Evolution, and
Theosophy, and many of the young native ministry who at first received
the truth unquestioningly as a child receives it from his mother, are
now calling for men whom they can follow as leaders in their struggle
with manifold error.[7]

Even Mohammedans are at last employing the press instead of the sword.
Newspapers in Constantinople are exhorting the faithful to send forth
missionaries to "fortify Africa against the whiskey and gunpowder of
Christian commerce, by proclaiming the higher ethical principles of the
Koran." Great institutions of learning are also maintained as the
special propaganda of the Oriental religions. El Azar, established at
Cairo centuries ago, now numbers ten thousand students, and these when
trained go forth to all Arabic speaking countries.[8] The Sanskrit
colleges and monasteries of Benares number scarcely less than four
thousand students,[9] who are being trained in the Sankhyan or the
Vedanta philosophy, that they may go back to their different provinces
and maintain with new vigor the old faiths against the aggressions of
Christianity. And in Kioto, the great religious centre of Japan, we find
over against the Christian college of the American Board of Missions, a
Buddhist university with a Japanese graduate of Oxford as its president.
In a great school at Tokio, also, Buddhist teachers, aided by New
England Unitarians, are maintaining the superiority of Buddhism over
Western Christianity as a religion for Japan.[10]

Another reason why the missionary should study the false systems is
found in the greatly diversified forms which these systems present in
different lands and different ages. And just here it will be seen that a
partial knowledge will not meet the demand. It might be even misleading.
Buddhism, for example, has assumed an endless variety of forms--now
appearing as a system of the bal