ed to admit the
truth, until they could calculate the probable effect of their
admissions.

The very best experience of missionaries has been found in the line of
Christ's example. "The surest way to bring a man to acknowledge his
errors," says Bishop Bloomfield, "is to give him full credit for
whatever he had learned of the truth."[12] "What should we think," says
a keen observer of the work of missions--"what should we think of an
engineer who, in attempting to rear a light-house on a sandbar, should
fail to acknowledge as a godsend any chance outcropping of solid rock to
which he might fasten his stays?"[13]

But in urging the duty of candor, I assume that an absolute freedom from
bias is impossible on either side. It is sometimes amusing to witness
the assurance with which professed agnostics assume that they, and they
alone, look upon questions of comparative religion with an unbiased and
judicial mind. They have no belief, they say, in any religion, and are
therefore entirely without prejudice. But are they? Has the man who has
forsaken the faith of his fathers and is deeply sensible of an
antagonism between him and the great majority of those about him--has he
no interest in trying to substantiate his position, and justify his
hostility to the popular faith? Of all men he is generally the most
prejudiced and the most bitter. We freely admit that we set out with a
decided preference for one religious system above all others, but we
insist that candor is possible, though an absolutely indifferent
judgment is out of the question. Paul, who quoted to the Athenians their
own poet, was fair-minded, and yet no man ever arraigned heathenism so
terribly as he, and none was so intensely interested in the faith which
he preached.

Archbishop Trench, in discussing the exaggerations from which a careful
study of the Oriental religions would doubtless save us, says, "There is
one against which we are almost unwilling to say a word. I mean the
exaggeration of those who, in a deep devotion to the truth as it is in
Christ Jesus, count themselves bound, by their allegiance to Him, to
take up a hostile attitude to everything not distinctly and avowedly
Christian, as though any other position were a treachery to his cause,
and a surrender of his exclusive right to the authorship of all the good
which is in the world. In this temper we may dwell only on the guilt and
misery and defilements, the wounds and bruises and putrefying so