icle published in the
"Homiletic Review" of September, 1890, recommended to active and
careworn pastors a continued study of the Greek classics, as calculated
to refresh and invigorate the mind, and increase its capacity for the
duties of whatever sphere. All that he said of the Greek may also be
said of the Hindu classics, with the added consideration that in the
latter we are dealing with the living issues of the day. Sir Monier
Williams, in comparing the two great Epics of the Hindus with those of
Homer, names many points of superiority in the former.[18] It is safe to
say that no poems of any other land have ever exercised so great a spell
over so many millions of mankind as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, of
India, and no other production is listened to with such delight as the
story of Rama as it is still publicly read at the Hindu festivals.

Of philosophies, no system of India has approached so near to veritable
divine revelation as that of Plato, but in variety and subtlety, and in
their far-reaching influence upon human life, the Indian schools,
especially the Vedanta, are scarcely excelled to this day. And they are
_applied_ philosophies; they constitute the religion of the people. Max
Mueller has said truly that no other line of investigation is so
fascinating as that which deals with the long and universal struggle of
mankind to find out God, and to solve the mystery of their relations to
him. Unfortunately, human history has dealt mainly with wars and
intrigues, and the rise and fall of dynasties; but compared with these
coarse and superficial elements, how much more interesting and
instructive to trace in all races of men the common and ceaseless
yearnings after some solution of life's mysteries! One is stirred with
a deeper, broader sympathy for mankind when he witnesses this universal
sense of dependence, this fear and trembling before the powers of an
unseen world, this pitiful procession of unblest millions ever trooping
on toward the goal of death and oblivion. And from this standpoint, as
from no other, may one measure the greatness and glory of the Gospel of
Jesus Christ.

To my mind there is nothing more pathetic than the spectacle of
world-wide fetichism. It is not to be contemplated with derision, but
with profoundest sympathy. We all remember the pathos of Scott's picture
of his Highland heroine, with brain disordered by unspeakable grief,
beguiling her woes with childish ornaments of "gaudy