d
they are discussed with favorable or unfavorable comments in the monthly
magazines. The missionary enterprise has come to attract great
attention: it has many friends, and also many foes, here at home; it is
misrepresented by scoffers at our doors. The high merits of heathen
systems, set forth with every degree of exaggeration, pass into the
hands of Christian families, in books and magazines and secular papers.
Apostles of infidelity are sent out to heathen countries to gather
weapons against the truth. Natives of various Oriental lands, once
taught in our mission schools perhaps, but still heathen, are paraded on
our lecture platforms, where they entertain us with English and American
arguments in support of their heathen systems and against Christianity.
Young pastors, in the literary clubs of their various communities, are
surprised by being called to discuss plausible papers on Buddhism, which
some fellow-member has contributed, and they are expected to defend the
truth. Or some young parishioner has been fascinated by a plausible
Theosophist, or has learned from Robert Elsmere that there are other
religions quite as pure and sacred as our own. Or some chance lecturer
has disturbed the community with a discourse on the history of religious
myths. And when some anxious member of a church learns that his
religious instructor has no help for him on such subjects, that they lie
wholly outside of his range, there is apt to be something more than
disappointment: there is a loss of confidence.

It is an unfortunate element in the case that error is more welcome in
some of our professedly neutral papers than the truth: an article
designed to show that Christianity was borrowed from Buddhism or was
developed from fetichism will sometimes be welcomed as new sensation,
while a reply of half the length may be rejected.

There is something ominous in these facts. Whether the secular press
(not all papers are thus unfair) are influenced by partisan hatred of
the truth or simply by a reckless regard for whatever is most popular,
the facts are equally portentous. And if it be true that such
publications are what the people most desire, the outlook for our
country is dark indeed. The saddest consideration is that the power of
the secular press is so vast and far reaching. When Celsus wrote, books
were few. When Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Paine made their assailments
on the Christian faith, the means of spreading the blight of er