ambassadors to the heathen of to-day,
are ourselves exposed to the dangers which result from wealth and
excessive luxury. Our grade of life, our scale of expenditure, even the
style in which our missionaries live, excites the amazement of the
frugal heathen to whom they preach. And as for the Church at home, it is
hardly safe for a Persian or a Chinaman to see it. Everyone who visits
this wonderful eldorado carries back such romantic impressions as excite
in others, not so much the love of the Gospel as the love of mammon.
When the Church went forth in comparative poverty, and with an intense
moral earnestness, to preach righteousness, temperance, and the judgment
to come; when those who were wealthy gave all to the poor--like Anthony
of Egypt, Jerome, Ambrose, and Francis of Assisi--and in simple garments
bore the Gospel to those who were surfeited with luxuries and pleasures,
and were sick of a life of mere indulgence, then the truth of the Gospel
conquered heathenism with all that the world could give. But whether a
Church in the advanced civilization of our land and time, possessed of
enormous wealth, enjoying every luxury, and ever anxious to gain more
and more of this present world, can convert heathen races who deem
themselves more frugal, more temperate, and less worldly than we, is a
problem which remains to be solved. We have rare facilities, but we have
great drawbacks. God's grace can overcome even our defects, and He has
promised success.

But in the proud intellectual character of the systems encountered
respectively by the ancient and by the modern Church, there are
remarkable parallels. The supercilious pride of Brahminism, or the lofty
scorn of Mohammedanism, is quite equal to that self-sufficient Greek
philosophy in whose eyes the Gospel was the merest foolishness. And the
immovable self-righteousness of the Stoics has its counterpart in the
Confucianism of the Chinese literati. A careful comparison of the six
schools of Hindu philosophy with the various systems of Greece and
Rome, will fill the mind with surprise at the numerous
correspondences--one might almost say identities. And that surprise is
the greater from the fact that no proof exists that either has been
borrowed from the other.

The atomic theory of creation advanced by Lucretius is found also in the
Nyaya philosophy of the Hindus. The pessimism of Pliny and Marcus
Aurelius was much more elaborately worked out by Gautama. The Hindus had