tury of contact with
missionaries and other Christian residents. It has approved the more
humane customs and reforms of Christendom, denouncing caste, and the
degradation of woman. It has repudiated the corrupt rites and the
degrading superstitions of Hinduism. At the same time its hatred of the
Christian faith is most bitter and intense.

And there are other alliances, not a few, between the East and the West.
In India and Japan the old Buddhism is compounded with American
Spiritualism and with modern Evolution, under a new application of the
ancient name of Theosophy. In Japan representatives of advanced
Unitarianism are exhorting the Japanese Buddhists to build the religion
of the future on their old foundations, and to avoid the propagandists
of western Christianity.

The bland and easy-going catholicity which professes so much in our day,
which embraces all faiths and unfaiths in one sweet emulsion of
meaningless negations, which patronizes the Christ and His doctrines,
and applies the nomenclature of Christianity to doctrines the very
opposite of its teachings, finds a counterpart in the smooth and vapid
compromises of the old Gnostics. "Gnosticism," says Uhlhorn, "combined
Greek philosophies, Jewish theology, and ancient Oriental theosophy,
thus forming great systems of speculative thought, all with the object
of displaying the world's development. From a pantheistic First Cause,
Gnosticism traced the emanation of a series of aeons--beings of Light.
The source of evil was supposed to be matter, which in this material
world holds light in captivity. To liberate the light and thus redeem
the world, Christ came, and thus Christianity was added as the crowning
and victorious element in this many-sided system of speculation. But
Christ was regarded not so much as a Saviour of individual souls as an
emancipator of a disordered kosmos, and the system which seemed to
accord great honor to Christianity threatened to destroy its life and
power." So, according to some of our Modern Systems, men are to find
their future salvation in the grander future of the race.[24]

Not only do we encounter mixtures of truth and error, but we witness
similar attempts to prove that whatever is best in Christianity was
borrowed from heathenism. Porphyry and others maintained that Pythagoras
and Theosebius had anticipated many of the attributes and deeds of
Christ, and Philostratus was prompted by the wife of Severus to write a
history of