. No sensible missionary
could bring himself to tell a man who has done all that he could do,
and more than many who have received the true light of the Gospel,
that he was excluded from all hope of salvation, and by his very birth
and colour handed over irretrievably to eternal damnation. It is
possible to put a charitable interpretation on many doctrines of
ancient heathenism, and the practical missionary is constantly obliged
to do so. Let us only consider what these doctrines are. They are not
theories devised by men who wish to keep out the truth of
Christianity, but sacred traditions which millions of human beings are
born and brought up to believe in, as we are born and brought up to
believe in Christianity. It is the only spiritual food which God in
his wisdom has placed within their reach. But if we once begin to
think of modern heathenism, and how certain tenets of Lao-tse resemble
the doctrines of Comte or Spinoza, our equanimity, our historical
justice, our Christian charity, are gone. We become advocates
wrangling for victory--we are no longer tranquil observers,
compassionate friends and teachers. Mr. Hardwick sometimes addresses
himself to men like Lao-tse or Buddha, who are now dead and gone more
than two thousand years, in a tone of offended orthodoxy, which may or
may not be right in modern controversy, but which entirely disregards
the fact that it has pleased God to let these men and millions of
human beings be born on earth without a chance of ever hearing of the
existence of the Gospel. We cannot penetrate into the secrets of the
Divine wisdom, but we are bound to believe that God has His purpose in
all things, and that He will know how to judge those to whom so little
has been given. Christianity does not require of us that we should
criticise, with our own small wisdom, that Divine policy which has
governed the whole world from the very beginning. We pity a man who is
born blind--we are not angry with him; and Mr. Hardwick, in his
arguments against the tenets of Buddha or Lao-tse, seems to us to
treat these men too much in the spirit of a policeman who tells a poor
blind beggar that he is only shamming blindness. However, if, as a
Christian Advocate, Mr. Hardwick found it impossible to entertain, or
at least express, any sympathy with the Pagan world, even the cold
judgment of the historian would have been better than the excited
pleading of a partisan. Surely it is not necessary, in order to prov