false systems by missionaries, pertain also to those who remain at home.
Both are concerned in the same cause, and both encounter the same
assailments of our common faith. We are all missionaries in an important
sense: we watch the conflict from afar, but we are concerned in all its
issues. The bulletins of its battle-fields are no longer confined to
missionary literature; they are found in the daily secular press, and
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