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 error were
comparatively few. But now the accumulated arguments of German infidels
for the last half-century may be thrown into a five-cent Sunday paper,
whose issue will reach a quarter of a million of copies, which perhaps a
million of men and women may read. These articles are copied into a
hundred other papers, and they are read in the villages and hamlets;
they are read on the ranches and in the mining camps where no sermon is
ever heard.

It is perfectly evident that in an age like this we cannot propagate
Christianity under glass. It must grow in the open field where the free
winds of heaven shall smite and dissipate every cloud of error that may
pass over it, and where its roots shall only strike the deeper for the
questionings and conflicts that may often befall it. Error cannot be
overcome either by ignoring it or by the cheap but imbecile scolding of
an ignorant pulpit.