current among us. But strangely enough, the Christian Church has seemed
to regard this subject as scarcely worthy of serious consideration. With
the exception of a very able work on Buddhism,[1] and several review
articles on Hinduism, written by Professor S.H. Kellogg, very little has
been published from the Christian standpoint.[2] The term "heathenism"
has been used as an expression of contempt, and has been applied with
too little discrimination.

There is a reason, perhaps, why these systems have been underestimated.
It so happened that the races among whom the modern missionary
enterprise has carried on its earlier work were mostly simple types of
pagans, found in the wilds of America, in Greenland and Labrador, in the
West Indies, on the African coast, or in the islands of the Pacific; and
these worshippers of nature or of spirits gave a very different
impression from that which the Apostles and the Early Church gained from
their intercourse with the conquering Romans or the polished and
philosophic Greeks. Our missionary work has been symbolized, as Sir
William W. Hunter puts it, by a band of half-naked savages listening to
a missionary seated under a palm-tree, and receiving his message with
child-like and unquestioning faith.

But in the opening of free access to the great Asiatic nations, higher
grades of men have been found, and with these we now have chiefly to do.
The pioneer of India's missions, the devoted Ziegenbalg, had not been
long in his field before he learned the mistake which the churches in
Europe had made in regard to the religion and philosophy of the Hindus.
He laid aside all his old notions when he came to encounter the
metaphysical subtleties of Hindu thought, when he learned something of
the immense Hindu literature, the voluminous ethics, the mystical and
weird mythologies, the tremendous power of tradition and social