no danger. Sir Monier Williams tells us that at first he was surprised
and a little troubled, but in the end he was more than ever impressed
with the transcendent truths of the Christian faith. Professor S.H.
Kellogg assures us that the result of his careful researches in the
Oriental systems is a profounder conviction of the great truths of the
Gospel as divine. And even Max Müller testifies that, while making every
allowance for whatever is good in the ethnic faiths, he has been the
more fully convinced of the great superiority of Christianity. Really,
those are in danger who receive only the superficial and misleading
representations of heathenism which one is sure to meet in our magazine
literature, or in works like "Robert Elsmere" and "The Light of Asia."

One cannot fail to mark the different light in which we view the
mythologies of the Greeks and Romans. If their religious beliefs and
speculations had remained a secret until our time, if the high ethical
precepts of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius had only now been proclaimed, and
Socrates had just been celebrated in glowing verse as the "Light of
Greece," there would be no little commotion in the religious world, and
thousands with only weak and troubled faith might be disturbed. But
simply because we thoroughly understand the mythology of Greece and
Rome, we have no fear. We welcome all that it can teach us. We cordially
acknowledge the virtues of Socrates and assign him his true place. We
enrich the fancy and awaken the intellectual energies of our youth by
classical studies, and Christianity shines forth with new lustre by
contrast with the heathen systems which it encountered in the Roman
Empire ages ago.

And yet that was no easy conquest. The early church, when brought face
to face with the culture of Greece and the self-assertion of Roman
power, when confronted with profound philosophies like those of Plato