who came to call on him whom he did not wish to see. He was imitated in this by Mencius, when the disciples of Mo Tzu came to call on him; for Mo Tzu's 'universal love,' said Mencius, would bring men into the state of a beast.' From the time of these sages until the present in the matter of veracity the Chinaman has lost all shame. He loves morality and moral maxims, but he lacks that subtle power which only God's Spirit can give, and is thus incapable of putting his moral maxims to a practical use. Of God he knows nothing. His religious nature-that part of his nature which should lead him to reach out after God and heaven and immortality -is almost, if not wholly, undeveloped. 'Living, he lives; dead, he is dead,' is a proverb that is in the mouth of men and women alike; and while in theory he refuses to adopt the sentiments of the ancient Epicurean philosopher, Yang Chu, yet he indicates by his life and talk that he believes what that philosopher taught, that a man may live as a Yao or a Shun, or as a Chieh or a Chou, but when he dies he is nothing but rotten bones in either case. In fact, there is no difference between the bones of a dead saint or a dead rascal. Wherefore, in life let us attend to the things of life; why should we trouble our heads about what is to take place after death?' That is as far as he has gone in his philosophy of a future life. Alive he is alive, dead he is dead.""

Just here the little creature took on that frightened look which is often seen on a squirrel when he sees a man approaching with a gun, jumped down from the ink bottle, and scrambled up over the writer's shoulder and into his ear as quick as a flash of lightning. And, as we turned our head to see who shook us, our wife, with a candle in her hand, said in a playful tone, "Don't you know it is twelve o'clock, and you have been sleeping at your desk? I can see my image in your eye." But we did not tell her what we now record, that the little fellow who had just run into our ear had perhaps climbed up to look out of the window.

Isaac 1. Headland,

ART. IX.-THE TRUE METHOD OF MISSIONARY PROGRESS.

Ir will be found, in comparing the great existing religions, that each of them has some marked point of divergence which when closely interrogated is seen to be an abnormally developed phase of some of the universal bases of religious thinking or fragments of primal revelation, as the case may be, upon which all religions are built. Each faith has brought a fragment into dominating boldness, and builds itself around this as a central proposition. Admitted by all, but slurred over by the others, this fragment becomes for the particular faith its great central truth, often overaccented, and even by its disproportion so destroying symmetry as to seemingly work harm rather than good. The reason for the religion's being and sway, however, is the fragment of truth at its core, and here is the key to its power over the hearts of men.

When any such system comes in contact with Christianity the first disposition is to insolently reject any affiliation with Christianity, because of the obtrusion upon the vision of the alien faith of the points wherein there is disagreement. Christianity is a doughty adversary, and in the conflict of ideas that ensues it is not long before the central feature of the nonChristian faith with its disproportion and abnormal accent is seen to be a kindred truth to some essential teaching of Christianity. The effect is to produce at once a mutual feeling of kinship, and, rightly used, it is a bridge over which the adherents of the alien faith easily pass as individuals to Christianity. Still more important, however, it is the point of contact through which Christianity most profoundly affects, and ultimately promises to control, the alien faith. It is the place in the wild olive where the graft takes place which will change the nature of the tree and the fruit it is to bear.

For illustration-which in some cases approaches demonstration-of how Christianity, when thus it understands and is understood by any alien faith, begins to fraternize in the line where kinship of truth appears, and through this contact of fraternity profoundly modifies and promises wholly to recon

struct the other faiths, vitalizing what is best in them and putting them to extruding the weak and the base in them, let us briefly examine some of the great non-Christian faiths of the world. If, in the case of many of them, it should be found that they have scarcely, if at all, felt the impact of Christianity, it must be remembered that political Christianity has not been exactly fashioned after the pattern of the Sermon on the Mount. That the alien religionists of Europe and Asia have had but small opportunity to learn the real teaching and spirit of Jesus, and have not therefore been best situated to illustrate the molding power of Christian truth, will be admitted. Indeed, the wonder will deepen in the observant mind that under such unfavorable conditions such vast results have already been achieved.

There are eight great religions-Christianity and seven others which have some degree of kinship with her. For we perhaps all recognize that what in any measure tends to create in men an other-worldliness and keeps alive a spirit of religious dependence and a sense, however vague, of something without us that is greater than we, cannot be begotten wholly of evil, however much it may be deformed by evil. Religion, any religion, is primarily of God and is in the main helpful. There are seven chief non-Christian religions, each of them in a sense begotten of some truth, though deformed by error-three Aryan faiths, Brahmanism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism; two Mongolian, Taoism and Confucianism; and two Semitic, Judaism and Mohammedanism. Of these the writer selects Confucianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism, for with these Christian missions are in the main concerned. Where we examine these systems closely and sympathetically we find that each of them is built around one foundation truth, which it holds in common with Christianity, though it has so accented and abnormally developed some particular phase of this truth as to obscure it and, what is more, to cause it to work moral harm. Friendly acquaintance with Christianity, wherever there have been opportunity and time for it, begins at this spot to develop a point of contact. Underneath all verbal oppositions, national and race rivalries, the alien faith and Christianity draw together.

vitalizing force of ChrisHowever long it may be

Through the point of contact the tianity passes into the alien faith. before this neighborly contact begins, once it is had the most astonishing changes are immediately set in motion. These changes, however, call for close observation because they are disguised by the fact that the old vocabulary of the nonChristian faith does not alter. Long after the ideas themselves have changed the old vocabulary will be retained, partly because the changes come almost unconsciously and partly because national and race prejudices prevent frank acknowledgment. But the old terms have new contents, and, what is more, the people who use them will sometimes be found to earnestly agree-and perhaps without conscious dishonesty that the terms always held these new contents. It matters not; the facts bear out the assertion that through some one point of contact the whole religious thinking of alien faiths is being steadily brought more and more to Christian standards and ideals. Nor are the people of these faiths on the one hand, and the active missionaries of Christianity on the other, the best judges of what is transpiring. Their very nearness to the contest in which they are engaged forbids that theirs should be the clearest vision.

But let the facts be examined sympathetically. Take Confucianism. The heart of its teachings is, perhaps, the value of external morality for purposes of stable and good government. What Confucius impressed upon China was the ethics of government. To secure these ethics for stable government he sought to found them on a deep veneration of the past and to multiply ceremony so to invest government, both in the family and State, with the dignity and awe that elaborate ceremonials, gravely discharged, create. Confucius was not a mere formalist. His thought at bottom is the value of religion as a basis for government, the value of patent morality as the reality of religion, the value of ceremonies in adding dignity and impressiveness and in hedging about all outward conduct. And the proof of the vitality of his teaching he demonstrated as a chief magistrate, for in the town he gov erned property became absolutely safe and public virtue was conspicuous. Nor does the solidarity and vitality of the Chi

nese empire fail yet to proclaim the value of the essential truths around which the sage builded. When neighborliness shall have given them opportunity to get closer together Confucianism will find that Christianity agrees with her in teaching the value of religion as a basis for good government; for, though this idea may have been overlooked by Christianity, there is no thoughtful Christian of our day but sees the teaching is there and that the time has fully come for reasserting this truth. The recent annals of our great cities may not be those to which we would invite the gaze of China, but they only the more deeply stir us to remember that Luther's work was an "epic and a tragedy"-an epic in the liberation of the individual, a tragedy in the sacrifice of the community good to a hyper-development of individualism. This, however, is not the teaching of Christianity. "Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others." "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." To do her best work in China, Christianity must recover the teachings of her Founder in Christendom, must see and emphasize his whole truth-the truth of the kingdom as well as the truth of the individual. What Confucianism will then learn, nay, what she is already learning, is the value of the individual below, whose voluntary self-surrender makes the stability of the community and the infinite value of the God above-whose will the individual first yields to, in self-surrender, that he may there get the motive and strength for the voluntary yielding of himself when the community good calls for it. And all this, in some small measure, is what is happening to-day in China.

We turn to an Asiatic faith which is assuredly widely diver gent from Confucianism-Hinduism. What is the central thought of Hinduism? Is it not the immanence of the gods -whether the worshiper shall philosophically hold these many to be but varying forms of the One, or, as is more usual in fact, the many appear as each one ruling in his own department of life? India is oppressed and overladen with gods. Every high hill and every green tree, the rivers, streams, the fields and jungles, the dawn of morning, the dusk of evening, the very circumambient air are all peopled with gods, and all