The missionary has often been surprised to find that the idea which he supposed was clearly understood, was wholly warped by the medium of Hindu thought, as a rod is apparently warped when plunged into a stream, or as a beautiful countenance is distorted by the waves and irregularities of an imperfect mirror.  To the preacher, sin, for example, is an enormity in the sight of God; but to his Hindu listener it may be only a breach of custom, or a ceremonial uncleanness.  The indwelling of the Holy Spirit, as it is set forth in Paul’s Epistles, is to the missionary a union in which his personality is still maintained in blest fellowship with God, while to his audience it may be only that out and out pantheism in which the deity within us supplants all individual personality, and not only excludes all joy, but all responsibility.

Professor W.G.T.  Shedd has clearly pointed out the fact that the modern missionary has a harder task in dealing with the perversions of the heathen mind than that to which the Apostles of the Early Church were called, owing to the prevalence in India and elsewhere of that pantheism which destroys the sense of moral responsibility.  He says:  “The Greek and Roman theism left the human will free and responsible, and thus the doctrine of sin could be taught.  But the pantheistic systems of the East destroy free will, by identifying God and man; and hence it is impossible to construct the doctrine of sin and atonement except by first refuting the pantheistic ethics.  The missionary can get no help from conscience in his preaching, when this theory of God and the world has the ground.  But St. Paul appealed confidently ’to every man’s conscience in the sight of God,’ and called upon the ethics and theology of the Greek and Roman philosophers for a corroboration.  The early Apologists, Tertullian and others, did the same thing.”

The testimonies which have been given within the last few years, by the most intelligent and observing missionaries in Eastern lands, are of such peculiar significance and force, that I shall be justified in quoting a few at some length.  Rev. George William Knox, D.D., of Tokio, Japan, in accepting an election to an honorary membership of the American Society of Comparative Religion, wrote, December 17, 1890:  “I am deeply in sympathy with the objects of the Society, as indeed every missionary must be.  We have practical demonstrations of the value of research into the ethnic religions.  Even at home the value of such research has already been great, but in these non-Christian lands it is indispensable.  It is true that non-Christian systems, as found among the people, rarely exhibit the forms or the doctrines which we learn from books, but I presume the same would be said by an intelligent Asiatic, were he to study our sacred books and then compare results with much of the religion which calls itself Christian in the West.  And yet for the study even of the most debased forms of Christianity in South America or