A specific reason for the study of the non-Christian religions is found in the changes which our intercourse with Eastern nations has already wrought.  With our present means of intercommunication we are brought face to face with them, and the contact of our higher vitality has aroused them from the comparative slumber of ages.  Even our missionary efforts have given new vigor to the resistance which must be encountered.  We have trained up a generation of men to a higher intellectual activity, and to a more earnest spirit of inquiry, and they are by no means all won over to the Christian faith.  And there are thousands in India whom a Government education has left with no real faith of any kind, but whose pride of race and venerable customs is raised to a higher degree than ever.  They have learned something of Christianity; they have also studied their own national systems; they have become especially familiar with all that our own sceptics have written against Christianity; still further, they have added to their intellectual equipment all that Western apologists have said of the superiority of the Oriental faiths.  They are thus armed at every point, and they are using our own English tongue and all our facilities for publication.  How is the young missionary, who knows nothing of their systems or the real points of comparison, to deal with such men?  It is very true that not all ranks of Hindus are educated; there are millions who know nothing of any religion beyond the lowest forms of superstition, and to these we owe the duty of a simple and plain presentation of Christ and Him crucified; but in every community where the missionary is likely to live there are men of the higher class just named; and besides, professional critics and opposers are now employed to harass the bazaar preacher with perplexing questions, which are soon heard from the lips of the common people.  A young missionary recently wrote of the surprise which he felt when a low caste man, almost without clothing, met him with arguments from Professor Huxley.

Missionary Boards have sometimes sent out a specialist, and in some sense a champion, who should deal with the more intelligent classes of the heathen.  But such a plan is fraught with disadvantages.  What is needed is a thorough preparation in all missionaries, and that involves an indispensable knowledge of the forces to be met.  The power of the press is no longer a monopoly of Christian lands.  The Arya Somaj, of India, is now using it, both in the vernacular and in the English, in its bitter and often scurrilous attacks.  One of its tracts recently sent to me contained an English epitome of the arguments of Thomas Paine.  The secular papers of Japan present in almost every issue some discussion on the comparative merits of Christianity, Buddhism, Evolution, and Theosophy, and many of the young native ministry who at first received the truth unquestioningly as a child receives it from his mother, are now calling for men whom they can follow as leaders in their struggle with manifold error.[7]