Even Mohammedans are at last employing the press instead of the sword.  Newspapers in Constantinople are exhorting the faithful to send forth missionaries to “fortify Africa against the whiskey and gunpowder of Christian commerce, by proclaiming the higher ethical principles of the Koran.”  Great institutions of learning are also maintained as the special propaganda of the Oriental religions.  El Azar, established at Cairo centuries ago, now numbers ten thousand students, and these when trained go forth to all Arabic speaking countries.[8] The Sanskrit colleges and monasteries of Benares number scarcely less than four thousand students,[9] who are being trained in the Sankhyan or the Vedanta philosophy, that they may go back to their different provinces and maintain with new vigor the old faiths against the aggressions of Christianity.  And in Kioto, the great religious centre of Japan, we find over against the Christian college of the American Board of Missions, a Buddhist university with a Japanese graduate of Oxford as its president.  In a great school at Tokio, also, Buddhist teachers, aided by New England Unitarians, are maintaining the superiority of Buddhism over Western Christianity as a religion for Japan.[10]

Another reason why the missionary should study the false systems is found in the greatly diversified forms which these systems present in different lands and different ages.  And just here it will be seen that a partial knowledge will not meet the demand.  It might be even misleading.  Buddhism, for example, has assumed an endless variety of forms—­now appearing as a system of the baldest atheism, and now presenting an approximate theism.  Gautama was certainly atheistic, and he virtually denied the existence of the human soul.  But in the northern development of his system, theistic conceptions sprang up.  A sort of trinity had appeared by the seventh century A.D., and by the tenth century a supreme and celestial Buddha had been discovered, from whom all other Buddhas were emanations.  To-day there are at least twelve Buddhist sects in Japan, of which some are mystical, others pantheistic, while two hold a veritable doctrine of salvation by faith.[11]

China has several types of Buddhism, and Mongolia, Thibet, Nepaul, Ceylon, Burmah, and Siam present each some special features of the system.  How important that one should understand these differences in order to avoid blundering, and to wisely adapt his efforts!  In India, under the common generic name of Hinduism, there are also many sects:  worshippers of Vishnu, worshippers of Siva, worshippers of Krishna.  There are Sikhs, and Jains, and devil worshippers; among the Dravidian and other pre-Aryan tribes there are victims of every conceivable superstition.