Now, a missionary must know something of these faiths if he would fight with “weapons of precision.”  Paul, in becoming all things to all men, knew at least the differences between them.  He preached the gospel with a studied adaptation.  He tells us that he so strove as to win, and “not as those who beat the air.”  How alert were the combatants in the arena from which his simile is borrowed!  How closely each athlete scanned his man, watched his every motion, knew if possible his every thought and impulse!  Much more, in winning the souls of darkened and misguided men, should we learn the inmost workings of their minds, their habits of thought, and the nature of the errors which are to be dislodged.

But how shall the false systems of religions be studied?  First, there should be a spirit of entire candor.  Truth is to be sought always, and at any cost; but in this case there is everything to be gained and nothing to be lost by the Christian teacher, and he can well afford to be just.  Our divine Exemplar never hesitated to acknowledge that which was good in men of whatever nationality or creed.  He could appreciate the faith of Roman or Syro-Phoenician.  He could see merit in a Samaritan as well as in a Jew, and could raise even a penitent publican to the place of honor.  It was only the Pharisees who hesitated to admit the truth, until they could calculate the probable effect of their admissions.

The very best experience of missionaries has been found in the line of Christ’s example.  “The surest way to bring a man to acknowledge his errors,” says Bishop Bloomfield, “is to give him full credit for whatever he had learned of the truth."[12] “What should we think,” says a keen observer of the work of missions—­“what should we think of an engineer who, in attempting to rear a light-house on a sandbar, should fail to acknowledge as a godsend any chance outcropping of solid rock to which he might fasten his stays?"[13]

But in urging the duty of candor, I assume that an absolute freedom from bias is impossible on either side.  It is sometimes amusing to witness the assurance with which professed agnostics assume that they, and they alone, look upon questions of comparative religion with an unbiased and judicial mind.  They have no belief, they say, in any religion, and are therefore entirely without prejudice.  But are they?  Has the man who has forsaken the faith of his fathers and is deeply sensible of an antagonism between him and the great majority of those about him—­has he no interest in trying to substantiate his position, and justify his hostility to the popular faith?  Of all men he is generally the most prejudiced and the most bitter.  We freely admit that we set out with a decided preference for one religious system above all others, but we insist that candor is possible, though an absolutely indifferent judgment is out of the question.  Paul, who quoted to the Athenians their own poet, was fair-minded, and yet no man ever arraigned heathenism so terribly as he, and none was so intensely interested in the faith which he preached.