Archbishop Trench, in discussing the exaggerations from which a careful study of the Oriental religions would doubtless save us, says, “There is one against which we are almost unwilling to say a word.  I mean the exaggeration of those who, in a deep devotion to the truth as it is in Christ Jesus, count themselves bound, by their allegiance to Him, to take up a hostile attitude to everything not distinctly and avowedly Christian, as though any other position were a treachery to his cause, and a surrender of his exclusive right to the authorship of all the good which is in the world.  In this temper we may dwell only on the guilt and misery and defilements, the wounds and bruises and putrefying sores of the heathen world; or if aught better is brought under our eye, we may look askant and suspiciously upon it, as though all recognition of it were a disparagement of something better.  And so we may come to regard the fairest deeds of unbaptized men as only more splendid sins.  We may have a short but decisive formula by which to try and by which to condemn them.  These deeds, we may say, were not of faith, and therefore they could not please God; the men that wrought them knew not Christ, and therefore their work was worthless—­hay, straw, and stubble, to be utterly burned up in the day of the trial of every man’s work.

“Yet there is indeed a certain narrowness of view, out of which alone the language of so sweeping a condemnation could proceed.  Our allegiance to Christ, as the one fountain of light and life for the world, demands that we affirm none to be good but Him, allow no goodness save that which has proceeded from Him; but it does not demand that we deny goodness, because of the place where we find it, because we meet it, a garden tree, in the wilderness.  It only requires that we claim this for Him who planted, and was willing that it should grow there; whom it would itself have gladly owned as its author, if, belonging to a happier time, it could have known Him by his name, whom in part it knew by his power.

“We do not make much of a light of nature when we admit a righteousness in those to whom in the days of their flesh the Gospel had not come.  We only affirm that the Word, though not as yet dwelling among us, yet being the ‘light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world,’ had also lighted them.  Some glimpses of his beams gilded their countenances, and gave to these whatever brightness they wore; and in recognizing this brightness we are ascribing honor to Him, and not to them; glorifying the grace of God, and not the virtues of man."[14]

In marked contrast with this, and tending to an extreme, is the following, from the pen of Bishop Beveridge.  It is quoted by Max Mueller, in the opening volume of “The Sacred Books of the East,” as a model of candor.