There are some specific advantages flowing from the study of other religions of which I will give little more than an enumeration.

1.  It impresses us with the universality of some more or less distinct conception of God.  I am aware that from time to time explorers imagine that they have found a race of men who have no notion of God, but in almost every instance subsequent investigation has found a religious belief.  Such mistakes were made concerning the aborigines of Australia, the Dyaks of Borneo, the Papuans, the Patagonians, and even the American Indians.  The unity of the race finds a new and striking proof in the universality of religion.

2.  The study of false systems brings to light an almost unanimous testimony for the existence of a vague primeval monotheism, and thus affords a strong presumptive corroboration of the Scriptural doctrine of man’s apostasy from the worship of the true God.

3.  The clearest vindication of the severities of the Old Testament Theocracy, in its wars of extermination against the Canaanites and Phoenicians, is to be found in a careful study of the foul and cruel types of heathenism which those nations carried with them wherever their colonies extended.  A religion which enjoined universal prostitution, and led thus to sodomy and the burning of young children in the fires of Moloch, far exceeded the worst heathenism of Africa or the islands of the Pacific.  The Phoenician settlements on the Mediterranean have not even yet recovered from the moral blight of that religion; and had such a cultus been allowed to spread over all Europe and the world, not even a second Deluge could have cleansed the earth of its defilement.  The extermination of the Canaanites, when considered as a part of one great scheme for establishing in that same Palestine a purer and nobler faith, and sending forth thence, not Phoenician corruption, but the Gospel of Peace to all lands, becomes a work of mercy to the human race.

4.  The ethics of the heathen will be found to vindicate the doctrines of the Bible.  This is a point which should be more thoroughly understood.  It has been common to parade the high moral maxims of heathen systems as proofs against the exclusive claims of Christianity.  But when carefully considered, the lofty ethical truths found in all sacred books and traditions, corroborate the doctrines of the Scriptures.  They condemn the nations “who hold the truth in unrighteousness.”  They enforce the great doctrine that by their own consciences all mankind are convicted of sin, and are in need of a vicarious righteousness,—­a full and free salvation by a divine power.  My own experience has been, and it is corroborated by that of many others, that very many truths of the Gospel, when seen from the stand-point of heathenism, stand out with a clearness never seen before.