Many prudential reasons like those which we have given for the study of false systems by missionaries, pertain also to those who remain at home.  Both are concerned in the same cause, and both encounter the same assailments of our common faith.  We are all missionaries in an important sense:  we watch the conflict from afar, but we are concerned in all its issues.  The bulletins of its battle-fields are no longer confined to missionary literature; they are found in the daily secular press, and they are discussed with favorable or unfavorable comments in the monthly magazines.  The missionary enterprise has come to attract great attention:  it has many friends, and also many foes, here at home; it is misrepresented by scoffers at our doors.  The high merits of heathen systems, set forth with every degree of exaggeration, pass into the hands of Christian families, in books and magazines and secular papers.  Apostles of infidelity are sent out to heathen countries to gather weapons against the truth.  Natives of various Oriental lands, once taught in our mission schools perhaps, but still heathen, are paraded on our lecture platforms, where they entertain us with English and American arguments in support of their heathen systems and against Christianity.  Young pastors, in the literary clubs of their various communities, are surprised by being called to discuss plausible papers on Buddhism, which some fellow-member has contributed, and they are expected to defend the truth.  Or some young parishioner has been fascinated by a plausible Theosophist, or has learned from Robert Elsmere that there are other religions quite as pure and sacred as our own.  Or some chance lecturer has disturbed the community with a discourse on the history of religious myths.  And when some anxious member of a church learns that his religious instructor has no help for him on such subjects, that they lie wholly outside of his range, there is apt to be something more than disappointment:  there is a loss of confidence.

It is an unfortunate element in the case that error is more welcome in some of our professedly neutral papers than the truth:  an article designed to show that Christianity was borrowed from Buddhism or was developed from fetichism will sometimes be welcomed as new sensation, while a reply of half the length may be rejected.

There is something ominous in these facts.  Whether the secular press (not all papers are thus unfair) are influenced by partisan hatred of the truth or simply by a reckless regard for whatever is most popular, the facts are equally portentous.  And if it be true that such publications are what the people most desire, the outlook for our country is dark indeed.  The saddest consideration is that the power of the secular press is so vast and far reaching.  When Celsus wrote, books were few.  When Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Paine made their assailments on the Christian faith, the means of spreading the blight of error were comparatively few.  But now the accumulated arguments of German infidels for the last half-century may be thrown into a five-cent Sunday paper, whose issue will reach a quarter of a million of copies, which perhaps a million of men and women may read.  These articles are copied into a hundred other papers, and they are read in the villages and hamlets; they are read on the ranches and in the mining camps where no sermon is ever heard.