visits this wonderful eldorado carries back such romantic impressions as excite in others, not so much the love of the Gospel as the love of mammon.  When the Church went forth in comparative poverty, and with an intense moral earnestness, to preach righteousness, temperance, and the judgment to come; when those who were wealthy gave all to the poor—­like Anthony of Egypt, Jerome, Ambrose, and Francis of Assisi—­and in simple garments bore the Gospel to those who were surfeited with luxuries and pleasures, and were sick of a life of mere indulgence, then the truth of the Gospel conquered heathenism with all that the world could give.  But whether a Church in the advanced civilization of our land and time, possessed of enormous wealth, enjoying every luxury, and ever anxious to gain more and more of this present world, can convert heathen races who deem themselves more frugal, more temperate, and less worldly than we, is a problem which remains to be solved.  We have rare facilities, but we have great drawbacks.  God’s grace can overcome even our defects, and He has promised success.

But in the proud intellectual character of the systems encountered respectively by the ancient and by the modern Church, there are remarkable parallels.  The supercilious pride of Brahminism, or the lofty scorn of Mohammedanism, is quite equal to that self-sufficient Greek philosophy in whose eyes the Gospel was the merest foolishness.  And the immovable self-righteousness of the Stoics has its counterpart in the Confucianism of the Chinese literati.  A careful comparison of the six schools of Hindu philosophy with the various systems of Greece and Rome, will fill the mind with surprise at the numerous correspondences—­one might almost say identities.  And that surprise is the greater from the fact that no proof exists that either has been borrowed from the other.

The atomic theory of creation advanced by Lucretius is found also in the Nyaya philosophy of the Hindus.  The pessimism of Pliny and Marcus Aurelius was much more elaborately worked out by Gautama.  The Hindus had their categories and their syllogisms as well as Aristotle.  The conception of a dual principle in deity which the early Church traced in all the religious systems of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Assyria, and whose influence poisoned the life of the Phoenician colonies, and was so corrupting to the morals of Greece and Rome, was also elaborated by the Sankhya philosophy of Kapila, and it has plunged Hindu society into as deep a degradation as could be found in Pompeii or Herculaneum.[23] The Indian philosophy partook far more of the pantheistic element than that of Greece.  Plato and Aristotle had clearer conceptions of the personality of the deity and of the distinct and responsible character of the human soul than any school of Hindu philosophers—­certainly clearer than the Vedantists, and their ethics involved a stronger sense of sin.

German philosophy has borrowed its pantheism from India rather than from Greece, and in its most shadowy developments it has never transcended the ancient Vedantism of Vyasa.