As in the early centuries, so in our time, different systems of religion have been commingled and interwoven into protean forms of error more difficult to understand and dislodge than any one of the faiths and philosophies of which they were combined.  As the Alexandrian Jews intertwined the teachings of Judaism and Platonism; as Manichaeans and Gnostics corrupted the truths of the Old and New Testaments with ideas borrowed from Persian mysticism; as various eclectic systems gathered up all types of thought which the wide conquests of the Roman Empire brought together, and mingled them with Christian teachings; so now the increased intercommunication, and the quickened intellectual activity of our age have led to the fusion of different systems, ancient and modern, in a negative and nerveless religion of humanity.  We now have in the East not only Indian, but Anglo-Indian, speculations.  The unbelieving Calcutta graduate has Hegel and Spinoza interwoven with his Vedantism, and the eclectic leader of the Brahmo Somaj, while placing Christ at the head of the prophets and recognizing the authority of all sacred bibles of the races, called on Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Mohammedans to unite in one theistic church of the New Dispensation in India.  Not even the old Gnostics could present so striking an admixture as that of the Arya Somaj.  It has appropriated many of those Christian ethics which have been learned from a century of contact with missionaries and other Christian residents.  It has approved the more humane customs and reforms of Christendom, denouncing caste, and the degradation of woman.  It has repudiated the corrupt rites and the degrading superstitions of Hinduism.  At the same time its hatred of the Christian faith is most bitter and intense.

And there are other alliances, not a few, between the East and the West.  In India and Japan the old Buddhism is compounded with American Spiritualism and with modern Evolution, under a new application of the ancient name of Theosophy.  In Japan representatives of advanced Unitarianism are exhorting the Japanese Buddhists to build the religion of the future on their old foundations, and to avoid the propagandists of western Christianity.

The bland and easy-going catholicity which professes so much in our day, which embraces all faiths and unfaiths in one sweet emulsion of meaningless negations, which patronizes the Christ and His doctrines, and applies the nomenclature of Christianity to doctrines the very opposite of its teachings, finds a counterpart in the smooth and vapid compromises of the old Gnostics.  “Gnosticism,” says Uhlhorn, “combined Greek philosophies, Jewish theology, and ancient Oriental theosophy, thus forming great systems of speculative thought, all with the object of displaying the world’s development.  From a pantheistic First Cause, Gnosticism traced the emanation of a series of aeons—­beings of Light.  The source of evil was supposed to be matter, which in this material world holds light