The prejudice which has existed in regard to this subject has taken two different forms:  First, there has been the broad assumption upon which Franke wrote to Ziegenbalg, that all knowledge of heathenism is worse than useless.  Good men are asking, “Is not such a study a waste of energy, when we are charged with proclaiming the only saving truth?  Is not downright earnestness better than any possible knowledge of philosophies and superstitions?” And we answer, “Yes:  by all means, if only the one is possible.”  Another view of the subject is more serious.  May there not, after all, be danger in the study of false systems?  Will there not be found perplexing parallels which will shake our trust in the positive and exclusive supremacy of the Christian faith?

Now, even if there were at first some risks to a simple, child-like confidence, yet a timid attitude involves far greater risks:  it amounts to a half surrender, and it is wholly out of place in this age of fearless and aggressive discussion, when all truth is challenged, and every form of error must be met.  Moreover, in a thorough study there is no danger.  Sir Monier Williams tells us that at first he was surprised and a little troubled, but in the end he was more than ever impressed with the transcendent truths of the Christian faith.  Professor S.H.  Kellogg assures us that the result of his careful researches in the Oriental systems is a profounder conviction of the great truths of the Gospel as divine.  And even Max Mueller testifies that, while making every allowance for whatever is good in the ethnic faiths, he has been the more fully convinced of the great superiority of Christianity.  Really, those are in danger who receive only the superficial and misleading representations of heathenism which one is sure to meet in our magazine literature, or in works like “Robert Elsmere” and “The Light of Asia.”

One cannot fail to mark the different light in which we view the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans.  If their religious beliefs and speculations had remained a secret until our time, if the high ethical precepts of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius had only now been proclaimed, and Socrates had just been celebrated in glowing verse as the “Light of Greece,” there would be no little commotion in the religious world, and thousands with only weak and troubled faith might be disturbed.  But simply because we thoroughly understand the mythology of Greece and Rome, we have no fear.  We welcome all that it can teach us.  We cordially acknowledge the virtues of Socrates and assign him his true place.  We enrich the fancy and awaken the intellectual energies of our youth by classical studies, and Christianity shines forth with new lustre by contrast with the heathen systems which it encountered in the Roman Empire ages ago.