132 ESSAYS IN NATIONAL IDEALISM.

be compressed into the tiny vessel of a single dogma ? He-
may think his own allegory best, or;fche best for him ; it-
may be best for others, but it is not likely to be so for*
all; and so while he is willing and even ' eager to explain
Ms form of belief to others, he is not bent upon securing-
their acceptance of it; what he looks for is belief, not a
"belief.

A missionary after a painfully intense discussion once-
exclaimed to me, t( The light that is in you is darkness."'
Of course, I never dreamed of thinking tha,t of him. For
him, light had to be filtered through glass of a familiar
colour before it could be recognised as light. Forms of
religion are like coloured glasses that we hold up to a
light too bright for human eyes ; pure white light is the-
truth behind them all; not seeing this, men say to each
other : " That is not light shining through your glass ; the'
only light shines through mine." The whole endeavour to-
prove that the light in heathen belief is not the same light-
as in Christian is an appalling waste of energy, when the-
real need is to awaken men to the fact that there is a light
at all. What devout Hindu or Mussalman has ever doubted!
that ? The materialist is the true heathen.

Many missionaries know but little of Hinduism or-
Buddhism; they have not time to study them ; as these
faiths are not Christian, they must be wrong,—why enquire-
further ? The home supporters of Christian missions are-
even more in the dark; an ardent advocate of missions-
told me once that " Hindus were Muhammadans
afid worshipped Confucius." But this is no impediment r
for as Schopenhauer in his Essay on Eeligion says: " One-
iftnds the ordinary man as a rule merely trying to prove
that the dogmas of the foreign belief do not agree with his
<>wn ; he labours to explain that not only do they not say