f that meant
absolutely nothing. I can not feel that the Aztecs who were baptized by
the followers of Cortes were any more believers in Christianity after the
ceremony than they were before. It seems to me, however that a Christian,
examining faithfully the grounds of his belief, will usually have that
belief strengthened, and that a churchman, examining the doctrines of the
church will be similarly upheld.

Not that church instruction should be one-sided. The teaching that tends
to make us believe that every intelligent man thinks as we do reacts
against itself. It is like the unfortunate temperance teaching that
represents the liking for wine as always acquired. When the pupil comes to
taste wine and finds that he likes it at once, he concludes that the whole
body of instruction in the physiology of alcohol is false and acts
accordingly. When a boy is taught that there is nothing of value beyond
his own church, or nothing of value outside of Christianity, he will think
less of his church, and less of Christianity when he finds intelligent,
upright, lovable outsiders. I look back with horror on some of the books,
piously prepared under the auspices of the S.P.C.K. in London, that I used
to take home from Sunday School. In them we were told that a good man
outside the church was worse than a bad man in it. If that was not the
teaching in the book, it was at least the form in which it took lodgment
in my boyish brain. Thank God it never found permanent foothold there.
Instead, I hold in my memory the Eastern story of God's rebuke to Abraham
when he expelled the Fire Worshipper from his tent. "Could you not bear
with him for one hour? Lo! I have borne with him these forty years!"

I have always thought that a knowledge of what our neighbors believe is an
excellent balance-wheel to our own beliefs and that our own beliefs, so
balanced, will be saner and more restrained. It would be well, I think, if
we could have a survey of the world's religions, setting down in parallel
columns all the faiths of mankind. If this is too great a task we might
begin with a survey of Christianity, set down in the same way. I believe
that the results of such a survey might surprise us, showing, as I think
it would do, the many fundamentals that we hold in common and the trivial
nature of some of the barriers that appear to separate us.

In your course, just completed, you have had such a survey, I doubt not,
of the beliefs of our own beloved