higher aim which they have set before themselves, the efforts of the missionaries have been wonderfully successful, though they care not for this success, in raising the social standard of the people with whom they are brought into contact. "They deserve infinite praise for the way they have created written languages where none existed, and for their assiduity in educating and civilizing thousands of savages."[125] Our missionaries, then, who deserve every credit for their noble and self-sacrificing efforts in the cause of Christ, who in the face of difficulties such as few can appreciate, do their Master's work with cheerfulness and zeal, in spite of danger and privation, comparing their own failure with the success of missionaries elsewhere, as, for instance, in Madagascar, and seeking to account for it before their countrymen at home, miss the true causes which we have been compelled, however ungraciously, to point out, and, taking the nominal objection from the mouths of their opponents, with heedless confidence assert that opium is the great obstacle to the propagation of the Gospel, forgetting that it was the difficulties connected with opium that first opened a way for them into the heart of China; that it was the second opium war, as they love to call it, which gave them a _locus standi_ in the country. But, in truth, in comparing their work with that of their fellow-workers in Africa and elsewhere, they are placing themselves at an enormous disadvantage; for we must not forget that in China and India we are dealing with races[126] immeasurably superior to the North American Indians and the savages of Africa; that we are confronted by civilizations which were in their prime when England was inhabited by naked savages, and was indeed, as the Chinese still believe it to be, but as "an anthill in the ocean," and by a race of men who were "learned," as Cobden said in the House of Commons, "when our Plantagenet kings could not write, and who had a system of logic before Aristotle, and a code of morals before Socrates." It would be surprising indeed if we could persuade such intellectual and civilised races to give up in a moment beliefs which have taken centuries to mature; and the difficulty is the greater in the case of the Buddhists from the striking similarity which exists between the general principles professed by followers of Buddha and disciples of Christ. "Conversion to Christianity," as Dr. Moore says, "involves the belief in certain statements the counterparts of which, when found in Buddhism, are regarded as impossible and untrue by Christians."