A missionary must know no fear; his heart must overflow with love--love of man, love of truth, love of God; and in this, the highest and truest sense of the word, every Christian is, or ought to be, a missionary. And now, let us look again at the religions in which the missionary spirit has been at work, and compare them with those in which any attempt to convince others by argument, to save souls, to bear witness to the truth, is treated with pity or scorn. _The former are alive, the latter are dying or dead._ The religion of Zoroaster--the religion of Cyrus, of Darius and Xerxes--which, but for the battles of Marathon and Salamis, might have become the religion of the civilized world, is now professed by only 100,000 souls--that is, by about a ten-thousandth part of the inhabitants of the world. During the last two centuries their number has steadily decreased from four to one hundred thousand, and another century will probably exhaust what is still left of the worshippers of the Wise Spirit, Ahura-mazda. The Jews are about thirty times the number of the Parsis, and they therefore represent a more appreciable portion of mankind. Though it is not likely that they will ever increase in number, yet such is their physical vigor and their intellectual tenacity, such also their pride of race and their faith in Jehovah, that we can hardly imagine that their patriarchal religion and their ancient customs will soon vanish from the face of the earth. But though the religions of the Parsis and Jews might justly seem to have paid the penalty of their anti-missionary spirit, how, it will be said, can the same be maintained with regard to the religion of the Brahmans? That religion is still professed by at least 110,000,000 of human souls, and, to judge from the last census, even that enormous number falls much short of the real truth. And yet I do not shrink from saying that their religion is dying or dead. And why? Because it cannot stand the light of day. The worship of Śiva, of Vishṇu, and the other popular deities, is of the same, nay, in many cases of a more degraded and savage character than the worship of Jupiter, Apollo, and Minerva; it belongs to a stratum of thought which is long buried beneath our feet: it may live on, like the lion and the tiger, but the mere air of free thought and civilized life will extinguish it. A religion may linger on for a long time, it may be accepted by the large masses of the people, because it is there, and there is nothing better. But when a religion has ceased to produce defenders of the faith, prophets, champions, martyrs, it has ceased to live, in the true sense of the word; and in that sense the old, orthodox Brahmanism has ceased to live for more than a thousand years.