tained in the Bible, through their study of the divine
government as manifest in the world, through their asking counsel of God with reference to each of the events of life, through their examination of their own hearts, and through their practice of comparing all tenets and teachings and holding fast that which is good, they necessarily become thoughtful and wise.
Since Christianity is the true religion, Christians love all true knowledee, and since it has also come from God, they love to inquire into the works of creation, which illustrate God’s power, and into the histories of various nations, which illustrate His providential rule.
The writers of the Purfinas were ignorant of geography and even of the very names of the oceans; and yet they talked, like men in their sleep, of oceans of milk, and oceans of curds, and oceans of ghee, and taught similar absurdities about the various continents and islands. It did not strike any of them that it would be well to go and see whether those things were really so. The Vedantic sages, again, taught that the world did not really exist, but was only an illusion, and that as it was ouly an illusion it was not worth inquiring into, and in this way they professed to despise the world and to thrust it away from their thoughts. Thus both these systems(the popular and the Vedantic) discourage inquiry, and prevent people from grow
ing in knowledge and intelligence.
Christian white men, on the other hand, instead of scorning the world as a vain illusion, regard it as a real and beautiful world, and as the creation of the Supreme God; and, therefore, according to that verse in the Kural, ¢ Know
ledge is tlie perception of things as they are,” they in