some independence to women, the inculcation of generosity and tolerance, the forbidding of avarice, the advocacy of compassion, the promotion of progress to a certain stage. This is a brilliant showing, but on the other hand, Buddhism does not seem to have permanently elevated the lower forms of civilization which have adopted it. It has not given expansion to the human soul, it has not continually impelled man onward in the track of general civilization and progress. Can the purest and best results be expected of a system which makes "celibacy the loftiest state, and mendicancy the highest idea of life?"

Greater things should be anticipated from a religion like the Christian, whose Founder fills his followers with much of His own hopeful vigour. While He láid His hand in blessing on every passive grace, He expanded the human soul with the inspiration to illustrate all the active virtues of a perfect manhood.

Christianity, when not perverted by pessimism, points its followers to an unspeakably better earth," with joy and love triumphing and fair truth." I believe that one of the most marked contracts between the civilization on which Christ has put His stamp and the civilization of Greece and Rome, which Christianity displaced, or the civilization of much of the Orient to-day, is the hope and energy which rule in the one, and the hopelessness and sloth which seem to pervade the others.

Now that men are beginning to see the might and majesty and sure coming victory of the Kingdom of Heaven, it becomes more difficult for Christian believers to sink into the slough of pessimism.

We study Christianity intelligently, only when we see it claiming the whole of humanity and the whole of man as the field of its redeeming activities, planning the redemption of the individual and the uplifting of society. For the individual, it emphasizes neither the inner nor the outer life, in such wise as to leave human nature ill-balanced. It would develop simultaneously all the various forces of the human spirit and not minister to thought at the expense of emotion, nor to meditation, at the expense of active energy. It is not surprising that all the great music of the world is the outcome of Christianity. It is not surprising that every department of mental and spiritual greatness and excellence has been illustrated in Christian civilization. In these recent centuries the Christian religion, which has been concerned chiefly with the individual spirit, is directing its energies as well to the social progress of mankind. It is adding new stars to its crown of triumph in new emancipations, mitigating the horrors of war, and diffusing beyond its own

boundaries the growing spirit of humanity and brotherhood. I regard the social discontent found in nations to-day as very largely the spirits of Jesus Christ, demanding that His law of love be still further pervasive in human affairs. And, if we go outside the domain of Christendom, we find the Gospel is modifying the ideas and usages of non-Christian peoples through the world-wide missionary movements of our time. Commerce is a penetrating force and a unifying power, and the Christian's Bible goes with the English and American ship to every shore. A chapter not yet written would indicate what these preparatory movements have wrought in Asia, not only where the crescent rules, not only where the Mohammedans have been led by the force of Christian example to educate their daughters, and by the pressure of Christian Governments to take some initial steps towards reform; not only in Japan, who wins her victories clad in the educational and military panoply of Christian nations, but also here where reforming sect after sect has risen, and where Hinduism seems now to claim as its own the spirit and truth which we believe have come from Bible lands and Biblical civilization. Christianity has been a leaven entering into the life of nations; it has greatly affected the political relationships of men; it has compelled governments to be less despotic and more humane; it has reversed the maxims of ancient society and made men not the appendages and slaves of the state, but the rightful recipients of whatever services government might render; it has modified the relations which whole peoples sustain to one another. However belligerent the nations may seem to-day, the chronic and continuing wars of ancient pagan societies have given way to an attitude more humane and peaceful. Two and a half centuries ago the Dutch jurist-consul, Hugo Grotius, the Christian theologian, whom Henry of Navarre called the "Miracle of Holland," published his book on the law of war and peace, which roused Europe to some faint sense of international obligation. Governments began to see that treachery and battle and conquest do not exhaust the relations which they might rightly bear to one another. The light which touched the mind of Grotius reached other minds. A body of international law has come into being, and in recent years the conviction has grown that arbitration should take the place of the iron-clad and the dynamite-gun in settling international disputes; and within a few years our American Capital has witnessed the gathering of men representing seventeen nationalities of the New World from Behring Sea to

the Straits of Magellan, met to confer in the interests of international peace, and themselves the heralds of that coming congress, which shall be "the Federation of the World."

And a distinctive feature of Christian civilization is this, that more and more it brings its highest blessings to every class of men, and does not reserve its choicest favors, like the Republic of Plato, for a limited oligarchy, dominant over a nation of slaves. The spirit of caste is to it supremely abhorrent, even more so than it would have been to the early sacred poets who wrote the Vedas. Christianity gave the transforming of the Roman World into the hands of a company of Jewish fishermen, men of common mould and it changed them into the princes of God. Paul speaks of things that are despised bringing to naught the pride of man. It has been said of Celsus, the earlist literary assailant of the Christian faith, that he was a very wise man, a physician, and philosopher, the true child of culture, proud of the manners, the speech, the daintiness and delicacy of the cultivated.” We hear him say, "See what a set of men these Christians are! The teachers of our noble philosophies in our academies are cultivated gentlemen, acquainted with the best thoughts of the best thinkers, and able to give them fit, because elegant, expression; but these Christian preachers, why they are fishermen, and publicans, and weavers, and cobblers, ignorant Jews, illiterate Greeks, the veriest barbarians, enthusiasts, without the gift of refined thought or cultured speech." We behold some remnants of Celsus in the feelings which dainty culture expresses towards the earnest Christian evangelism of our day. But what of these criticisms? Let us take Celsus at his word, accepting his testimony as true, and what then! "Does he not become," as Dr. Fairbairn writes, one of the oldest, though most unconscious, witnesses to the power of Christ? It was a new thing in the history and experience of men that men such as Celsus described should become grander and mightier than any known to his academies, possessed of ideas as to God, as to man and society and the state, sublimer than Plato ever imagined, men wiser in their notions of civil rights, and political duties than Solon, dreaming of more splendid achievements than ever dawned on the soul of Alexander or of Cæsar, working at the foundations of a city infinitely nobler in ideal, as it was to be incomparably grander in history, than the city Athene loved and shielded, or the city Romulus founded, and Jove guided to universal empire.

Open the pages of the Roman historians and you will find

there pictures of the Roman nobility, looking upon their slaves as so many cattle, murdering them with impunity, using their bodies to fatten the lampreys in their lakes, pitting them against tigers in the amphitheatre. Open the pages of the early Christian historians and you will see the Roman nobility and their slaves sitting down as brethren at the Lord's table. It was the doctrine of Jesus, concerning the equal humanity of all men, which reserved the maxims of philosophy and gave the literature of heaven to men whom Plato excluded from his "Academy" and condemned in his "Republic" to menialness and brutality. And what an immense and glorious revolution the Christian doctrine has effected in the thought and literature of the world! It is not rank or place or princely wealth that gives dignity and grace to the characters whom the masters of our imaginative art unveil to us. The verse of Robert Burns has made an entrance for all the world beneath the low roof of the Scottish peasant, and the family worship of the "Cotter's Saturday Night" may bring us as near to God-as a gorgeous service intoned within cathedral walls. The spiritual influence and consolation which Christianity has brought to the poor are not greater than the ennoblement it brings to our conceptions of man in lifting us above boudage to the formal and external. The soul is sovereign over rank and dress, and the highest art of a Christian age finds passion and suffering, love and joy, as significant and sublime among the miners of Cornwall and the huts of Ireland as in the drawing rooms of London; amid the slave cabins of Louisiana as along the brilliant boulevards of Paris; in Millet's portraiture of the Norman peasantry, as in Paul Veronese's gorgeous pictures of Venetian splendor.

There have been no tribes SO distant and so debased that the touch of Christ's hand has not reached them and lifted them into manhood. The impossible in the case of the brutal Hottentot, and the native Australian, has been realised. It is not a Christian Missionary, but Charles Darwin, the greatest name in science since Sir Isaac Newton, it is Darwin, himself a contributor to Christian Missions, who wrote of the Tahitians, that human sacrifices, unparalleled profligacy, infanticide, and bloody wars have been abolished, and that dishonesty, intemperance and licentiousness have been greatly reduced by the introduction of Christianity. I might tell the story of special triumphs like that in Madagascar where the Bible has been enthroned, moral abominations largely uprooted, education diffused and a hundred thousand

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souls gathered into Christian churches. I might ask you to look to far off Melanesia, with Fiji as its centre, and note the fact that out of a population of a hundred and twenty thousand, not long since cannibals, a hundred thousand have been reached and are now worshippers in Christian assemblies; or I might tell you how the power of the ever-living Gospel in the heart of Robert Moffatt gave to the degraded Bechuana tribes trade, literature and civilization. Or, I might sketch the movement in Mussulman lands, which has touched with the radiance of the Cross the Lebanon and Persian mountains, as well as the waters of the Bosphorus, and which is the sure harbinger of the day when Cairo and Damascus and Teheran shall be the servants of Jesus, and when even the solicitudes of Arabia shall be pierced, and Christ, in the person of His disciples, shall enter the Kaaba of Mecca and the whole truth shall at last be there spoken, "This is eternal life that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent."

It is not my purpose, to deny or to belittle the beneficent results of the other faiths. But while determined to see the good, how great is the good which can be discovered? "Buddhism has made Asia mild," we are told, but it is not the general impression that where it prevails it has made Asia moral. "While Buddhism," as a recent writer has said, "made Chinese Asia gentle in manners and kind to animals, it covered the land with temples, monasteries and images; on the other hand the religion of Jesus filled Europe not only with churches and abbeys, monasteries and nunneries, but also with hospitals, orphan asylums, lighthouses, schools and colleges." Furthermore, while India has been an immense theatre for the activity, and contention of all the religions which are really great, while it has been the museum and the encyclopedia, and the reservoir of these faiths, would it be difficult to establish a claim, which is often made that Christianity directly and indirectly" has done more for the elevation in certain respects of Hindu society in the last eighty years than the other religions have accomplished in all the ages of their dominion?" Much may be said in praise of Confucianism, but it has not been progressive, it has not been in a high sense religious, and it has sacrificed man to the social order. And nothing more is needed to show that Mohammedanism is only a temporary halting-place in human progress, than the engrafting of polygamy into its fundamental ideas and permanent system. A Scotch theologian has well said, that