gion it is not otherwise. Ethical principles prevail within the shrine. They are immutable and all pervading. They are the ground not only from which natural religion arises, but on which revealed religion descending must take its stand to find a firm support.

Shall an exception be made in favor of Christianity? Not at all. Christianity is preeminently ethical. Indeed in a philosophic view its great strength lies in the exact conformity of its teaching to the universal and eternal ethical principles which it enlightens, widens, exalts and refines. It came not to destroy but to fulfill the law more enduring than heaven and earth. The Sermon on the Mount speaks of the Kingdom of heaven and of the fatherhood of God, but it contains no distinctively Christian doctrine, and is occupied otherwise with applications of purely ethical principles. It might fairly be entitled a Lecture on Practical Ethics. These principles determine what is due in domestic, in social, and in civic order, and are likewise fundamental in religious order. Hence it is that so much is discovered to be common to all those religions, both natural and revealed, that have attained to the dignity of a system.1

1 Bishop Bigandet of Ava, in his Life and Legend of Gaudama, p. 494, says: "The Christian system and the Buddhistic, though differing from each other in their respective objects and ends as much as truth from error, have, it must be confessed, many striking features of an astonishing resemblance. There are many moral precepts equally commanded and enforced in common by both creeds. It will not be rash to assert that most of the moral truths prescribed by the gospel are to be met with in the Buddhistic scriptures."

Mozoomdar, one of the leaders in a new religious movement in India, belonging to the high caste of his people, and reputed as learned in almost all the wisdom of certain kinds in England and America as well as in India, says: "Every great religion of which I have any knowledge has worshipped God either through the forces of nature, or in the form of heroes and great men, or through their own spiritual instincts. No religion, however idolatrous, has been able to shake off this threefold medium. The Vedas worshipped God through the forces of nature. David and Elias also saw the

§ 143. In general it is true that wherever cults develop, even those full of superstition, there arises a priesthood professing the function of mediator to propitiate the super

human power. The priesthood becomes organized, and unites with the State, seeking its protection, using its authority, and lending in turn its potent influence to strengthen the secular government. So it has been with the Christian Church, an organization that prevails to-day throughout Europe and America. To it we will now give special

attention.

In the Christian Church we find a purified and exalted ethical doctrine, including natural religion, supplemented and complemented by revelation. Christianity is differentiated from other religions by the teaching that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the incarnate Son of God, making atonement by the cross, and ever living as Savior and King.1 It is this differentia only that Christian polemics has to defend against infidelity. Its expansion constitutes Christology. With this a treatise on Ethics has nothing to do; it is concerned only with the generic elements expanded into natural religion.

manifestations of God's power and wisdom in natural objects so glorious that no argument, no logic, no sophistry, could overcome the simplicity of their natural religion. Behold, also, God's attributes in the different deities worshipped in the Hindu Pantheon ! We cannot escape the conclusion that the processes of religious development have been universal. . . . Every nation has had its different surrounding circumstances. Its climate is different; its geography, its bodily constitution, its mental temperament, its history, all different. That these differences should have deeply affected religious development is not at all wonderful. But the sense of trust, love, and holi

ness in all religions is the same or similar, only the forms disagree. Yet I declare that even in the midst of all this variety there is so much in common that the student is wonder-struck at the fact of unity. In the midst of all the controversies and conflicts that afflict the religious world, we come across fundamental truths which are so similar that we are struck by the thought that they must have a common soul, a common impulse, a common origin, and a common aim."

1 For the best possible definition of Christianity, see John 3:16.

For, all the great virtues that stand out as cardinal have had existence among all peoples from the beginning. The decalogue, excepting perhaps the sabbath-day law, contains nothing new. All moral obligations binding men to God and to each other originate, not in legislation, but in the nature which God gave to man, and are determined in detail by the variations in his complex relations. The virtues have been developing through all the ages among all peoples, and are developing to-day under a better understanding, a fuller comprehension, a more subservient recognition of personal relations and their consequent obligations. No doubt Christianity has been and still is powerfully influential in their higher development, giving brighter light over a widening horizon; but Christianity did not originate them, it merely found them, enlarged them, enlightened them. Manifestly, the all-informing, all-embracing, fundamental law of Christian activity, is the ethical, altruistic law of loving service.1

§ 144. Historically the Christian Church emerged from Judaism very weak in numbers, and in social influence. Its organization, comparable to a shepherd with his flock, was

and

1 "It is sufficiently evident," says Guizot, “that morality may exist independently of religious ideas; that the distinction between moral good and evil, and the obligation to avoid evil and to cleave to that which is good, are laws as much acknowledged by man, in his proper nature, as the laws of Logic, springing likewise from a principle within him, and finding likewise their application in his life. Granting all this, and yielding up to morality its independence, the question naturally arises: Whence cometh morality, whither doth it lead? This obligation to do good, is it a fact standing by itself, without author, without aim? Doth it not conceal, or rather doth it not reveal an origin, a destiny reaching beyond the world? By this question, which arises spontaneously and inevitably, morality leads man to the porch of religion, and opens to him a sphere whence it was not borrowed." History of Civilization, Lecture V. "The real novelty of Christian Ethics," says Dr. Broadus, "lies in the fact that Christianity offers not only instruction in moral duty, but spiritual help in acting accordingly."- Commentary on Matthew, p. 161.

6

extremely simple and apparently feeble. But its native strength was soon manifested. The original hundred and twenty speedily became as many thousands. Local churches were multiplied. The heresy was propagated with an activity, energy and devoted zeal that knew no bounds. It spread into Asia Minor, it invaded Europe, and entered Rome. The vast power of the State, then mistress of the civilized world, was put forth to suppress the rising superstition,' and in the course of three centuries ten fierce and bloody persecutions, extending throughout the Empire, and waged with all the implacable might of the Roman power, sought to crush it, and failed. Gathering new and greater strength from adversity, it successfully resisted the oppressor, conquered the conqueror, and shared the throne of the Cæsars.1

เ

1 "We can be at no loss to discover the cause of this triumph. No other religion, under such circumstances, had ever combined so many distinct elements of power and attraction. Unlike the Jewish religion, it was bound by no local ties, and was equally adapted for every nation and for every class. Unlike Stoicism, it appealed in the strongest manner to the affections, and offered all the charms of a sympathetic worship. Unlike the Egyptian religions, it united with its distinctive teaching a pure and noble system of ethics, and proved itself capable of realizing it in action. It proclaimed, amid a vast movement of social and national amalgamation, the universal brotherhood of mankind. Amid the softening influence of philosophy and civilization, it taught the supreme sanctity of love. To the slave, it was the religion of the suffering and the oppressed. To the philosopher it was at once an echo of the highest ethics of the later Stoics, and the expansion of the best teaching of the school of Plato. . . . To a world, grown very weary of gazing on the cold and passionless grandeur which Cato realized and Lucan sung, it presented an ideal of compassion and of love, an ideal destined for centuries to draw around it all that was greatest, as well as all that was noblest on earth, a Teacher who could weep by the sepulchre of his friend, who was touched with the feeling of our infirmities. It was because Christianity was true of the moral sentiments of the age, because it represented faithfully the supreme type of excellence to which men were then tending, because it corresponded with their religious wants, aims, and emotions, because the whole spiritual being could then expand and expatiate under its influence, that it planted its roots so deeply in the hearts of men. LECKY, History of European Morals, ch. iii, p. 387 sq.

This affiliation of the Church with the State, in the middle of the fourth century, together with an increasing complexity and solidarity of organization, gave even greater efficiency to its propagandism. Apparently weakened by the schism into East and West, into Greek and Latin, it nevertheless withstood the floods of barbarians that overwhelmed and overthrew the Empire, converted and subdued them, saved Christianity for Europe, and ruled the continent throughout the mediæval centuries.1 In modern times, beginning with the sixteenth century, a further division of the Western Church into Catholic and Protestant, with many subdivisions, has occurred, which seems to have stimulated rather than impaired its zealous activity. Thus during two millenniums, amid the rise and fall of States and Empires, the Church has maintained its growing power, and to-day Christendom embraces Europe and America, and is pressing its jurisdiction into Asia, Africa, and the isles of the sea.2

1 Strikingly similar is the historical spread of Buddhism, propagated from India over eastern Asia and Japan, by its lofty ethics, and the promise of Karma and Nirvana; and of Mohammedanism, propagated from Arabia over western Asia and northern Africa, by the sword and the Koran, with its promise to the faithful of a paradise of houris. Mohammedanism swept Christianity out of Asia and Africa, excepting the feeble remnants in Armenia and Abyssinia; and Christianity in southern Europe was threatened with a like fate from the invasions of the northern barbarians overthrowing the Roman Empire. "Humanly speaking, it is not too much to aver," says Guizot, "that in the fourth and fifth centuries, it was the organized Christian Church that saved Christianity; the Church with its institutions, its magistrates, its authority, which struggled so vigorously to prevent the internal dissolution of the Empire, which struggled against the barbarian, and in fact overcame the barbarian, it was this Church that became the great connecting link, the principle of civilization, between the Roman and the barbarian worlds."- Hist. Civ., Lec. ii. Cf. Lectures V, and VI, on The Christian Church.

2 44 Christianity enjoyed no privileges and claimed no immunities when it boldly confronted and confounded the most ancient and most powerful religions of the world. Even at the present day it craves no mercy, and it receives no mercy. Unless our religion has ceased to be what it was, its