It is, perhaps, inaccurate to speak of Buddhism as having any conception of God.  “The very idea of a god as creating or in any way ruling the world,” says one authority, “is utterly absent in the Buddhist system.  God is not so much as denied, he is simply not known.”  Buddha taught men to be compassionate to one another, but he did not teach them to look above themselves for any divine compassion.  It is true that they now venerate him, and even pray to him; for the human soul will pray,—­its instinct of dependence, its craving for fellowship with something higher than itself will prevail over all theories; but this prayer must be somewhat incoherent, for the worshiper believes that Buddha has no longer any conscious or personal existence.  And there is certainly no conception in his mind of any such fatherly relation with any Power above himself, who loves him and cares for him and knows how to help him, as that which Jesus has revealed to us.

The Mohammedan Deity is indeed a person, but he is a relentless, omnipotent Will.  The worst phases of the old Calvinism—­those which have disappeared from Christian thought—­are the central ideas of the Mohammedan creed.  God is represented in the Koran as fitful and revengeful, as arbitrary and despotic; he is a very different being from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

2.  The religion of Jesus emphasizes, as no other religion has done, “the redemptive principle in its idea of God.”  It does not hide the fact of moral evil as the source of all our woes, but it shows an eternal purpose in the heart of God to save man from sin, even at the cost of suffering to himself.  This is the meaning of redemption; it is the salvation of men through a divine self-sacrifice.  No such revelation of the love of God as this has ever been made to the world, except through the life and teachings and death of Jesus Christ.  No wonder that when it is simply and clearly presented to men it wins their hearts.  A Chinese woman, listening to a recital of this redemptive work of God, turned suddenly to her neighbor and said, “Didn’t I tell you that there ought to be a God like that?”

We shall look in vain through the scriptures of the other religions for any such conception of the relation of God to men.  Men must save themselves by their own endeavors; they must obey or they will suffer; perchance by their own suffering they may be purified:  but that God should stoop to earth and stand by the side of sinning and suffering man, and save him by suffering with him, is a truth to which none of them has risen.

3.  Christianity, above all other faiths, is the religion of hope.  It not only kindles in our hearts the hope of overcoming the sin which is our worst enemy, but it conquers in our hearts the fear of death and opens up to us the prospect of unending and glorious future life, in the society of those most dear to us.