Mohammedanism also permits us to hope for future blessedness, albeit its representations of the life to come are not always such as to purify and elevate our thoughts.  Buddhism, on the contrary, though it tells us that we may be reborn many times, assures us that each reappearance in this world will be attended with suffering and struggle; from which, if we continue to walk in the true path, striving more and more to conquer our desires, we may at length hope to be delivered; but the blessedness which comes at the end of all this struggle is simply forgetfulness:  we shall lose our identity and be remerged in that fount of Being from which at first we came.  Existence is the primal evil:  to get rid of ourselves is what we are to strive for; salvation is our disappearance out of life, our absorption in the ocean of unconsciousness.  This is the best that Buddhism has to offer us.  Not many of us, I dare say, will wish to exchange for this the Christian hope.

There are many other characteristics of the Christian faith on which it would be interesting to reflect, but these three great elements are sufficient to enable us to form our judgment as to its comparative value.  No religion which in these particulars is inferior can ever draw the world away from the leadership of Jesus Christ.  And it ought to be clear to all who can comprehend the needs of human nature that while these other faiths, in view of the great services they have rendered to mankind, are not to be despised; and while it is probable that the world, until the end of it, will be indebted to them for contributions which they have made to our knowledge of the highest things; yet there is no good reason why any one who has been walking in the light that shines from the life and teachings of Jesus Christ should wish to turn from his way into the ways of Mohammed or Gotama.

It is not by any happy accident that Christianity is growing far more rapidly than any other form of faith, and now vastly outnumbers every other; it is not a strange thing that the lands in which it prevails are far more prosperous and far more powerful than the lands in which other religions prevail.  It is winning the world.  It is winning the world because its interpretation of life is a truer interpretation than any other religion has offered; because it meets and supplies the deepest wants of men more perfectly than any other religion meets and supplies them.

The great evolutionary law is at work here, as everywhere.  There is a struggle for existence among religions, as among all other forms of life.  The law of variation has had full play in all this realm; human nature has produced a great variety of religious ideas and forms, and natural selection is doing its work upon them.  The fittest will survive.  And the fittest religion will be the religion that ministers most perfectly to human needs; that makes the best and strongest men and women; that rears up the most fruitful and the most enduring civilization.