of which stream it entered India from the northwest.  It has never attempted to extend itself beyond that particular variety of mankind.  Perhaps one hundred and fifty millions of men accept it as their faith.  It has been held by this race as their religion during a period immense in the history of mankind.  Its sacred books are certainly more than three thousand years old.  But during all this time it has never communicated itself to any race of men outside of the peninsula of India.  It is thus seen to be a strictly ethnic religion, showing neither the tendency nor the desire to become the religion of mankind.

The same thing may be said of the religion of Confucius.  It belongs to China and the Chinese.  It suits their taste and genius.  They have had it as their state religion for some twenty-three hundred years, and it rules the opinions of the rulers of opinion among three hundred millions of men.  But out of China Confucius is only a name.

So, too, of the system of Zoroaster.  It was for a long period the religion of an Aryan tribe who became the ruling people among mankind.  The Persians extended themselves through Western Asia, and conquered many nations, but they never communicated their religion.  It was strictly a national or ethnic religion, belonging only to the Iranians and their descendants, the Parsees.

In like manner it may be said that the religion of Egypt, of Greece, of Scandinavia, of the Jews, of Islam, and of Buddhism are ethnic religions.  Those of Egypt and Scandinavia are strictly so.  It is said, to be sure, that the Greeks borrowed the names of their gods from Egypt, but the gods themselves were entirely different ones.  It is also true that some of the gods of the Romans were borrowed from the Greeks, but their life was left behind.  They merely repeated by rote the Greek mythology, having no power to invent one for themselves.  But the Greek religion they never received.  For instead of its fair humanities, the Roman gods were only servants of the state,—­a higher kind of consuls, tribunes, and lictors.  The real Olympus of Rome was the Senate Chamber on the Capitoline Hill.  Judaism also was in reality an ethnic religion, though it aimed at catholicity and expected it, and made proselytes.  But it could not tolerate unessentials, and so failed of becoming catholic.  The Jewish religion, until it had Christianity to help it, was never able to do more than make proselytes here and there.  Christianity, while preaching the doctrines of Jesus and the New Testament, has been able to carry also the weight of the Old Testament, and to give a certain catholicity to Judaism.  The religion of Mohammed has been catholic, in that it has become the religion of very different races,—­the Arabs, Turks, and Persians, belonging to the three great varieties of the human family.  But then Mohammedanism has never sought to make converts, but only subjects; it has not asked for belief, but merely for submission.  Consequently Mr. Palgrave,