Sec. 7.  Comparative Theology will probably show that the Ethnic Religions are one-sided, each containing a Truth of its own, but being defective, wanting some corresponding Truth.  Christianity, or the Catholic Religion, is complete on every Side.

Brahmanism, for example, is complete on the side of spirit, defective on the side of matter; full as regards the infinite, empty of the finite; recognizing eternity but not time, God but not nature.  It is a vast system of spiritual pantheism, in which there is no reality but God, all else being Maya, or illusion.  The Hindoo mind is singularly pious, but also singularly immoral.  It has no history, for history belongs to time.  No one knows when its sacred books were written, when its civilization began, what caused its progress, what its decline.  Gentle, devout, abstract, it is capable at once of the loftiest thoughts and the basest actions.  It combines the most ascetic self-denials and abstraction from life with the most voluptuous self-indulgence.  The key to the whole system of Hindoo thought and life is in this original tendency to see God, not man; eternity, not time; the infinite, not the finite.

Buddhism, which was a revolt from Brahmanism, has exactly the opposite truths and the opposite defects.  Where Brahmanism is strong, it is weak; where Brahmanism is weak, it is strong.  It recognizes man, not God; the soul, not the all; the finite, not the infinite; morality, not piety.  Its only God, Buddha, is a man who has passed on through innumerable transmigrations, till, by means of exemplary virtues, he has reached the lordship of the universe.  Its heaven, Nirvana, is indeed the world of infinite bliss; but, incapable of cognizing the infinite, it calls it nothing.  Heaven, being the inconceivable infinite, is equivalent to pure negation.  Nature, to the Buddhist, instead of being the delusive shadow of God, as the Brahman views it, is envisaged as a nexus of laws, which reward and punish impartially both obedience and disobedience.

The system of Confucius has many merits, especially in its influence on society.  The most conservative of all systems, and also the most prosaic, its essential virtue is reverence for all that is.  It is not perplexed by any fear or hope of change; the thing which has been is that which shall be; and the very idea of progress is eliminated from the thought of China.  Safety, repose, peace, these are its blessings.  Probably merely physical comfort, earthly bien-etre, was never carried further than in the Celestial Empire.  That virtue so much exploded in Western civilization, of respect for parents, remains in full force in China.  The emperor is honored as the father of his people; ancestors are worshipped in every family; and the best reward offered for a good action is a patent of nobility, which does not reach forward to one’s children, but backward to one’s parents.  This is the bright side of Chinese life; the dark side