religions, seems to possess the power of keeping abreast with the advancing civilization of the world.  As the child’s soul grows with his body, so that when he becomes a man it is a man’s soul and not a child’s, so the Gospel of Jesus continues the soul of all human culture.  It continually drops its old forms and takes new ones.  It passed out of its Jewish body under the guidance of Paul.  In a speculative age it unfolded into creeds and systems.  In a worshipping age it developed ceremonies and a ritual.  When the fall of Rome left Europe without unity or centre, it gave it an organization and order through the Papacy.  When the Papacy became a tyranny, and the Renaissance called for free thought, it suddenly put forth Protestantism, as the tree by the water-side sends forth its shoots in due season.  Protestantism, free as air, opens out into the various sects, each taking hold of some human need; Lutheranism, Calvinism, Methodism, Swedenborgianism, or Rationalism.  Christianity blossoms out into modern science, literature, art,—­children who indeed often forget their mother, and are ignorant of their source, but which are still fed from her breasts and partake of her life.  Christianity, the spirit of faith, hope, and love, is the deep fountain of modern civilization.  Its inventions are for the many, not for the few.  Its science is not hoarded, but diffused.  It elevates the masses, who everywhere else have been trampled down.  The friend of the people, it tends to free schools, a free press, a free government, the abolition of slavery, war, vice, and the melioration of society.  We cannot, indeed, here prove that Christianity is the cause of these features peculiar to modern life; but we find it everywhere associated with them, and so we can say that it only, of all the religions of mankind, has been capable of accompanying man in his progress from evil to good, from good to better.

We have merely suggested some of the results to which the study of Comparative Theology may lead us.  They will appear more fully as we proceed in our examination of the religions, and subsequently in their comparison.  This introductory chapter has been designed as a sketch of the course which the work will take.  When we have completed our survey, the results to which we hope to arrive will be these, if we succeed in what we have undertaken:—­

1.  All the great religions of the world, except Christianity and Mohammedanism, are ethnic religions, or religions limited to a single nation or race.  Christianity alone (including Mohammedanism and Judaism, which are its temporary and local forms) is the religion of all races.

2.  Every ethnic religion has its positive and negative side.  Its positive side is that which holds some vital truth; its negative side is the absence of some other essential truth.  Every such religion is true and providential, but each limited and imperfect.

3.  Christianity alone is a [Greek:  plaeroma], or a fulness of truth, not coming to destroy but to fulfil the previous religions; but being capable of replacing them by teaching all the truth they have taught, and supplying that which they have omitted.