took from Greece intellectual activity, and returned moral life.  It received from Rome organization, and returned faith in a fatherly Providence.  It took law, and gave love.  From the German races it accepted the love of individual freedom, and returned union and brotherly love.  From Judaism it accepted monotheism as the worship of a Supreme Being, a Righteous Judge, a Holy King, and added to this faith in God as in all nature and all life.

But we will proceed to examine some of these points a little more minutely.

Sec. 3.  Christianity, as a Pleroma, compared with Brahmanism, Confucianism, and Buddhism.

Christianity and Brahmanism.  The essential value of Brahmanism is its faith in spirit as distinct from matter, eternity as distinct from time, the infinite as opposed to the finite, substance as opposed to form.

The essential defect of Brahmanism is its spiritual pantheism, which denies all reality to this world, to finite souls, to time, space, matter.  In its vast unities all varieties are swallowed up, all differences come to an end.  It does not, therefore, explain the world, it denies it.  It is incapable of morality, for morality assumes the eternal distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, and Brahmanism knows no such difference.  It is incapable of true worship, since its real God is spirit in itself, abstracted from all attributes.  Instead of immortality, it can only teach absorption, or the disappearance of the soul in spirit, as rain-drops disappear in the ocean.

Christianity teaches a Supreme Being who is pure spirit, “above all, through all, and in all,” “from whom, and through whom, and to whom are all things,” “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”  It is a more spiritual religion than Brahmanism, for the latter has passed on into polytheism and idolatry, which Christianity has always escaped.  Yet while teaching faith in a Supreme Being, the foundation and substance below all existence, it recognizes him as A LIVING GOD.  He is not absorbed in himself, nor apart from his world, but a perpetual Providence, a personal Friend and Father.  He dwells in eternity, but is manifested in time.

Christianity, therefore, meets the truth in Brahmanism by its doctrine of God as Spirit, and supplies its deficiencies by its doctrine of God as a Father.

Christianity and the system of Confucius.  The good side in the teaching of Confucius is his admirable morality, his wisdom of life in its temporal limitations, his reverence for the past, his strenuous conservatism of all useful institutions, and the uninterrupted order of the social system resting on these ideas.

The evil in his teaching is the absence of the supernatural element, which deprives the morality of China of enthusiasm, its social system of vitality, its order of any progress, and its conservatism of any improvement.  It is a system without hope, and so has remained frozen in an icy and stiff immobility for fifteen hundred years.