Now it is a remarkable fact that these three religions, which are the only pure monotheistic religions, are at the same time the only religions which have any claim to catholicity.  Buddhism, though the religion of numerous nations, seems to be the religion of only one race, namely, the Turanic race, or Mongols.  The people of India who remain Buddhists, the Singalese, or inhabitants of Ceylon, belong to the aboriginal Tamul, or Mongol race.  With this exception then (which is no exception, as far as we know the ethnology of Eastern Asia), the only religions which aim at Catholicism are these three, which are also the only monotheistic religions.  Judaism aimed at catholicity and hoped for it.  It had an instinct of universality, as appeared in its numerous attempts at making proselytes of other nations.  It failed of catholicity when it refused to accept as its Christ the man who had risen above its national limitations, and who considered Roman tax-gatherers and Samaritans as already prepared to enter the kingdom of the Messiah.  The Jews required all their converts to become Jews, and in doing this left the catholic ground.  Christianity in the mouth of Paul, who alone fully seized the true idea of his Master, said, “Circumcision availeth nothing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature.”  In other words, he declared that it was not necessary to become a Jew in order to be a Christian.

The Jewish mind, so far forth as it was monotheistic, aimed at catholicity.  The unity of God carries with it, logically, the unity of man.  From one God as spirit we infer one human family.  So Paul taught at Athens.  “God that made the world and all things therein, ... hath made of one blood all races of men to dwell on all the face of the earth.”

But the Jews, though catholic as monotheists, and as worshipping a spiritual God, were limited by their ritual and their intense national bigotry.  Hereditary and ancestral pride separated them, and still separate them, from the rest of mankind. “We have Abraham to our Father” is the talisman which has kept them together, but kept them from union with others.

Christianity and Mohammedanism, therefore, remain the only two really catholic religions.  Each has overpassed all the boundaries of race.  Christianity, beginning among the Jews, a Semitic people, passed into Europe, and has become the religion of Greeks, Romans, Kelts, Germans, and the Slavic races of Russia, and has not found it impossible to convert the Africans, the Mongols, and the American Indians.  So too the Mohammedan religion, also beginning among the Semitic race, has become the nominal religion of Persia, Turkey, Northern Africa, and Central Asia.  Monotheism, therefore, includes a tendency to catholicity.  But Islam has everywhere made subjects rather than converts, and so has failed of entire success.  It has not assimilated its conquests.