One great distinction between Christianity and all other religions is in this pleroma, or fulness of life which it possesses, and which, to all appearance, came from the life of Jesus.  Christianity is often said to be differenced from ethnic religions in other ways.  They are natural religions:  it is revealed.  They are natural:  it is supernatural.  They are human:  it is divine.  But all truth is revealed truth; it all comes from God, and, therefore, so far as ethnic religions contain truth, they also are revelations.  Moreover, the supernatural element is to be found in all religions; for inspiration, in some form, is universal.  All great births of time are supernatural, making no part of the nexus of cause and effect.  How can you explain the work of Confucius, of Zoroaster, of the Buddha, of Mohammed, out of the existing state of society, and the educational influences of their time?  All such great souls are much more the makers of their age than its result; they are imponderable elements in civilization, not to be accounted for by anything outside of themselves.  Nor can we urge the distinction of human and divine; for there is a divine element in all ethnic religions, and a broadly human element in Christianity.  Jesus is as much the representative of human nature as he is the manifestation of God.  He is the Son of man, no less than the Son of God.

One great fact which makes a broad distinction between other religions and Christianity is that they are ethnic and it is catholic.  They are the religions of races and nations, limited by these lines of demarcation, by the bounds which God has beforehand appointed.  Christianity is a catholic religion:  it is the religion of the human race.  It overflows all boundaries, recognizes no limits, belongs to man as man.  And this it does, because of the fulness of its life, which it derives from its head and fountain, Jesus Christ, in whom dwells the fulness both of godhead and of manhood.

It is true that the great missionary work of Christianity has long been checked.  It does not now convert whole nations.  Heathenism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, stand beside it unmoved.  What is the cause of this check?

The catholicity of the Gospel was born out of its fluent and full life.  It was able to convert the Greeks and Romans, and afterward Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Franks, Scandinavians, because it came to them, not as a creed, but as a life.  But neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants have had these large successes since the Middle Ages.  Instead of a life, Christianity became a church and a creed.  When this took place, it gradually lost its grand missionary power.  It no longer preached truth, but doctrine; no longer communicated life, but organized a body of proselytes into a rigid church.  Party spirit took the place of the original missionary spirit.  Even the majority of the German tribes was converted by Arian missionaries, and orthodoxy has not the credit