of that last grand success of Christianity.  The conversion of seventy millions of Chinese in our own day to the religion of the Bible was not the work of Catholic or Protestant missionaries, but of the New Testament.  The Church and the creed are probably the cause of this failure.  Christianity has been partially arrested in its natural development, first by the Papal Church, and secondly by the too rigid creeds of orthodoxy.

If the swarming myriads of India and Mongolia are to be converted to Christianity, it must be done by returning to the original methods.  We must begin by recognizing and accepting the truth they already possess.  We must be willing to learn of them, in order to teach them.  Comparative Theology will become the science of missions if it help to show to Christians the truth and good in the creeds outside of Christendom.  For to the Church and to its sects, quite as much as to the world, applies the saying, “He that exalteth himself shall be abased, but he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.”

Sec. 8.  Christianity as a Religion of Progress and of Universal Unity.

As long as a tree or an animal lives it continues to grow.  An arrest of growth is the first symptom of the decline of life.  Fulness of life, therefore, as the essential character of Christianity, should produce a constant development and progress; and this we find to be the case.  Other religions have their rise, progress, decline, and fall, or else are arrested and become stationary.  The religions of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Scandinavia, have come to an end.  As ethnic religions, they shared the fortunes of the race or nation with which they were associated.  The systems of Confucius, of the Buddha, of Brahmanism, of Judaea, of Mohammed, are arrested.  They remain stationary.  But, thus far, Christianity and Christendom advance together.  Christianity has developed; out of its primitive faith, several great theologies, the mediaeval Papacy, Protestantism, and is now evidently advancing into new and larger forms of religious, moral, and social activity.

The fact of a fulness of divine and human life in Jesus took form in the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity.  The fact of the reconciling and uniting power of this life took form in the doctrine of the atonement.  Both of these doctrines are illogical and false, in their form, as church doctrines.  But both of them represent most essential facts.  We have seen the truths in the doctrines of incarnation and the Trinity.  The truth in the atonement is, as the word itself signifies, the at-one-making power of the Gospel.  The reconciliation of antagonist truths and opposing tendencies, which philosophy has always unsuccessfully endeavored to state in theory, Christianity accomplishes in practice.  Christianity continually reproduces from its depths of life a practical faith in God, both as law and as love, in man, both as a free and yet as a providentially guided being.