This plausible plea is urged with such force and volume, it is so backed by the current literature and the secular newspaper press that it cannot be ignored.  The time has come when the Church must not only be able to give a reason for the faith she professes, but must assign reasons why her faith should supplant every other.  I am aware that many are insisting that her true course is to be found in an intensive zeal in the promulgation of her own doctrines without regard to any other.  “Preach the Gospel,” it is said, “whether men will hear or whether they forbear.”  But it must be borne in mind that Paul’s more intelligent method was to strive as one who would win, and not as they who beat the air.  The Salvation Army will reach a certain class with their mere unlettered zeal.  The men who purposely read only One Book, but read that on their knees, doubtless have an important work to do, but the Church as a whole cannot go back to the time when devout zealots sneered at the idea of an educated ministry.  The conflict of truth and error must be waged intelligently.  There are sufficient reasons for claiming a divine supremacy for the Gospel over all heathen faiths, and the sooner we thoroughly understand the difference, the more wisely and successfully shall we accomplish our work.

Wherein, then, consists the unique supremacy of the Christian faith?

1.  It alone offers a real salvation.  We are not speaking of ethics, or conceptions of God, or methods of race culture, but of that one element which heals the wounds of acknowledged sin and reconciles men to God.  And this is found in Christianity alone.  There is no divine help in any other.  Systems of speculation, theories of the universe, and of our relation to the Infinite are found in all sacred books of the East.  There are lofty ethical teachings gathered from the lips of many masters, and records of patient research, cheerful endurance of ascetic rigors, and the voluntary encounter of martyrs’ deaths.  And one cannot but be impressed by this spectacle of earnest struggles in men of every land and every age to find some way of peace.  But in none of the ethnic religions has there been revealed a divine and heaven-wrought salvation.  They have all begun and ended with human merit and human effort.  Broken cisterns have everywhere taken the place of the One Fountain of Eternal Life.  Though all these systems recognize the sin and misery of the world, and carry their estimate of them to the length of downright pessimism, they have discovered no eye that could pity and no arm that could bring salvation.  In the silence and gloom of the world’s history only one voice has said, “Lo, I come! in the volume of the Book it is written of me.”  And although men have in all ages striven to rid themselves of sin by self-mortification, and even mutilation, yet the ever-recurring question, “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” was never answered till Paul answered it in his rapturous