God with us, “The Son of God,” “The Son of Man,” “The Redeemer,” “The Elder Brother.”  In a word, Islam has nothing to fill the breach between a holy and just God and the conscience-smitten souls of men.  These honored names of Allah are as sublime as the snow-peaks of the Himalayas and as inaccessible.  How can we attain unto them?  Without a Daysman how shall we bridge the abyss that lies between?  Even Israel plead for Moses to speak to them in place of the Infinite, and they voiced a felt want of all human hearts.

Yet no religious system but Christianity reveals a Mediator.  There is in other faiths no such conception as the fatherhood of God.  Though such names as Dyauspater, Zeuspiter or Jupiter, and others bearing the import of father are sometimes found, yet they imply only a common source, as the sun is the source of life.  They lack the elements of love and fostering care.  There can be no real fatherhood and no spirit of adoption except through union with the Son of God.  The idea that re-birth and remission of sin may be followed by adoption and heirship, and joint heirship with the Son of the Infinite, belongs to the Christian faith alone; and the hope and inspiration of such a heritage, seen in contrast with the endless and disheartening prospects of countless transmigrations, are beyond the power of language to describe.  It was with infinite reason that Paul was taught to regard his work among the Gentiles as a rescue or a deliverance “from darkness unto light, and from the power of Satan unto God,” and it was a priceless boon which enabled him to offer at once the full remission of sins and a part in the glorious inheritance revealed through faith in Christ.

Mere ethical knowledge cannot comfort the human soul.  Contrast the gloom of Marcus Aurelius with the joy of David in Psalm cxix.; and Seneca, also, with all his discernment, and his eloquent presentation of beautiful precepts, was one of the saddest, darkest characters of Roman history.  He was the man who schemed with Catiline, and who at the same time that he wrote epigrams urged Nero onward with flattery and encouragement to his most infamous vices and his boldest crimes.  Knowledge of ethical maxims and the power of expressing them, therefore, is one thing, religion is another.  Religion is a device, human or divine, for raising up men by a real or a supposed supernatural aid.  It ought to reveal God as a helper and a Saviour.  It ought to be a provision of grace by which the Just can yet be a justifier of them that are weak and wounded by sin.  The ethical systems of the heathen world corroborate the Scriptural diagnosis of man’s character and condition, but they fail as prescriptions.  So far as divine help and regenerative power are concerned, they leave the race helpless still.