Instantaneous renewal of the character and the life is not even claimed by other faiths; there is in them nothing like the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, or that of thousands of others well known in the history of Christian experience.  There are no such changes in men who, from having led lives of profligacy and irreligion, have turned at once into paths of righteousness—­have tamed their wild propensities and submitted themselves to the gentle law of love.  But under Christian influence we have seen Africaner the savage transformed to a tractable, humane, and loving disciple.  We have seen the wild and bloodthirsty Koord subdued and made as a little child.  We have seen the cannibal King Thokambo, of Fiji, turned from his cruelty to a simple, childlike faith, and made to prefer the good of his people to the glory of a powerless sceptre.  Whole races, like the Northmen, have been tamed from savagery and made peaceable and earnest followers of Christ.  In our own time it has been said of a missionary in the South Pacific Islands, “that when he arrived on his field there were no Christians, and when he closed his labors there were no heathen.”

The religion of Gautama has won whole tribes of men, Hinduism and Mohammedanism are even now winning converts from fetish-worshipping races, but, so far as I know, none of these faiths have ever made converts except either by war or by the presentation of such motives as might appeal to the natural heart of man; there has been no spiritual transformation.  If it be said that the Buddhist Nirvana and the Hindu doctrine of final absorption cannot attract the natural heart, the ready answer is that Nirvana and absorption are not the real inspiration of their respective systems.  They are so far removed into the dim future as to exert no practical influence on the great mass of men.  The future estate that is really expected and desired is a happy ideal transmigration, and perhaps many of them; and the chief felicity of the Hindu is that no particular estate is prescribed.  While the Christian is promised a heaven to which the natural heart does not aspire, the Hindu may imagine and prefigure his own heaven.  His next life may be as carnal as the celestial hunting-ground of the Indian or the promised paradise of the Moslem.  It may be only the air-castle of a day-dreamer.  There is no moral transformation.  There is no expulsive power of a new and higher aspiration.  Old things have not passed away; nothing has become new.

But the grace of God in Christ claims to work an entire change in the desires and aspirations of the heart by the power of the Holy Ghost.  Paul found the men of Ephesus highly civilized in a sense, but “dead in trespasses and sins,” “walking according to the course of this world, and having their conversation in the lusts of the flesh.”  But God by His Spirit so “quickened” them that they were able to understand and appreciate one of the most spiritual of all his Epistles.  He addressed them as “new creatures,” as God’s “workmanship,” “created in Christ Jesus unto good works.”