inator, or whether either one was the copyist of the other.

Every man who has gone into this matter with any freedom of soul has had his period of devotion to Buddhism when the great Hindu seemed for a time destined to divide the worship of the world with Jesus of Nazareth, but the period terminates sooner or later, and he finds himself gladly at home again in the faith of his fathers, at one with God in Christ Jesus, and at home with all the righteous souls of the human race.

The same is true, but in another sense, with Mohammed and Mohammedism. As to its theology, it is my belief that Mohammed succeeded by emphasizing his one thought, There is but one God and Mohammed is His prophet. It is true that the military and barbaric spirit of Mohammed greatly aided and facilitated such religious success as he met with, but this was not the whole of it. Christianity, that is, the Church, had already become exceedingly, emphatically and exclusively Trinitarian, with much of the mysticism originally attached to the old Trinitarianism of old Brahamism. It was too deep and too intricate for the simple-minded, straight-headed clearness of the Arab. It had already disaffected nearly half the Christian world. The Jew nor the Arab ever could believe or accept it.

Mohammed had learned the morality of the Jew and the Christian, and determining on a more genial life here and hereafter, his religion, alike for its simplicity, intensity and earnestness, became and continued to be satisfactory to nearly half of that semi-civilized world to which it seems well adapted. I speak as a man.

Mohammedism is simply an afterthought of Judaism and Christianity, but without any divine center of attraction, mediator or helper. It is hard, sensual, selfish. Many years ago I gave a course of fifteen lectures on the beauties and virtues of Mohammedism and the Koran. I am glad to forget them all, and to dwell at peace and at home with the one God-man and only divinely human Master of the world—Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God.

So much regarding various abortive attempts at constructing a science of religion, either in connection with or apart from Christianity. Every such effort has failed, and every such effort will fail. Apostolic and early Christianity adopted or adapted the best religious faith and impulses of the ages preceding the Christian era and wove these into the very heart of the Scriptures. It betrays consummate ignorance and folly on the part of modern investigators to suppose or claim for a moment either that in the Apostolic era or the age that followed it, the master minds of Christianity were not familiar with the best thought of ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, and the relation of these to the Hebrew revelation and civilization on the one hand, and the total philosophy, mental, moral and religious, of the entire Asiatic systems on the other.

Palestine was the gateway of commerce in national, spiritual and mental affairs between the ancient East .and West and South of those times. Paul knew it all. The ancient fathers, Jerome and Augustine, and others knew it all better than the tallow dip, rush lights, or electric spirits of New York, London or Berlin know it to-day. But they had all learned a higher and a better way—for whatever things were gain to me, learning as well as wealth, those I counted lost for the knowledge of God in Jesus Christ, by whom the world is sacrificed unto me and I unto the world.

The trouble with modern thought and investigation is that it has never learned or comprehended Christ or Christianity. It has dabbled in all sorts of scientific and Buddhistic humbuggery, but has never been smitten with -that ineffable and blinding light which struck the long cherished and learned darkness from the mind of Paul and gave him God instead.

I am not saying that modern thought is wholly to blame for this. I think the old Church is something to blame for it, because instead of preaching Christ with the fullness of heaven's light and power, it has been preaching the Primacy of Peter, the Temporal Power, the Immaculate Conception, devotions to relics, Maine laws, total abstinence, and other immoral reforms.

Having gone over the general points of our abstracts, let us advance a few reasons for supposing and believing that Christianity is the absolute religion—destined to meet and satisfy, when rightly understood, all the religious cravings of all nations of the world.

First, we must lift it out of the contradictions of critics and theologians. Christianity, divested of its excrescences of dogma and culture, so-called, is the burning heart of God in love with the world and ever working to win its love in order to its salvation.

Can the Pope and the priesthood of the Roman Catholic or other Christian Churches speak with power and authority to this point—let them do so and stop mumbling over side issues that have for ages split into fragments and nauseated mankind.

In comparing Christianity with other systems of religion, there is this to be said, that while all the old systems grew up out of the semi-civilized conditions of the nations and peoples practicing them, Christianity was born, and grew up into and out of the supremest wisdom and culture the world has ever known. Athens, Corinth, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Rome, were the quintet and concentration of all that mortal man had known or dreamed up to that morning when the wise men found in the manger at Bethlehem the soul of that light which lighteneth every man who cometh into the world.

Rome had inherited all the best from Egypt and Greece and Asia, and at the time of the birth of Christ the scholars of Alexandria were endeavoring to reconcile their philosophies in one great philosophy of all nations.

Jesus was born, and Christianity grew and bloomed though through bitter suffering in the sunlight of the gardens of the world. These things were not done in a corner. The gospel of John takes all this religious philosophy and, as has been generally believed, by the inspiration of heaven, and certainly as a fact, whether with or without divine inspiration, weaves it into the spiritual fact, a crown of glory, a radiation of God into the being and about the brows of Jesus of Nazareth—who from that time has become, to those who believe, the Son of God—the God-man, the one human and divine center and glory of the human race. Oh, that men could all see it and stop their cavilling and their dreams.

It is the supreme intellectual grasp, the supreme spiritual wisdom to be found in the gospel of John, the epistles of Paul and the epistle to the Hebrews that wins and holds my undying adherence to Christianity as the gentlest and most ineffable and uncomparably the greatest, and the absolute, the divine religion of the human race. Jesus was not a half-taught charlatan but God with us. St. Paul and the authors of the books named were of the supremest faculties that have ever been bestowed upon human minds.

Socrates and Plato were great and splendid, but not to be compared with Jesus and St. Paul for depth of insight and breadth of comprehension of the profoundest spiritual relationships of the human soul—the relationships that hold and reconcile man with the immortal and omniscient soul of the universe and of eternity.

Christianity, I say, differs from all its predecessors in this that it was born of the noonday of human culture and civilization, and could the older religions be compared with it in any light, this one factor would have to be considered and weighed with infinite care. The earlier systems of religion cannot be compared with Christianity for other reasons, as we shall see. Born thus in the broad daylight of the highest culture of history, all this culture, plus the imperial Roman power were invoked by the Hebrew hierarchy of those days to destroy that divine Man-child of the ages. To all intents and purposes, it was destroyed; but, like God Himself, who is indestructible, it rose out of its own ashes, and for three hundred years fought all the cultured and civilized kingdoms of the world, till it conquered them, and from its birth till the present time it has dominated the dominating forces of the world. It has changed the tides of time, made a new era for all civilized nations, and is the one divine and unerring light of God in all the world at this hour.

A showing as to numbers cannot be counted on as a measurement of spiritual power. If Jesus were alive in the world to-day, the Scriptures banished and forgotten, the Church a by-word and an unsubstantial dream, and all other forms of religion intact and all-powerful, including the religion of lust, of commerce and of gain, I would undertake to construct a religion of God out of the one fact of Jesus alone that should in due time annihilate all other forms of religion and dominate the world.

It is not a question of the Scriptures, of verbal or other inspiration. It is not a question of the Primacy of Peter or of the Temporal Power of the Popes. It is not a question of the comparative numbers of Buddhism, Mohammedism and Christianity; it is a question of the inherent motive and divine power of Jesus to win souls to God and virtue, and so to dominate the world.

Am I volunteering mere personal opinion? Let us see. All nations and peoples of the world have certain fixed standards of certain fixed principles of moral, religious, heroic and divine character. I am not speaking of any primitive, imaginary, prehistoric man or men who are the real myths of the ages. I am not speaking of any prehistoric creatures who may have thought this or that, but of whom none but imaginary scientists know anything, and they as good as nothing—I am speaking of human beings, as far as we have any trace of them on any habitable portion of this planet since the morning stars sang together and the sons of God, in more or less distinct chorus, shouted for joy.

I am well aware that certain actions condemned as immoral in New York may be winked at in Salt Lake City with a smile of approval. I am not saying that the detailed standards of moral specialists, doctrinaires, creed-makers, etc., are all alike in Constantinople, in London, Pekin, Berlin and the Soudan.

I am saying, however, that spite of these personal idiosyncrasies of the surface moralities of the different nations and peoples, there are great underlying axioms, altruisms, principles, out of which the decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount might have been naturally or supernaturally evolved; and that these axiomistic, psychic principles are common to the race of bipeds that we call men.

For instance, Do unto others as ye would that others should do unto you, appeals to the heart and mind and conscience of the world. All men, even the stupidest savages, all men except Wall street brokers and modern politicians have some sense of right and wrong, and even the latter know when another man is trying to deal fairly or unfairly with them. The stupidest savage knows the same. All men know that one who is ready, who chooses, and who is ever willing to sacrifice his own personal benefit or safety or life to help, to aid, to save another man or men from death, from just suffering, from hell and damnation, if you please, represents what is known to savages even as a higher and better type of man than the man who is constantly planning, intriguing and scheming to secure his own