only when it implies that the world has bidden farewell to
Christianity, either through the mystical expectation of a Millennial
reign which is to supersede it, or through the sceptical belief that our
religion has only an historic value, and needs remodelling to meet the
requirements of advancing civilization. If the latter was the meaning of
this utterance of the Franciscan book, the idea was the germ of the modern
conception of the function of Christianity in "the education of the race,"
the first statement of which is usually attributed to Lessing.(287)

The same century which gave birth to this _mot_, expressive of _progress
in religion_, created also another which embodied the idea of the
_comparative study of religions_. This phrase may have different meanings.
It may signify the comparison of Christianity with ethnic creeds in its
external and internal character, without sacrificing the belief that a
divinely revealed element exists in it, which caused it to differ from
them in kind as well as degree. Or it may mean a comparison of
Christianity with other religions, as equally false with them, equally a
deliberate and conscious invention of priestcraft which was the shocking
view adopted by writers like Volney in the last century,(288) or else a
comparison of it as equally true with them, as equally a psychological
development of the religious intelligence, which is the view prevalent in
many noted works on the philosophy of history in the present.(289) It was
the second of these ideas, expressive of actual incredulity, which existed
in the thirteenth century. It is traceable in the imputation made by
Gregory IX(290) against the celebrated emperor Frederick II, that he had
spoken of Moses, Christ, and Mahomet, as the three great impostors who had
respectively deceived the Jews, the Christians, and the Arabs.

The very possibility of the existence of such a comparison presupposes
intercourse with disciples of foreign creeds. The Christians now no longer
possessed a merely vague knowledge of Jews and Mahometans. The crusades
were expiring, the danger which evoked them had subsided, and the enmity
which supported them was decaying. Europe had entered into relations of
commerce, if not of amity, with Mahometan nations; and through contact
with them had come to measure them by an altered standard, and to acquire
the idea of comparing religions. Frederick II, to whom this expression is
imputed, is stated to have manife