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
acknowledgment of victory through the righteousness of Christ. Mohammed
never claimed to be a saviour or even an intercessor. He was