known as the persistence of force, a body once set in motion will never
stop unless through the intervention of some other resisting force. And
this is strikingly true of moral character and the well-known power and
momentum of habit. Who shall change the leopard's spots or deflect the
fatal drift of a human soul? Remorselessly these Oriental systems exact
from Kharma the uttermost farthing. They emphasize the fact that
according to the sowing shall be the reaping, and that in no part of the
universe can ill desert escape its awards. Even if change were possible,
therefore, how shall the old score be settled? What help, what rescue
can mere infinitude of time afford, though the transmigrations should
number tens of thousands? There is no hint that any pitying eye of God
or devil looks upon the struggle, or any arm is stretched forth to raise
up the crippled and helpless soul. Time is the only Saviour--time so
vast, so vague, so distant, that the mind cannot follows its cycles or
trace the relations of cause and effect.

In contrast with all this, Christianity bids the Hindu ascetic cease
from his self-mortification and become himself a herald of Glad Tidings.
It invites the hook-swinger to renounce his useless torture and accept
the availing sacrifice of Him who hung upon the Cross. It relieves woman
from the power of Satan, as exercised in those cruel disabilities which
false systems have imposed upon her, and assigns her a place of honor in
the kingdom of God. The world has not done scoffing at the idea of a
vicarious sacrifice for the sins of men, and yet it has advanced so far
that its best thinkers, even without any religious bias, are agreed that
the principle of self-sacrifice is the very highest element of character
that man can aspire to. And this is tantamount to an acknowledgment that
the great principle which the Cross illustrates, and on which the
salvation of the race is made to rest, is the crowning glory of all
ethics and must be therefore the germinal principle of all true
religion.

Christianity with its doctrine of voluntary Divine Sacrifice was no
after-thought. Paul speaks of it as "the mystery which hath been hid
from ages and from generations but now is made manifest." It was the one
great mystery which angels had desired to look into and for which the
whole world had waited in travail and expectation. Christ was "the Lamb
slain from the foundation of the world," and the entire world-history
has