ectual subjective
transformation by a direct influence from on high. But there are many
other points of contrast in which the transcendent character of
Christianity appears.

First, an important differential lies in the completeness of the Divine
personality of Jesus. Buddhism, Confucianism, and Mohammedanism, were
strongly supported by the personality of their founders. We also
cheerfully accord to such men as Socrates and Plato great personal
influence. They have impressed themselves upon the millions of mankind
more deeply than statesmen, or potentates, or conquerors; but not one of
these presents to us a complete and rounded character, judged even from
a human stand-point. Mohammed utterly failed on the ethical side.[211]
His life was so marred by coarse sensuality, weak effeminacy, heartless
cruelty, unblushing hypocrisy, and heaven-defying blasphemy, that but
for his stupendous achievements, and his sublime and persistent
self-assertion, he would long since have been buried beneath the
contempt of mankind.[212] Confucius appears to have been above reproach
in morals, and that amid universal profligacy; but he was cold in
temperament, unsympathetic, and slavishly utilitarian in his teachings.
His ethics lacked symmetry and just proportion. The five relations which
constituted his ethico-political system were everything. They were made
the basis of inexorable social customs which sacrificed some of the
tenderest and noblest promptings of the human heart. Confucius mourned
the death of his mother, for filial respect was a part of his system,
but for his dying wife there is no evidence of grief or regret, and when
his son mourned the death of his wife the philosopher reproved him. In
all things he reasoned upward toward the throne; his grand aim was to
build up an ideal state. He therefore magnified reverence for parents
and all ancestors even to the verge of idolatry, but he utterly failed
in that symmetry in which Paul makes the duties of parents and children
mutual. Under his system a father might exercise his caprice almost to
the power of life or death, and a Chinese mother-in-law is proverbially
a tyrant. The beautiful sympathy of Christ, shown in blessing little
children and in drawing lessons from their simple trust, would have been
utterly out of place in the great sage of China. Confucius seems to
have troubled himself but slightly, if at all, about the wants of the
poor and the suffering; he taught no doctr