ican Indians. So too the Mohammedan
religion, also beginning among the Semitic race, has become the nominal
religion of Persia, Turkey, Northern Africa, and Central Asia. Monotheism,
therefore, includes a tendency to catholicity. But Islam has everywhere
made subjects rather than converts, and so has failed of entire success.
It has not assimilated its conquests.

The monotheism of Christianity, as we have already seen, while accepting
the absolute supremacy of the Infinite Being, so as to displace forever
all secondary or subordinate gods, yet conceives of him as the present
inspiration of all his children. It sees him coming down, to bless them in
the sunshine and the shower, as inspiring every good thought, as a
providence guiding all human lives. And by this view it fulfils both
Judaism and Mohammedanism, and takes a long step beyond them both.

Sec. 7. The Fulness of Christianity is derived from the Life of Jesus.

Christianity has thus shown itself to be a universal solvent, capable of
receiving into itself the existing truths of the ethnic religions, and
fulfilling them with something higher. Whenever it has come in contact
with natural religion, it has assimilated it and elevated it. This is one
evidence that it is intended to become the universal religion of mankind.

This pleroma, or fulness, integrity, all-sidedness, or by whatever name we
call it, is something deeper than thought. A system of thought might be
devised large enough to include all the truths in all the religions of the
world, putting each in its own place in relation to the rest. Such a
system might show how they all are related to each other, and all are in
harmony. But this would be a philosophy, not a religion. No such
philosophy appears in the original records of Christianity. The New
Testament does not present Jesus as a philosopher, nor Paul as a
metaphysician. There is no systematic teaching in the Gospels, nor in the
Epistles. Yet we find there, in incidental utterances, the elements of
this many-sided truth, in regard to God, man, duty, and immortality. But
we find it as life, not as thought. It is a fulness of life in the soul of
Jesus, passing into the souls of his disciples and apostles, and from them
in a continuous stream of Christian experience, down to the present time.

The word pleroma ([Greek: plaeroma]), in the New Testament, means that
which fills up; fulness, fulfilling, filling full. The verb "to fulfil"
([Greek: