e of human nature as he is the manifestation of
God. He is the Son of man, no less than the Son of God.

One great fact which makes a broad distinction between other religions and
Christianity is that _they_ are ethnic and _it_ is catholic. They are the
religions of races and nations, limited by these lines of demarcation, by
the bounds which God has beforehand appointed. Christianity is a catholic
religion: it is the religion of the human race. It overflows all
boundaries, recognizes no limits, belongs to man as man. And this it does,
because of the fulness of its life, which it derives from its head and
fountain, Jesus Christ, in whom dwells the fulness both of godhead and of
manhood.

It is true that the great missionary work of Christianity has long been
checked. It does not now convert whole nations. Heathenism, Mohammedanism,
Judaism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, stand beside it unmoved. What is the cause
of this check?

The catholicity of the Gospel was born out of its fluent and full life. It
was able to convert the Greeks and Romans, and afterward Goths, Vandals,
Lombards, Franks, Scandinavians, because it came to them, not as a creed,
but as a life. But neither Roman Catholics nor Protestants have had these
large successes since the Middle Ages. Instead of a life, Christianity
became a church and a creed. When this took place, it gradually lost its
grand missionary power. It no longer preached truth, but doctrine; no
longer communicated life, but organized a body of proselytes into a rigid
church. Party spirit took the place of the original missionary spirit.
Even the majority of the German tribes was converted by Arian
missionaries, and orthodoxy has not the credit of that last grand success
of Christianity. The conversion of seventy millions of Chinese in our own
day to the religion of the Bible was not the work of Catholic or
Protestant missionaries, but of the New Testament. The Church and the
creed are probably the cause of this failure. Christianity has been
partially arrested in its natural development, first by the Papal Church,
and secondly by the too rigid creeds of orthodoxy.

If the swarming myriads of India and Mongolia are to be converted to
Christianity, it must be done by returning to the original methods. We
must begin by recognizing and accepting the truth they already possess. We
must be willing to learn of them, in order to teach them. Comparative
Theology will become the science of missions if