it help to show to
Christians the truth and good in the creeds outside of Christendom. For to
the Church and to its sects, quite as much as to the world, applies the
saying, "He that exalteth himself shall be abased, but he that humbleth
himself shall be exalted."

Sec. 8. Christianity as a Religion of Progress and of Universal Unity.

As long as a tree or an animal lives it continues to grow. An arrest of
growth is the first symptom of the decline of life. Fulness of life,
therefore, as the essential character of Christianity, should produce a
constant development and progress; and this we find to be the case. Other
religions have their rise, progress, decline, and fall, or else are
arrested and become stationary. The religions of Persia, Egypt, Greece,
Rome, Scandinavia, have come to an end. As ethnic religions, they shared
the fortunes of the race or nation with which they were associated. The
systems of Confucius, of the Buddha, of Brahmanism, of Judaea, of
Mohammed, are arrested. They remain stationary. But, thus far,
Christianity and Christendom advance together. Christianity has developed;
out of its primitive faith, several great theologies, the mediaeval
Papacy, Protestantism, and is now evidently advancing into new and larger
forms of religious, moral, and social activity.

The fact of a fulness of divine and human life in Jesus took form in the
doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity. The fact of the reconciling
and uniting power of this life took form in the doctrine of the atonement.
Both of these doctrines are illogical and false, in their form, as church
doctrines. But both of them represent most essential facts. We have seen
the truths in the doctrines of incarnation and the Trinity. The truth in
the atonement is, as the word itself signifies, the at-one-making power of
the Gospel. The reconciliation of antagonist truths and opposing
tendencies, which philosophy has always unsuccessfully endeavored to state
in theory, Christianity accomplishes in practice. Christianity continually
reproduces from its depths of life a practical faith in God, both as law
and as love, in man, both as a free and yet as a providentially guided
being. It gives us God as unity and as variety, as the substance and as
the form of the world. It states the reality of evil as forcibly as any
system of dualism, and yet produces a practical faith in good as being
stronger than evil and sure to conquer it. In social life i