comparison. This introductory chapter has been designed as a sketch of the
course which the work will take. When we have completed our survey, the
results to which we hope to arrive will be these, if we succeed in what we
have undertaken:--

1. All the great religions of the world, except Christianity and
Mohammedanism, are ethnic religions, or religions limited to a single
nation or race. Christianity alone (including Mohammedanism and Judaism,
which are its temporary and local forms) is the religion of all races.

2. Every ethnic religion has its positive and negative side. Its positive
side is that which holds some vital truth; its negative side is the
absence of some other essential truth. Every such religion is true and
providential, but each limited and imperfect.

3. Christianity alone is a [Greek: plaeroma], or a fulness of
truth, not coming to destroy but to fulfil the previous religions; but
being capable of replacing them by teaching all the truth they have
taught, and supplying that which they have omitted.

4. Christianity, being not a system but a life, not a creed or a form, but
a spirit, is able to meet all the changing wants of an advancing
civilization by new developments and adaptations, constantly feeding the
life of man at its roots by fresh supplies of faith in God and faith in
man.

Chapter II.

Confucius and the Chinese, or the Prose of Asia.

Sec. 1. Peculiarities of Chinese Civilization.
Sec. 2. Chinese Government based on Education. Civil-Service Examinations.
Sec. 3. Life and Character of Confucius.
Sec. 4. Philosophy and subsequent Development of Confucianism.
Sec. 5. Lao-tse and Tao-ism.
Sec. 6. Religious Character of the "Kings."
Sec. 7. Confucius and Christianity. Character of the Chinese.
Sec. 8. The Tae-ping Insurrection. NOTE. The Nestorian Inscription in China
of the Eighth Century.

Sec. 1. Peculiarities of Chinese Civilization.

In qualifying the Chinese mind as prosaic, and in calling the writings of
Confucius and his successors _prose_, we intend no disrespect to either.
Prose is as good as poetry. But we mean to indicate the point of view from
which the study of the Chinese teachers should be approached. Accustomed
to regard the East as the land of imagination; reading in our childhood
the wild romances of Arabia; passing, in the poetry of Persia, into an
atmosphere of tender and entrancing song; then, as we go farther East into