ical world for
the second. Islam--yes, Islam had in some sense a Christian ambition: to
win the whole world. The difference was: Islam wished world-conquest;
the Church, the world's salvation. Islam intended to subdue all men and
bring them before God as His servants: The Church intended to educate
all men, to purify and elevate them, and to bring them before God as His
children.

And all others: star-worshippers, and fire, and wood, and water, and
stone, and animal-worshippers had a touching sense of the immediate
divine presence in nature. The Church came not to extinguish this sense
but to explain and to subordinate it; to put God in the place of demons
and hope instead of fear.

The Church came not to destroy, but to purify, to aid and to assimilate.
The destination of the Church was neither national nor racial, but
cosmic. No exclusive power was ever destined to be a world-power. The
ultimate failure of Islam to become a world-power lies in its
exclusiveness. It was with religion as with politics. Every exclusive
policy is foredoomed to failure: the German as well as the Turkish and
the Napoleonic. The policy of the Church was designed by her Divine
Founder: "He that is not against us is for us." Well, there is no human
race on earth wholly against Christ and wholly unprepared to receive
Him. The wisdom of the Christian missionaries therefore is to see first
in what ways Providence has prepared a soil for Christian seed; to see
which of the Christian elements a race, or a religion, already
possesses, and how to utilise these elements and weld them into
Christianity. All that--in order to make Christianity grow organically,
instead of pushing it mechanically.

In conclusion let me repeat again: the wisdom of the Church has been
inclusive. Inclusive was the wisdom of her Founder, inclusive the wisdom
of her organisation and of her destination. Exclusiveness was the very
sickness and weakness of the Church. That is why we in the East in the
time of sickness of the Church looked neither towards Peter, nor Paul,
nor John, but towards the Holy Wisdom, the all-healing and
all-illuminating. For St Sophia in Constantinople, the temple dedicated
to Christ the Eternal, includes in itself the sanctuaries of Peter, Paul
and John; moreover, it is supported even by some pillars of Diana's
temple from Ephesus and has many other things, in style or material,
which belonged to the Paganism of old. Indeed, St Sophia has room and