who have no faith in our evangelism. They may indeed admit, what no candor can deny, that the religion of the cross has become the religion of the best and ruling races of mankind; but they do not believe that it can be made to traverse the whole scale of humanity. There are races of men, it is alleged, who can no more take it than they could take the refined philosophy of Plato. These races may be overborne and pushed out of history; but evangelized they can never be. Or if ever evangelized, it can not be till they have first been civilized. Nor is the faith of Christian men themselves always as firm and buoyant as it should be. The good work goes on slowly. Empires like those of Chin and Japan, embracing more than a third part of the population of the globe, and millions of men everywhere, idolatrous and stupid, resist our march. On rational and historic grounds, apart from the explicit assurance of prophecy, have we any right to expect that these empires, and these millions will ever accept the faith we offer them?

This question I now propose to answer: First, by an analysis of Christianity itself, which by making clear its marvelous adaptation to human wants, such as no human system ever exhibited, may at the same time demonstrate the divinity of its origin, and so give double assurance of its final triumph; and secondly, by a brief glance at the past achievements of Christianity in its gallant struggle for the dominion of the world.

I. In the first place, what are the distinctive features of Christianity? Wherein does it differ from other religions? And how do these points of difference stand related to God on the one side, and to man on the other?

1. In enumerating the distinctive features of our religion, we may mention first the Incarnation of God in Christ.

If any thing is clear from history, it is clear that human nature can not endure a bald spiritual theism. Man has two thoughts of God, equally normal and necessary. He thinks of God as One Infinite Spirit, wholly separate from matter, without form, or voice, or changeable affections, transcending the limitations of time and space, wise, just, and awful in his holiness. Hence the pure monotheism now recognized as lying in the background of all the better Pagan mythologies. Hence, in part, the triumphs of Mohammed, whose wild voice out of the Arabian peninsula went pealing over three continents: "Your God is one God." That there are more gods than one, or that this One God is any thing else than pure spirit, human reason in its best estate, has always steadily

refused to believe. The divine unity and spirituality were affirmed by Plato, looking the Greek polytheism boldly in the face; and were re-affirmed by the Neo-Platenists as essential parts of their eclectric creed. But human weakness and human sinfulness necessitate another conception of God. Across the great gulf between the finite and the infinite, between sin and holiness, the voice of man is afraid to speak. The human heart sinks discouraged, and shudders with affright. A being so feeble, and so defiled, must have God near to him. Hence the Patriarchal and Hebrew theophanies, in which the ineffable Jehovah is seen wearing the human form, and is heard speaking in human tones. Hence, likewise, the Pagan deification of nature and man, and all the inferior divinities of the Pagan Pantheon, bridging as best they might, the bottomless abyss which yawns betwixt the finite and the infinite, the sinful and the sinless. The idea of incarnation is thus seen to be congenial to our nature. And yet in none of the instances referred to was this idea realized. The Patriarchal and Hebrew theophanies were only transient manifestations of God in the human form; a temporary expedient of merely provisional economies. They only abated a hunger which they could not feed. Still they served what appears to have been their providential purpose; they prevented at once the worship of nature and the multiplication of inferior divinities. Accordingly for centuries, down even to the time of the deluge, when wicked men shrank away from the awfulness of God, they took refuge not in polytheism, but in atheism. After the Deluge, mankind no longer able to be atheists, betook themselves to the worship of innumerable divinities. Nature in all her rage was defied from the starry hosts on high down to the mountains, the rivers, and the trees. At first these natural objects were revered only as symbols of the Divine presence and power. At first the carved or molten image was only a symbol. But in process of time the symbols themselves were worshiped. Even the Hebrews, in spite of their theophanies were til after the exile in Babylon, constantly lapsing into these idolatries. Outside of Judaism the declension was monstrous. The Creator was sunk and lost sight of in his creation. In the great hunger of the human heart for an incarnate God, polytheism became the faith of the masses, and pantheism the speculation of the schools. Human reason pronounces for unity in its conception of the Godhead; but the human heart, yearning for sympathy in its weakness, and stricken with terror in its defilement cries out for an incarnate God.

This importunate demand of our finite and sinful nature is for the first time met, and fully met, by the incarnation of God in Christ. The theophanies were transient and provisional. They really adumbrated the coming reality. The incarnations of the pagan world were all of a pantheistic type, involving no proper personal union between the Divine and the human. In the pagan philosophies, God could enter humanity no other wise than he entered nature. The tree and the man fared alike. But in Christ the two natures, each complete and perfect in itself, were united in a real, perfect personality. He was a man, born of the Virgin Mary, with a real human body, and a real human soul; as human in every propor sense of the word, as any one of us. He was also God; not God the Father, but God the Word, the Second Person in the Trinity, whom angels worship and who made the worlds. In one breath we may say of him that he was born and died. In the next breath we may say of him, Before Abraham began to be he eternally and unchangeably is. And for three and thirty years this mysterious being lived and walked in Palestine. Now he sailed upon the lake, and now he smoothed its angry billows by a word. Now he was a genial guest at a marriage feast, and now he turned the water into wine. Now he wept before a sepulcher, and now he waked the dead. Now he died himself, and now having risen from the dead, he ascended up where he was before. Such is the Christ of the New Testament. Such was the Christ of Christendom for three hundred years before the Nicene Creed echoed the speculations of Athanasius. And such has been the Christ of Christendom, by a vast preponderance of numbers in every succeeding century. Such, too, must continue to be the Christ of Christendom, by an equally vast preponderance of numbers, through ail coming time. Here at last our nature rests. Here at last is the great hunger of the heart appeased. We need no less, as we can ask no more. God manifest in the flesh is the end of all our desires, the solace of all our sorrows, the conquest of all our fears. And what is more, even philosophy is now ranging herself on the side of faith. From pantheistic speculations there is no legitimate escape but in the doctrine of the Word made flesh. Here then, the sage and the savage meet, bowing together at the feet of an incarnate God. The conception of such a divine humanity is equally above them both; but as an accomplished fact, it satisfies and renovates, and saves them both.

2. Another distinctive feature of Christianity is the Atonement.

If as a Roman poet has said, it be human to err, equally human

is it to undergo the pangs of remorse and the fear of punishment. Dualism may, in indeed, may affirm an eternal independent principle of evil, and pantheism may seek to resolve all evil into good; but the conscience of the race refuses thus to be relieved of its crushing burden of guilt. In man's own unperverted and honest judgment of himself, he is an offender, not merely against the moral order of the universe, but an offender against the moral ruler of the universe, against whom personally he has rebelled, and whose inmost moral nature has been aroused to the vindication of its righteous claims. Punishment is of course the instinctive apprehension of the soul that has sinned. Nature, it is observed, always punishes, never pardons an offender. Human governments seldom pardon. Human society would lose its coherence, and human life itself become a hideous riot, were not punishment the rnle for evil-doers, and pardon the rare exception. How, then, can impunity for sinners be looked for under the moral government of God? But the abyss thus opened is frightful; for every human being misery, and that misery eternal. Hence a wild cry everywhere for relief. Is there no escape? Is the law to have its course? In this sphere of spirit, as in the sphere of sense, must fire always burn, and water always drown? Verily they must, says reason; there is no such thing as forgiveness. Altars and sacrifices are of no avail. From the very heights of the Platonic philosophy, more than two thousand years ago, the verdict came that "the gods are not easily propitiated." Sorrow, O sinner! is bootless; by penance you must yourself atone for the mischief you have wrought. I will not say that human beings in their distress would never dare to dream that God might somehow succor such misery. But I must say, what no sound thinker will venture to question, that there is no safety in reasoning from mere goodness to mercy. The rude peasant, with low, confused notions of what is due to justice and law, might have imagined that somehow pardon was attainable; but philosophy would have rebuked his presumption. And yet in spite of philosophy, men everywhere have had their altars and victims. Whence these altars and victims? Of blind human instinct say some, making thus the strongest possible confession of ill-desert, in the hope of averting a retribution seen to be justly impending. Of gross conceptions, say others, as though God might be wrought upon and moved to favor by such offerings. But penitent confession, how bitter soever it may be, is no atonement says philosophy. Nor is God so coarse and savage a monster as to delight in the scent of burning flesh. Let

then these altars and victims be swept away; they are an offense to reason. And yet the altars stand, dotting every continent, and with their huge volumes of smoke blackening the whole firmament. Whatsoever it may be that builds them and lights their fires, these altars are evidently indestructible. Philosophy may frown but still they smoke. And their meaning is, that sin, in order to be remitted, must first be attoned for. The necessity of expiation is what they preach with their tongues of flame. But there is no real expiation in the blood of beasts and birds. Such victims take away no sin. The whole system of bloody sacrifices is therefore vain; a dismal cheat if it promises atonement; and pitiful at best, if it be only a confession that atonement is needed. Such is the dilemma of philosophy. Here on the one side is the admitted universality of sacrifice proving its connection with something indestructible within us; and on the other side the demonstration of its impotency.

From this dilemma Christianity offers the only possible escape. In the sufferings and death of Christ it sets before us a real attonement actually accomplished in history; an atonement eternally prepared, of course, since God himself, its author is eternal; an atonement which began its saving work by the very cradle of our apostate race. It was no mere show of condescension and of sympathy, enacted for moral effect, but a real thing. Christ actually suffered for us in his divine humanity, enduring mysterious and immeasurable agonies, that there might be a real satisfaction to the awful justice of God. Not God's honor only but God's own nature required it. This sublime work of attonement was to him, as well as of him, penetrating the very depths of his being, and answering a holy demand, which otherwise could have been answered only by the punishment of the guilty. It was not merely that he might safely pardon but that he might pardon at all. Pardon required some other basis than that of penitence in the offender; it required a basis of satisfied justice in God's own nature. And that basis was furnished by the sufferings and death of Christ. As for man, there was nothing for him to do, indeed there was nothing he could do but simply accept the attonement thus accomplished for him. He had only to confess his sin, and receive forgiveness on the ground of what had been done for him by another. In this way was Adam saved, if saved at all. It matters not that thousands of years were to roll away before the Son of Man should go as it was purposed for him. The lamb that taketh away sin was already slainslain from before the foundation of the world, and faith had