We answer that the fundamental doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation, the word made flesh.  It is God revealed in man.  Under some doctrinal type this has always been believed.  The common Trinitarian doctrine states it in a somewhat crude and illogical form.  Yet somehow the man Christ Jesus has always been seen to be the best revelation of God.  But unless there were some human element in the Deity, he could not reveal himself so in a human life.  The doctrine of the incarnation, therefore, repeats the Mosaic statement that “man was made in the image of God.”  Jewish and Mohammedan monotheism separate God entirely from the world.  Philosophic monotheism, in our day, separates God from man, by teaching that there is nothing in common between the two by which God can be mediated, and so makes him wholly incomprehensible.  Christianity gives us Emmanuel, God with us, equally removed from the stern despotic omnipotence of the Semitic monotheism and the finite and imperfect humanities of Olympus.  We see God in Christ, as full of sympathy with man, God “in us all”; and yet we see him in nature, providence, history, as “above all” and “through all.”  The Roman Catholic Church has, perhaps, humanized religion too far.  For every god and goddess of Greece she has given us, on some immortal canvas, an archangel or a saint to be adored and loved.  Instead of Apollo and the Python we have Guido’s St. Michael and the Dragon; in place of the light, airy Mercury she provides a St. Sebastian; instead of the “untouched” Diana, some heavenly Agnes or Cecilia.  The Catholic heaven is peopled, all the way up, with beautiful human forms; and on the upper throne we have holiness and tenderness incarnate in the queen of heaven and her divine Son.  All the Greek humanities are thus fulfilled in the ample faith of Christendom.

By such a critical survey as we have thus sketched in mere outline it will be seen that each of the great ethnic religions is full on one side, but empty on the other, while Christianity is full all round.  Christianity is adapted to take their place, not because they are false, but because they are true as far as they go.  They “know in part and prophesy in part; but when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.”

Sec. 8.  Comparative Theology will probably show that Ethnic Religions are arrested, or degenerate, and will come to an End, while the Catholic Religion is capable of a progressive Development.

The religions of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, have come to an end; having shared the fate of the national civilization of which each was a part.  The religions of China, Islam, Buddha, and Judaea have all been arrested, and remain unchanged and seemingly unchangeable.  Like great vessels anchored in a stream, the current of time flows past them, and each year they are further behind the spirit of the age, and less in harmony with its demands.  Christianity alone, of all human