OF CHRISTIANITY UPON OTHER RELIGIOOS SYSTEMS. 



57 



God, was not looking back to Zoroaster. But earlier still the one 

 primeval faith taught belief in One God. 



The Meeting adjourned at 6.10 p.m. 



Written Commuxicatiox. 



Mr. E. Walter Maunder, F.R.A.S. : In studying Dr. Tisdall's 

 paper, the reader cannot fail to be impressed, not only with the 

 breadth of his learning and his mastery of his subject, but also with 

 the fidelity with which he has carried out the purpose of the Council 

 in their choice of the subject for the Gunning Prize competition. 



There is a school at the present day, commanding a very wide sub- 

 conscious influence beyond its avowed adherents, which regards 

 Christianity, not as a living organism, but as a more or less happy 

 collection of fragments from a large number of earlier religions, and 

 " the debt which Christianity owes to other Faiths " is a constant 

 theme with it. The Council Avished the reverse side of the problem 

 to be examined, for assuredly other religions have come under the 

 influence of Christianity, and have imitated it or borrowed from it, 

 or have modified their own creeds in opposition to it. Dr. Tisdall's 

 paper has presented to us some striking examples of the influence 

 of Christianity in modifying alien creeds in a direction towards 

 itself. Might I suggest that there is a very remarkable case in which 

 another religion has been fundamentally modified away from it ? 



When the Jewish nation, having put to death its Messiah, deter- 

 mined upon the rejection of the Apostles whom He had appointed 

 to build up His Church, the teachers of the nation were necessarily 

 driven to organize a theology which should be definitely anti- 

 Christian. Thus, Dr. Schechter, in " Some Aspects of Rabbinic 

 Theology," points out that though we have no Rabbinic literature of 

 the same date as the books of the New Testament, the Mishna, or 

 Law of the Lip, is evidence of the existence of Rabbinic work during 

 that period, and he considers it probable that " the teaching of the 

 Apostle Paul, the antinomian consequences of which became so 

 manifest during the second century, brought about a growing 

 prejudice against all allegorical explanations of the Scriptures "... 

 " A curious alternative is always haunting our exegesis of the 

 Epistles. Either the theology of the Rabbis must be wrong, its con- 

 ception of God debasing, its leading motives materialistic and coarse, 



