THE SUPREMACY OP CHRISTIANITY. 



257 



distinctive virtues and graces of the Christian life. It is not 

 necessary to accept all the glowing tribute of a religious 

 reformer like Keshub Cliunder Sen to the ascendancy of Jesus 

 Christ in India ; but the fact remains, I believe, tliat even 

 to-day the East and the West are never so nearly harmonized 

 as when in Southern India, for example, native converts, both 

 men and women, are seen kneeling side by side with European 

 missionaries at the Holy Communion of Clu'ist's Body and 

 Blood. For myself, I cherish the hope that, if India embraces 

 Christianity, its intellectual and spiritual effect upon the Church 

 of Christ will be surpassed only by the effect of Greece in the 

 second, third and fourtli centuries of the Christian era. 



Another point of Christian supremacy I hold to be the Bible. 

 To me the sacred literatures of the world are, upon the whole, 

 disappointing. No one of them is comparable witli the Old or, 

 a fortiori, with the New Testament. The noble series of the 

 Religious Books of the East, published under the auspices of 

 the late Professor Max Miiller, has for the first time afforded 

 the Western World an opportunity of acquainting itself with the 

 literary expression of Oriental creeds. I can only say that those 

 books are in my judgment not only inferior to the Bible, but 

 that the later parts of them are generally inferior to the earlier ; 

 whereas the Bible exhibits a continuous moral and spiritual 

 advance from Genems to Revelation. At any rate, there can be 

 no higher authority upon Oriental literature than that illus- 

 trious scholar, Sir William Jones, and he wrote in his Bible, " I 

 have carefully and regularly perused the Holy Scriptures, and 

 am of opinion that the volume, independently of its divine 

 origin, contains more sublimity, purer morality, more important 

 history, and finer strains of eloquence than can be collected 

 from all other books, in whatever language they may have been 

 written." 



Yet another point of supremacy in the Creed of Christendom 

 is its moral elevation. It will not, I think, be denied that 

 Mohannnedanism, by its toleration of slavery and polygamy, or 

 Hinduism, by such practices as sati and such ceremonies as the 

 holi festival, to say nothing about the worship of cows, stand 

 upon a lower moral platform than Christianity. The Brahnio 

 Soma,]" is, in fact, on its moral side a protest against the degra- 

 dation of Hinduism. Contrast with Mohannnedanism or 

 Hinduism the morality of the Sermon on the Mount, of which a 

 critic so dispassionate as Goethe could say that it represented 

 the unsurpassable ideal of human conduct, and the gulf between 

 Christianity and the other religions of the world at their best is 



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