yet every whit as important and as responsible as his, because her primal duty and responsibility to God are the same as his. From the time when our Lord showed such delicate and beautiful courtesies to the sisters in Bethany, down through the days of Christian knighthood and quite to our own era, there has been in all Christendom a certain chivalric respect for woman which has never been witnessed anywhere outside of Christendom, and which has brought the highest blessings on men as well as on women, and has advanced and enriched and exalted all our civilization. This is distinctly a fruitage of Christian growth.

3. The traveller in non-Christian lands is struck with the lack of those great organized charities, whether private or public, which are found so abundantly in all Christian lands. These are wanting, not because there is no need of them. The poor and the suffering are everywhere. Beggars line the streets, crowd the gates of temples and cities, swarm upon your path. The blind, the deaf, the insane, the diseased are unhappily to be found in all lands. Nor are kind hearts wanting altogether in any land. But nowhere else has the duty of making large and careful provision for the needy been so clearly recognized as in the countries where the parable of the good Samaritan has been preached. Homes for orphans, asylums for the blind, for deaf mutes, for the insane, thoroughly appointed hospitals for the sick, nay, even humanely conducted prisons for the criminals, these all are the outgrowth of Christianity The prisons of Asia are an abomination and disgrace to the race. Dante's Inferno with its fearful scenes hardly surpasses in horror some of those hells upon earth. It is only where Christianity has taken root that proper ideas of the punishment of the guilty are combined with a proper regard for the humanity which is found even in the most hardened criminals.

And surely it is Christianity alone which has led largehearted and skilful physicians to go to heathen lands to establish hospitals for the gratuitous aid of the needy When did Brahmanism or Buddhism or Confucianism set on foot such an undertaking? So strange is the idea to the Asiatic nations that they cannot comprehend the thought that good men and women have come to help them, out of utterly unselfish and humane motives. Such is the distance between Christianity and the eastern systems of religion.

4. The most superficial observer must be struck with the fact that in non-Christian states government, as a rule, takes on the type of absolutism. The state or the emperor is every thing, the individual nothing. Even in the ancient Greek and Roman republics this was largely true. The theory underlying them was that the individual existed for the state, not the state for the individual. The majority or the dominant faction spoke for the state, and the minority had few rights clearly recognized. Consequently the very best men were often ostracized or slain. There can hardly be said to be any individualism in Asiatic life. In certain cases there are strata of society But in each stratum men rarely emerge above the dead level. Absolutism sits on its throne, tyrannical and often unjust. It is so arbitrary that no western nation consents to submit its citizens to the oriental courts. We have by treaty secured the right to establish our courts for trying our own citizens in all these lands.

It is too often forgotten that Christianity planted the germ of individual liberty in Europe by showing what is the worth of the human soul and by declaring that it has certain indefeasible rights of which not even the state can deprive it. When Peter and his associates declared to the astonished high priests,

"We must obey God rather than men," they proclaimed that true higher law doctrine, which has come sounding down through the centuries, setting bounds to absolutism, and nerving brave hearts everywhere to the assertion of their fundamental rights and duties. Christianity has come to reverse or at any rate to modify the old doctrine, and to declare in substance that the individual is not made for the state so much as the state for the individual, that men are not made for institutions, but all institutions, ordinances, sabbaths, churches, governments are here for the protection, elevation and salvation of individual men. When an institution utterly fails in this, be it church or government, it should give place to something better The New Testament is the great charter of the rights of the human soul. Whatever improper restrictions are put upon human freedom in one or two nominally Christian lands, it is unquestionably true that civil liberty is most secure where the gospel doctrine of human rights is most clearly and fully recognized.

5. The traveller and the scholar have not failed to notice that non-Christian nations, even the most civilized, have never wrought out any well defined system of international law to govern their intercourse with each other This is not an accident. There was, of course, some personal exchange of civilities between sovereigns. But in general a foreigner was an enemy In the Greek a foreigner was a barbarian. There was no word in either tongue to express the modern idea of neutrality between belligerents. The fundamental notion of international law, that nations are equal in respect to rights, is a distinctively Christian idea, a corollary from the doctrine of Christian brotherhood proclaimed by St. Paul in his great dis-course on Mars Hill, when he announced to the Greeks that

God "hath made of one blood all the nations of men," that is, they are children of one common Father, and so brethren. The Asiatic idea has been that nations live in isolation unless one is subject to another For a long time China was unwilling to negotiate with western powers save as a superior with inferiors. The narrow conceptions of all Asiatic religions failed to grasp the idea of the brotherhood of man and the equal rights of nations, which is the very soul of modern international law The whole system rests avowedly on the just and humane principle of Christian ethics, and it is possible thus far for Oriental nations to be admitted only partially to reciprocity under its code, because they have not fully accepted those ideas of justice, which Christianity has wrought into our system of jurisprudence.

Its supreme aim

6. The attitude of Christianity toward truth in general is more friendly and just than that of other religions. I do not. forget how far short of the true catholicity of pure Christianity many of its professed disciples have come. Christianity itself is hospitable to truth from whatever source. is truth. One of its chosen titles of its great Master, is The Truth. I know full well that many of its disciples have not been quick to give a welcome to new truth. Sometimes they have persecuted the messengers of truth. Sometimes they have been indifferent or hostile to the messages of truth, scientific, political or religious. Often this opposition has been due to the ignorance of men, who sincerely believed they were defending the truth, as Saul thought he was doing God service by haling Christians to prison. But after making all the concessions which are demanded on this score, it still remains indisputable that whether we consider the doctrines themselves or the believers in them, no religion can be for a moment compared with the

Christian faith for its promotion and dissemination of all kinds of truth.

In some lands learning is the exclusive possession of the priests, and by a natural impulse they shut their eyes to all learning which they do not originate or which cannot be made subservient to their special purposes. In others the believers are taught that their religious books contain all that is needful for man to know, and so all new truth is rejected as superfluous or obtrusive.

With the single exception of a few Brahmins, who have made some study of the religion of their English conquerors, it is the Christian disciple alone, who has made a careful philosophic study of all religions and sought with impartiality to recognize the good in each. It is from the bosom of Christian civilization with its great schools of learning, that nearly all scientific discovery has come. A very large proportion of the scientific investigators and discoverers, the Keplers and Newtons and Faradays abroad, the Peirces and Danas and Grays at home, have been most devout and reverent Christian men. The services to scholarship, to scientific learning, to the general increase of the treasures of the human mind, which have been rendered by all the civilizations that are dominated by nonChristian religions fall immeasurably short of the contributions of Christian civilization, although only about one-fourth of the human race are even nominally Christian.

Now I have stated, and have stated, I think, with moderation, some of the advantages which Christianity as a practical, working religion presents over other religions. I have not spoken at all of its distinctively spiritual superiority, of the high and rational hopes and aspirations, which it kindles in the soul by its revelation of a personal God and of our personal rela