ianity. A good
Christian is a good Buddhist, a good Jew, a good Mohammedan, a good
Zoroastrian; that is, he has all the truth and virtue that these can
possess, purged and fused in a greater and completer light.
Christianity, I say, supersedes all other religions by including these
fragments of truth in its own completeness. You cannot show me any
element of spiritual light or strength which is in other religions and
is not in Christianity. Nor can you {138} show me any other religion
which can compare with Christianity in completeness of light:
Christianity is the one complete and final religion, and the elements
of truth in other religions are rays of the One Light which is
concentrated and shines full in Jesus Christ our Lord.'[3]

II

From whatever cause, whether as a reaction against the mode in which
this great truth has been at times presented, there have been, and
there are, attempts to supersede Christianity because of its
narrowness. Religion must not be identified with any one name: God
manifests Himself to all, and no Mediator is needed. Theism,
therefore, the worship of the One Almighty and Eternal Being, not
Christianity, in which a Human Name is associated with the Divine Name,
can alone pretend to be the Universal Religion, the {139} Religion of
all Mankind. It is not the first time that such an attempt to do
without Christianity and to do away with it has been made. In the
eighteenth century there was a similar movement. To this day at
Ferney, near Geneva, is preserved the chapel which Voltaire erected for
the worship of God, of God as distinguished from Christ as Divine or as
Mediator between God and man. Voltaire thought that he could overthrow
and crush the Faith of Christ, but he none the less erected a temple to
God. The Deists upheld what they called the Religion of Nature and
repudiated Revelation. _Christianity not Mysterious; Christianity as
old as the Creation_, were among the works issued to show the
superiority of Natural Religion, its freedom from difficulties, its
agreement with reason, its universality. The most enduring memorial of
the controversy is Bishop Butler's _Analogy of Religion to the
Constitution and Course of Nature_, {140} in which it was argued that
the Natural Religion of the Deists was beset by as many difficulties as
the Revelation of the Christians, that those who were not hindered from
believing in God by the problems which Nature presented need not be