Foreign Missions or World Wide Evangelism 71 surely most untrue save on the basest levels of life. But the proverb of the Arab women of Kesrawan too truly sug gests the Asiatic point of view: “The threshold weeps forty days when a girl is born.” And between man and man the world knows no deep basis of common humanity, or if it knows, it has no adequate sanction and resources for its reali zation. Its brotherhood is within the faith or within the caste, not as inclusive as humanity. It wants what all the world wanted until it found it through Christ. “In his little churches, where each person bore his neighbor’s burden, Paul’s spirit,” says Harnack, “already saw the dawning of a new humanity, and in the Epistle to the Ephesians he has voiced this feeling with a thrill of exaltation. Far in the background of these churches, like some unsubstantial semblance, lay the division between Jew and Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, great and small, rich and poor. For a new humanity had now appeared, and the Apostle viewed it as Christ’s body, in which every member served the rest, and each was indispensable in his own place.” The great social idea of Christianity is still only par tially realized by us. But we do not have it at all unless we have it for humanity, and it can be made to prevail anywhere only by being made to prevail everywhere. The world needs, moreover, the moral ideal and the moral power of Christianity. The Christian conceptions of truth and purity and love and holiness and service are original. Every ideal except the Christian ideal is defective. Three other sets of ideals are offered to men. The only other theistic ideals are the Mohammedan and the Jewish. The Mohammedan ideal expressly sanctions polygamy, and the authority of its founder is cited in justification of falsehood. The Jewish ideal is wholly enclosed in and transcended by the Christian. Bud dhism and Shintoism and Confucianism offer men atheistic ideals, i. e., ideals which abandon the conception of the abso lute and cannot rise above their source in man who made them. Hinduism, with its pantheism, is incapable of the moral dis- -
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