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The Fundamentals prayer; in the universal presence of spiritual powers of some kind;” belief in the sovereignty of God, in the immanence of God, in the transitoriness and vanity of this earthly life on one hand, and in the infinite significance of this life and the sacredness of the human order on the other,—have a relation ship and a significance in Christianity, with its perfect God, which makes them totally different from the conceptions of other religions. And beside these, Christianity has a whole world of conceptions of its own—the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, redemption, the incarnation of a personal God, atonement, character, service, fellowship. 4. In its conception of sin, in its provision for sin’s for giveness and defeat, and in its ideals of salvation and the free offer of its salvation to every man, Christianity is unique and satisfying. Christianity sees sin as the supreme evil in the world, it regards it as a want of conformity to the perfect will of God, or as transgression of His perfect law; it teaches that sin is not a matter of act only, but also of thought and desire and will—a taint in the nature; it insists that God is not re sponsible for it or for any evil; it emphasizes the guilt and horror of it, and the deadly consequences both for time and for eternity, and it opens to man a way of full forgiveness and clean victory. In contrast with this view, Mohammedanism teaches that sin is only the wilful violation of God’s law; sins of ignorance it does not recognize; its doctrine of God’s sovereignty fixes the responsibility for sin on God and dis solves the sense of guilt, and it denies the evil taint of sin in human nature. In Hinduism sin as opposition to the will of a personal God is inconceivable; it is the inevitable result of the acts of a previous state of being; it is evil, because all ex istence and all action, good as well as bad, are evil, and it is illusion, as all things are illusion. In pure Buddhism there can be no sin in our sense of the word, because there is no God; sin there means “thirst,” “desire,” and what Buddhism seeks to escape is not the evil of life only, but life itself; and
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