Foreign Missions or World Wide Evangelism 79 its conception of the sins that impede, while including much that is immoral, does not include- all, and does not include much on the other hand that has no immoral character at all. Confucianism makes no mention of man’s relation to God, and totally lacks all conception of sin. In one word, Christianity is the only religon in the world which clearly diagnoses the disease of humanity and discovers, what it is that needs to be healed and that attempts permanently and radically to deal with it. And so, also, Christianity alone knows what the salvation is which men require, and makes provision for it. In Chris tianity salvation is salvation from the power and the presence of sin, as well as from its guilt, and shame. Its end is holy character and loving service. It is available for men here and now. In the Mohammedan conception salvation consists in deliverance from punishment, and deliverance not by redemp tion and the sacrifice of love, but by God’s absolute sovereignty. The Hindu idea of salvation is to escape from the' sufferings incident to life, to be liberated from personal, conscious exist ence, and this liberation is to be won by the way of knowledge, knowledge being the recognition of the soul’s essential identity with Brahma, thé impersonal God, or by the way of devotion, devotion being not faith in a God who works for the soul, but the maintenance by the soul of a saving attitude of mind toward the deity chosen to be worshiped. This is actual Hin duism, not the nobler doctrine of the Vedas. In Buddhism salvation is the extinction of existence. Indeed, there is no soul recognized by pure Buddhism. There is only the Karma,’ or character, which survives, and every man must work out his own Karma unaided. “By one’s self,” it is written in the Dhammapada, “the evil is done; by one’s self one suffers; by one’s self evil is left undone ; by one’s self one is purified. Lo, no man can purify, another.” The best Northern Bud dhism draws nearest to Christianity in its conception of a salvation by faith in Amitaba Buddha, but even here the salva- -
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