82 The Fundamentals tras.” ("Indian Evangelical Review,” January, 1891.) In the Bhagavata Purana the character of the god Krishna is^dis tinguished by licentiousness. And worst of all in the Hindu ethics, even in the Bhagavadgita, it is taught that actions in themselves do not defile one, if only they are performed in the state of mind enjoined in the poem. While Buddha and Confucianist ethics are deficient in active benevolence and human service. “Be ye perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect,” is a conception peculiar to Christianity. 7. Christianity is the final and absolute religion, because it contains all the good and truth that can be found in any other religion, and presents it to men in its Divine fulness, while other religions have none but partial good; because it is free from the evils which are found in all other religions, and because it alone can satisfy all the needs of the human heart and of the human race. It is the one true religion. We are glad to find any outreach after truth in other religions which shows that the hearts of those who hold them are made for that truth and capable of receiving it in its perfect form in Christianity. Christianity is final, because there is no good beyond it and no evil in it, and because it cleanses and crowns all the life and thought of man. I t is the end of all men’s quest. “I maintain,” says Tiele, “that the appearance of Christianity inaugurated an entirely new epoch in the develop ment of religion; that all the streams of the religious life of man, once separate, unite in it; and that religious development will henceforth consist in an ever higher realization of the principles of that religion.” And Christianity is absolute as well as final; that is, it fills the field. There can be nothing higher or better. There can be nothing else in the same class. As Bishop Westcott said: “A perfect religion—a religion which offers a complete sat isfaction to the religious wants of man—must be able to meet the religious wants of the individual, the society, the race, in
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