It is not our interest, therefore, to sever Christianity from all connection with the manifold forms in which the religious instinct and faculty of man has found expression. If it could be proved that our religion stands in no relation to anything which men in other religions thought or believed, it would be discovered defective, and we would have to abandon the claim that it is the universal religion of humanity. To assert that all previous religious ideas must be expunged as erroneous or false, so that an entirely new message might be written, is to contradict the evangelical doctrine as to the nature of Christ and the purpose of His mission to the world. The New Testament writers assert that Christ is the source of all the truth that was ever uttered, the inspirer of all the goodness that was ever seen, and that He is the stimulator and educator of man’s every reaching out after God. The noblest thinkers, it is true, failed to comprehend the truth, and theirhighest religion failed to satisfy them; but we must not think of them as divinely permitted to fail to teach us the glory of Christ as the ultimate revelation of God. Here, as in all similar cases, failure was rather a partial success; for by the effort to reach it the mind was trained to receive and grasp the reality when it was disclosed. Some one has said that all pre-Christian religions are just Christ partially—very very partially—realised. Certainly they all point to Him, and but for Him they would have been abortive. They all suggest Him, in respect that they each claim something to satisfy and unite them. Christianity thus proves itself Divine, not in being absolutely different from, nor even in being vastly superior to, but in the fact that it harmonises and completes them. Instead, therefore, of being scared by the resemblances to Christianity which we meet in other religions, we should be thankful for their discovery. The early Apologists were not frightened when Celsus,[59]in the second century, submitted his alleged parallels to Christian doctrine and ethics, in order to prove that what Christians called revelation had already been attained by the unassisted efforts of heathen minds. Anticipating the language of the eighteenth centuryDeists, he proclaimed that “Christianity was as old as creation.” His parallels were often found to be defective, and many of them had only to be looked at to show the immense superiority of the Christian quotations. Augustine turned them against himself, when he showed that to claim entire originality for Christianity, to deny the existence of any light before Christ came, and the possibility of any silent universal revelation through reason and conscience, was to contradict His Messiahship. To ignore what God had done before, would have cut Him off from God and man. We would expect the Son of Man to confirm the deepest convictions of the human race. We would expect the Son of God to claim and utilise all the truth God’s Spirit had spoken in ages past. “Siquis vera loquitur, prior est quam ipse veritas? O Homo, attende Christum, non quando ad te venerit, sed quando te fecerit.”[60]
The more of Christian doctrine and ethics we find in other religions, the more Divine will Christianity appear. There is not a truth which has verified and sustained any other religion which is not found in Christianity, in fuller amount and in clearer form. Christianity differs from all other religions, not because it is a purer system of moraltruth, but because it is the manifestation of a Divine life, and because in that life it reveals thepowerwhich alone can reconcile the knowing with the doing of duty. It professes only to have one original, one distinctive element; but how much is involved in that profession? for this original is Christ Himself, and all its doctrines and precepts are vital only because of their connection with Christ. Whole libraries of moral and doctrinal anthologies would not make up for the obliteration of His likeness from the religious consciousness of the world: “It would be like consoling ourselves for the loss of the sun by the kindling of ten thousand artificial lamps.”[61]He confronts the ages, as the One to whom all religions point, of whom all true prophets of the human race have unconsciously testified. They, like the Founder of this great religion, whose alleged resemblances will be found, as we examine them, to be rather point-blank contradictions and contrasts to the Christian doctrines and story, may have indeed been burning and shining lights, and men were willing for a season to rejoice in their light. They were “not that Light,” but as voices crying in the night for its arising they came to “bear witness of it”: the Light not of Asia only, nor yet only of Europe, but the “Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.”