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 their highest 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 century Deists, 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