No; it is not true. There have been many restricted, some (very few) widespread religious systems; to-day there are two in especial--the Buddhist, the Mohammedan, occur at once to mind; but not one of them makes this particular Catholic affirmation. Mohammedan society, not a new religion but essentially an offshoot and degradation of the Christian, taking the Catholic doctrine and simplifying it to its last rudiments (with the exception of all in it that demands faith in mystery), is passionate for a certain way of life and intolerant of others. It creates a very marked and special culture which no doubt could claim in its own way to be historically unique, just as the culture of the Chinese is historically unique. But Islam does not come forward with the statement, “I am a society of divine foundation possessed of the power to reply to question after question upon the only things that really matter, to which questions man has never yet of himself attained an answer.” It says indeed, “This is the way to live; and in this way of living we are content. A disturbance of it is odious to us, and we desire as much as we can to turn all others into our own image--not only the religious, but the social habits of men offend us where very different from our own.” But it does not and cannot of its nature say, “Here alone through this defined organisation is the voice of God perpetually speaking, settling controversies, defining and re-defining in ever-expanding area of thought whatever truths may be challenged.” It is alive, but it is not alive with a life of development; and so far from presenting any organisation through which its doctrine can be developed as well as affirmed, it is specifically repugnant to such organisations. In a phrase, Mohammedanism is essentially anti-clerical. If it be true of Mohammedanism (the chief historically active opponent of the Faith) that it has not the peculiar marks which make the Catholic Church different from any other society in the world, that it has not some major quality by which all religions are distinct and which is also the major quality of the Catholic Church, that statement is still more true of Buddhism. Buddhism never pretended to make, and does not make to-day, an affirmation to be accepted corporately by the universal world. It presents a certain philosophy--which I cannot but call the philosophy of despair, and which is quite certainly a philosophy of negation. It presents this gloom for acceptation by the individual mind. But it claims no corporate rule; it affirms no divine authority: it enjoys no functional power of excretion nor any of assimilation. You cannot say of Buddhism, “Here is orthodoxy and the living tradition searching out heresy and denouncing it, maintaining its life triumphantly by insistence upon a personality of its own and by a corresponding power of attack against whatever would diminish or threaten that life.”