Meantime, its Nestorian missionaries, pushing east, made converts in
Armenia, Persia, India, and China. In later days it has converted negroes,
Indians, and the people of the Pacific Islands. Something, indeed, stopped
its progress after its first triumphant successes during seven or eight
centuries. At the tenth century it reached its term. Modern missions,
whether those of Jesuits or Protestants, have not converted whole nations
and races, but only individuals here and there. The reason of this check,
probably, is, that Christians have repeated the mistakes of the Jews and
Mohammedans. They have sought to make proselytes to an outward system of
worship and ritual, or to make subjects to a _dogma_; but not to make
converts to an idea and a life. When the Christian missionaries shall go
and say to the Hindoos or the Buddhists: "You are already on your way
toward God,--your religion came from him, and was inspired by his Spirit;
now he sends you something more and higher by his Son, who does not come
to destroy but to fulfil, not to take away any good thing you have, but to
add to it something better," then we shall see the process of conversion,
checked in the ninth and tenth, centuries, reinaugurated.

Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, all teaching the strict unity of God,
have all aimed at becoming universal. Judaism failed because it sought
proselytes instead of making converts. Islam, the religion of Mohammed (in
reality a Judaizing Christian sect) failed because it sought to make
subjects rather than converts. Its conquests over a variety of races were
extensive, but not deep. To-day it holds in its embrace at least four very
distinct races,--the Arabs, a Semitic race, the Persians, an Indo-European
race, the Negroes, and the Turks or Turanians. But, correctly viewed,
Islam is only a heretical Christian sect, and so all this must be credited
to the interest of Christianity. Islam is a John the Baptist crying in the
wilderness, "Prepare the way of the Lord"; Mohammed is a schoolmaster to
bring men to Christ. It does for the nations just what Judaism did, that