And what is true of Mohammedanism is true also of Buddhism--the great
religion of the East. Its teachers have largely ceased to be faithful to
their own faith; and, as a consequence, that faith is a declining power.
Beautiful as much of its teaching undoubtedly is, millions who are
nominally Buddhist are estranged by its failures; and are, with increasing
unrest, looking this way and that for help in the battle with evil, and
for hope amidst the bitter consciousness of sin.

Such is a cursory view of the attitude of the opening century towards the
great faiths of the world. Perhaps one word more than another sums it all
up--especially as regards Christianity--and that word is NEGLECT--cold,
stony neglect!

And yet men are still demanding standards of life and conduct. The open
materialist, the timid agnostic, no less than the avowedly selfish, the
vicious and the vile, are asking, with a hundred tongues and in a thousand
ways, "Who will show us any good?" The universal conscience, unbribed,
unstifled as on the fateful day in Eden--conscience, the only thing in man
left standing erect when all else fell--still cries out, "YOU OUGHT!"
still rebels at evil, still compels the human heart to cry for rules of
right and wrong, and still urges man to the one, and withholds him from
the other.

And it is--for one reason--because Jesus can provide these high standards
for men, that I say He is _The Man for the Century_. The laws He has
laid down in the Gospels, and the example He furnished of obedience to
those laws in the actual stress and turmoil of a human life, afford a
standard capable of universal application.

The ruler, contending with unruly men; the workman, fighting for