Page:The World's Parliament of Religions Vol 1.djvu/37

Rh that the plan was suggested three centuries ago by the great John Comenius. More than twenty years ago the Free Religious Association of Boston conceived the idea that such a meeting should be gathered whenever practicable.

President W. F. Warren, of the Boston University, wrote:

I am glad to know that the World's Religions are to be represented at the World's Fair. Were they to be omitted, the sense of incompleteness would be painful. Even a museum of idols and objects used in ceremonial worship would attract beyond any other museum. Models and illustrations of the great temples of the world and of the world's history would be in a high degree instructive. Add to these things the living word of living teachers, and the whole world may well pause to listen.

A few years ago President Warren preached a sermon wherein he imagined the assembling of a great convention in Tokyo, a conference of the religious leaders of the Eastern world, the Buddhist, Brahman, Parsee, Mohammedan, Taoist, Shintoist, and Confucian, met together to discuss the great problems of Faith, and to discover, if possible, the Perfect Religion. As the discussion proceeded they reached the conclusion that there could be only one perfect Religion, that the perfect Religion must reveal a perfect God, that it must assure man the greatest possible ultimate good, that it must bring God into the most loving and lovable relations with humanity, and that this could be achieved only by his taking upon himself a human form, and suffering for men. And it would have seemed that the convention was talking something ideal, something which had never been actualized, had not the last speaker, the Buddhist leader of Japan, related the story of his own long mental unrest, and how, on the day before, he had learned, through the teaching of a brother who had seen many lands, that God had really come to earth, had revealed himself through his Son, had furnished all the credentials needed by the eager intellect and the yearning heart, had centered and glorified in himself all the truths which Gautama had discovered beneath the Indian fig-tree, or Confucius in his long- wandering quest, and through the Cross reared on an Asian hill-top had offered deliverance from the guilt and love of sin, and had irradiated the sorrows and incompleteness of earth,