208 No Man Excluded from Salvation. [LECT. an absolutely true religion comes, those that are partial and imperfect must of necessity pass away, or cease to be a blessing, rather a clog to the upward progress of man. My object to-day is not to show the adequacy or inadequacy of different religions to save the individual soul and give him the surest hope of a blessed hereafter. But one thing I would just like to say to prevent all misconception; and that is that I belong to a class of people who believe that every human soul, from the first man that felt the impulse of conscious life to the last man that shall stand upon this earth, has had, or has, or will have, a sufficient opportunity for eternal salvation. I believe that no soul of all the myriads of earth will ever be able to hurl back at the Judge of all the Earth, as excuse for loss, "thou never gavest me an opportunity for salvation." Such a possibility would to me unhinge the whole fabric of the moral universe and degrade the idea of God. Nay, thousands will come from the East and the West, and from the North and the South, either with the help of, or in spite of, an imperfect religion, saved by a Saviour whom they never consciously knew, while thousands amid the blaze of day, who thought themselves the chosen of God, shall be cast out into the darkness of the lost, the home of the vile and the hypocrite. In a word, of all the myriads of human beings, not one will ever be excluded from the Heaven of the Christian's God, whose character would lead him to relish that home of pure goodness. Why then send the gospel to those who have other faiths if they have the chance to be saved? is the frequent question of a narrow-minded class. A question which I can never hear without a feeling of loathing. Why feed the hungry? Why pity the poor? Why teach the ignorant? Why lead the blind? Why educate my children? I pity the mean specimen of a man that would not do these things, and more so the one who will not help the spiritually needy. The idea of Christianity is not to get so many souls out V.] The Bible True History. 209 of hell into heaven; salvation is not so limited a thing as that,—a thought that has narrowed many a mind and many a system of doctrine. Christianity aims at the salvation, the elevation of mankind; the feeding of the spiritually hungry; the supplying of every spiritual faculty with its legitimate object; the opening of the way, the urging of mankind on to humanity's highest, fullest destiny, both here and hereafter. And now, one thing more. In maintaining to-day that the Bible maps out before us this line of salvation for the human race, this absolute religion for human need, I do not base my argument on the Bible in the sense of claiming for it more than I allow to the Shu-king of China, the Zendavesta of Persia, the Vedas of India, or any other old book of any other old religion, which seems to be a genuine product of olden times. You will understand that I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, but that I do not argue from it. I rather wish to prove it to you, and all I claim as argument is that the Bible, on the whole, presents a true history of facts; and this I do all the more confidently, because all recent research in Assyria, Palestine, and Egypt, goes to prove the reliability of the historical facts of the Book. II. PRELIMINARY. One very essential preliminary in discussing the problem of humanity is to have it thoroughly understood that the human race is one-a single species in many varieties-all descended from a primitive pair. This is the teaching of the Bible; but I insist on it here, because it is also the teaching of the most advanced science of to-day. Various speculations have been entertained as to this unity or diversity of the origin of the human family, many maintaining that there were several centres in which man first emerged from the brute, or came by creation, and from which the diverse races of the globe were produced. The overwhelming balance of the argument, however, seems to 210 The Human Race One. [LECT. be on the other side, and every new advance of research into the subject tends to confirm the biblico-scientific doctrine of the one origin of the human race, and to show that that origin geographically was in the neighbourhood of the Tigris and the Euphrates, or somewhere in Western Asia. The arguments for this are manifold; I can only indicate some of them in brief. 1. There is the physiological proof, which shows that the most distant races can unite in marriage, and produce fruitful descendants, and that the morphological differences on the whole between the various living races, as well as between the present and pre-historic man, are no greater than between individuals in the same nation to-day. Mr. Spencer, in his Sociology, has this sentence:1"There are, indeed, remains which, taken by themselves, indicate inferiority of type in ancestral races. The Neanderthal skull and others like it, with their enormous supra-orbital ridges, so simian in character, are among these." Now, the fact of the matter is, that the Neanderthal skull has no enormous simian marks at all, and is a skull that would be an improvement on many that have the brains of the 19th century in them. Skulls there are like it all through Mongolia and the East. Again, he tells of a flattened tibia as a distinguishing feature of the cave-men of Gibraltar, France, Wales, and North America, and not known to belong to any race now living, from which we may infer an inferior ancient race. The fact is that any physician of much practice in these Eastern lands has probably often handled a flattened tibia in living men, and has not found that it made the mind of the possessor less human. It is, indeed, true that there are plenty of morphological differences in minor points, differences which, however, do not affect one whit the mental or spiritual constitution of the man. 2. Then besides the physiological, there are many other 1Sociology, pp. 41-42. V.] Proved in various ways. 211 proofs which, combined, make the hypothesis pretty certain. These are the philological, pointing to a common centre of languages now so different; traditions, myths, which though so varied are all derived from ancestors and colored by time and place, but traced through the ages, they point nearer and nearer to a common source. Take for instance the old Japan myth of the sun-goddess Amaterasu entering a cave and causing all sorts of ills, and then being invited back again, to restore the harmony of a disturbed world. You find the essential features of the same story in the myths of Babylon, which were believed in more than 4,000 years ago, and can trace it in many another nation as well, pointing to a common source somewhere.1 The philological and mythological argument taken alone would not perhaps furnish absolutely convincing proof, but taken together with the psychological evidence of the mental, moral and spiritual unity of constitution in all living races, we have sufficient proof for the doctrine. As to the place whence all the streams of historical humanity have flowed, let me read you one or two extracts. Mr. Renouf, Egyptologist, thus writes concerning ancient Egypt.2 “The view is now entirely abandoned according to which the Egyptians came down the Nile from the more southern regions of Africa. It has been conclusively proved that they gradually advanced from North to South. Most scholars now point to the interior of Asia as the cradle of the Egyptian people. The further back we go in antiquity, the more closely does the Egyptian type approach the European." Again, with reference to China, the other nation whose history is most ancient, Prof. Douglass writes:-"The question arises-Where did these people 1 Compare Mr. Chamberlain's Kojiki, Vol. VIII. Sect. XIV., with Smith's Chaldean Account of Genesis. 2 The Religion of Ancient Egypt, p. 55. 8 China, p. 2. 212 Asian Cradle of Man. [LECT. (the ancient Chinese) come from? and the answer which research gives to this question is-From the South of the Caspian sea. Probably in about the 24th or 23rd century B.C. some political disturbance drove the Chinese from the land of their adoption, and they wandered eastward until they finally settled in China and the countries south of it. They came to China possessed of the resources of Western-Asian culture. They brought with them a knowledge of writing and astronomy, as well as of those arts which primarily minister to the wants and comforts of mankind." Names, system of chronology, astrological accounts of the planets, etc., accord with the Babylonian. Hwang-ti 2697-2597 B.C., first recorded Chinese Emperor, probably never sat on the Chinese throne but belongs to the original home-land. The point is this, Egypt and China were both settled and civilized by swarms from a common, or nearly common, hive in Western Asia; Egypt more than 3000 or 4000 years before Christ, and China between 2000 and 3000 B.C. It is also a perfectly established fact that the Indians of the Vedas, the Persians of the Avesta, the Greeks, Romans, Scandinavians of Europe all sprang from a common stock somewhere in the interior of Asia. And from earliest times, many streams have gone from the same centre, making it more than probable that pre-historic man emanated from the same spot, and subdued the wilderness for the advance of more cultured races. As we advance to a greater distance from the centre we find the stream flowing outward, but losing its purity and power as it extends, until you find in far-off lands and distant lonely islands, little more than the wreckage of humanity. There seem to be three great divisions of the human race, in which the biblical references to Ham, Shem, and Japhet are followed by writers on the subject. It would seem that Ham's descendants were for ages the most powerful. Even in historic or semi-historic times, we find the Shemites together with the |