y belongs to
Him; and when He foretells His peaceful conquest, one knows not which
predominates in His words, simplicity or grandeur. Now this predicted
work has been done, is being done, and will be done. No one entertains
any serious doubt of this. The idea of God, as it exists amongst
Christian peoples, bears on its brow the certain sign of victory.

In many respects, we are passing through the world in times which are
not extraordinary, and among things little worthy of lasting record.
Still great events are being accomplished before our eyes. The ancient
East is shaken to its foundations. The work of foreign missions is taken
up again with fresh energy. Ships, as they leave the shores of Europe,
carry with them,--together with those who travel for purposes of
commerce, or from curiosity, or as soldiers,--those new crusaders who
exclaim: God wills it! and are ready to march to their death in order
to proclaim the God of life to nations plunged in darkness. The advances
of industry, the developments of commerce, the calculations of ambition,
all conspire to diffuse spiritual light over the globe. These are noble
spectacles, revealing clearly the traces of a superior design, which the
mighty of this world are accomplishing, even by the craft and violence
of their policy: they are the manifest instruments of a Will to which
oftentimes they are insensible. The knowledge of God is extending; and
while it is extending, it is enriching itself with its own conquests.
Just as it absorbed the living sap of the doctrines of the Greeks, so it
is strengthening itself with the doctrines of the ancient East and of
old Egypt, which an indefatigable science is bringing again to light.
Christian thought is growing, not by receiving any foreign impulse from
without, but like a vigorous tree, whose roots traverse new layers of a
fertile soil. All truth comes naturally to the centre of truth as to its
rallying-point; and to the universal prayer must be gathered all the
pure accents gone astray in the superstitious invocations which rise
from the banks of the Ganges or from the burning regions of Africa. The
day will come, when our planet, in its revolutions about the sun, shall
receive on no point of its surface the rays of the orb of day, without
sending back, over the ruins of idol-temples for ever overthrown, a song
of thanksgiving to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, become through
Jesus Christ the God of all mankind.

We know