not yet had this opportunity.

Let us take some of the simpler and plainer things in this question,
that we may come up to it without any hesitation. Now, I do not need
to go into the question as to what God will do with the heathen. I
don't know what He will do with them. I know as much about it as you
do, or anybody else, because I know what the Book says about it. God
knows better about this than I do, and will find a way that I cannot
dream of. But, because the words are not uttered by divine authority,
I dare not stand here and utter any word of hope for any man beyond
the gospel committed to me to preach. This I know: That if the heathen
have the Spirit of the Lord Jesus, whether they ever saw the Lord
Jesus or not, they are of His. And this I know: That if this
congregation have not the spirit of the Lord Jesus, tho it may have
seen Him, they are not of His. And this I know: That He will save a
Jew and a Gentile on the same terms; that He will do no better for the
Gentile than He will for the Jew, and no better for the Jew than for
the Gentile. And if there was no other name given under heaven among
men by which an ancient Jew or an ancient Gentile might be saved, that
is true to-day. The Lord Jesus thought that these people needed the
gospel, and that they needed it so much that He actually came and
submitted Himself unto death that they might have the gospel. And
God seems so thoroughly to believe that they need the gospel that He
actually gives His only-begotten Son to die, that they may have the
gospel. He treats the case just exactly as if He thought, at least,
that they do really need this divine Redeemer. He has done, in every
step and process of this great work of world-saving, just exactly as
He would have done had He absolutely thought and believed that they
needed a divine Redeemer.

And then I understand another thing out of the Book: That the very
last and supreme utterance of the Master on earth grew out of His
conviction that we should do exactly this thing. And see how He comes
up to it, little by little! He does not rush suddenly upon it--He does
not, upon any truth. It is not in the divine plan to flash upon us
in anything. Truths grow; moral ideas grow. They come into the race
little, and hardly able to stand at all; we can barely find them
beneath us in the lower strata of our being. But they struggle into
power and strength until they fill the field of vision. Nearly every
great truth of