ith repeated warnings, and many were slain for their faithful messages.
Tribe after tribe was borne into captivity, the Temple was destroyed,
and at last the nation was virtually broken up and scattered abroad.

There was indeed a true development in the church of God from the
Abrahamic period to the Apostolic day. There was a rising from a narrow
national spirit to one which embraced the whole brotherhood of man, from
type and prophecy to fulfilment, from the sins that were winked at, to a
purer ethic and the perfect law of love; but these results came not by
natural evolution--far enough from it. They were wrought out not by man,
but we might almost say, in spite of man. Divine interpositions were all
that saved Judaism from a total wreck, even as the national unity was
destroyed. A new Dispensation was introduced, a Divine Redeemer and an
Omnipotent Spirit were the forces which saved the world from a second
universal apostasy.

We come nearer still to the church of God for proofs of man's inherent
tendency to polytheism. Even under the new Dispensation we have seen the
church sink into virtual idolatry. Within six centuries from the time of
Christ and His apostles there had been a sad lapse into what seemed the
worship of images, pictures, and relics, and a faith in holy places and
the bones of saints. What Mohammed saw, or thought he saw, was a
Christian idolatry scarcely better than that of the Arabian Koreish.
And, as if by the judgment of God, the churches of the East were swept
with a destruction like that which had been visited upon the Ten Tribes.
In the Christianity of to-day, viewed as a whole, how strong is the
tendency to turn from the pure spiritual conception of God to some more
objective trust--a saint, a relic, a ritual, an ordinance. In the old
churches of the East or on the Continent of Europe, how much of virtual
idolatry is there even now? It is only another form of the tendency in
man to seek out many devices--to find visible objects of trust--to try
new panaceas for the ailments of the soul--to multiply unto himself gods
to help his weakness. This is just what has been done in all ages and
among all races of the world. This explains polytheism. Man's religious
nature is a vine, and God is its only proper support. Once fallen from
that support, it creeps and grovels in all directions and over all false
supports.

We have not resorted to Divine revelation for proofs except as history.
But our con