ONSIDERATIONS_.

CHAPTER I.

THE UNITY OF MANKIND.

In Acts xvii. 26 the apostle says, "And God hath made of one blood all
nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth, and hath determined
the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." In
Mark xvi. 15, 16, is recorded that remarkable command of our Saviour,
"GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD, and preach the gospel TO EVERY CREATURE. He
that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth
not shall be damned." (See also Matt. xxviii. 18, 20.) Now there is a
very close connection between the statement here made by the apostle,
and the command here given by our Lord Jesus Christ; for it was in
obedience to this command that the apostle was at that time at Athens.
There, amid the proud and conceited philosophers of Greece, in the
centre of their resplendent capital, surrounded on every hand by their
noblest works of art and their proudest monuments of learning, the
apostle proclaims the equality of ALL MEN, their common origin, guilt,
and danger, and their universal obligations to receive and embrace the
gospel. The Athenians, like other ancient nations, and like them, too,
in opposition to their own mythology, regarded themselves as a
peculiar and distinct race, created upon the very soil which they
inhabited, and pre-eminently elevated above the barbarians of the
earth,--as they regarded the other races of men. Paul, however, as an
inspired and infallible teacher, authoritatively declares that "God
who made the world and all things therein," "hath made of one blood,"
and caused to descend from one original pair the whole species of men,
who are now by His providential direction so propagated as to inhabit
"all the face of the earth," having marked out in his eternal and
unerring counsel the determinate periods for their inhabiting, and the
boundaries of the regions they should inhabit.

The apostle in this passage refers very evidently to the record of the
early colonization and settling of the earth contained in the books of
Moses. Some Greek copies preserve only the word [Greek: enos], leaving
out [Greek: aimatos], a reading which the vulgar Latin follows. The
Arabic version, to explain both, has _ex homine_, or as De Dieu
renders it, _ex Adamo uno_, there being but the difference of one
letter in the Eastern languages between _dam_ and _adam_, the one
denoting blood, and the other man. But if we take this passage as our
more ordinary