nspired men, and that then at last, through certain
chosen mediums, he wrote a book telling men the truth about their
condition, about his feeling towards them, about what they ought to do,
and the destiny involved in the kind of life they should live here.
After the world had been in existence about four thousand years,
according to this teaching, and very little headway had been made even
among the chosen people, the few that had been selected from the great
outside and wandering nations, God himself comes down to earth, by
means of a woman specially prepared to be his mother he is born without
a human father. He lives, he suffers, he dies. This, after one theory
or another, I need not go into them, to make it possible for God to
forgive, and to enable him to save those who should accept the terms
which he should offer.

Then, after his withdrawal from the earth, his Church is organized
under the special guidance of the Holy Spirit. Its mission is to
proclaim the gospel among all nations. That proclamation has gone on;
but after two thousand years not a third of the world has heard the
gospel, not a third of the people who walk the planet knows anything
about the book that has been written. But they still stumble along in
darkness, worshipping anything except the one only and true God. So
that this effort up to the present time would strike us, if we judged
it as a human device, as being a sad and lamentable failure.

The upshot of this, according to the Evangelical creed, is that the
great majority of the world is to be permanently lost. Only a few,
those who are converted or those becoming members of the true Church,
connected with it sacramentally or in some way, only the few are to be
saved, and the great majority outcast forever.

This, in substance, makes up what has been called the gospel; and those
who claim that they are preaching the gospel are preaching these things
as true. I am well aware and I would not have anybody suppose that I
overlooked it that this creed is undergoing very striking and marked
changes, and that a great many of those things which some of us look
upon as more objectionable are being left out of sight, and not
preached, as they used to be, though they still remain in the creeds.

I am aware, for example, that what it is to be orthodox or evangelical
has been reduced to very low terms as compared with those which I have
just set forth; that is to say, reduced to very low terms in c