be
like a chaotic ocean; these teeming millions of barbarians and savages
who render the aspect of the world so sad and so dark. The Church, we
need not say, have accepted the Biblical theory, and have traced the lost
condition of the pagan world, as the apostle Paul does, to their sin and
transgression. They have held that every pagan is a rational being, and
by virtue of this fact has known something of the moral law; and that to
the extent of the knowledge he has had, he is as guilty for the
transgression of law, and as really under its condemnation, as the
dweller under the light of revelation and civilization. They have
maintained that every human creature has enjoyed sufficient light, in the
workings of natural reason and conscience, and in the impressions that
are made by the glory and the terror of the natural world above and
around him, to render him guilty before the Everlasting Judge. For this
reason, the Church has denied that the pagan is an innocent creature, or
that he can stand in the judgment before the Searcher of hearts. For this
reason, the Church has believed the declaration of the apostle John, that
"the _whole_ world lieth in wickedness" (1 John v. 19), and has
endeavored to obey the command of Him who came to redeem pagans as much
as nominal Christians, to go and preach the gospel to _every_ creature,
because every creature is a lost creature.

But the disbeliever in Revelation adopts the theory of human innocency,
and looks upon all the wretchedness and ignorance of paganism, as he
looks upon suffering, decay, and death, in the vegetable and animal
worlds. Temporary evil is the necessary condition, he asserts, of all
finite existence; and as decay and death in the vegetable and animal
worlds only result in a more luxuriant vegetation, and an increased
multiplication of living creatures, so the evil and woe of the hundreds
of generations, and the millions of individuals, during the sixty
centuries that have elapsed since the origin of man, will all of it
minister to the ultimate and everlasting weal of the entire race. There
is no need therefore, he affirms, of endeavoring to save such feeble and
ignorant beings from judicial condemnation and eternal penalty. Such
finiteness and helplessness cannot be put into relations to such an awful
attribute as the eternal nemesis of God. Can it be,--he asks,--that the
millions upon millions that have been born, lived their brief hour,
enjoyed their little j