oys and suffered their sharp sorrows, and then
dropped into "the dark backward and abysm of time," have really been
_guilty_ creatures, and have gone down to an endless hell?

But what does all this reasoning and querying imply? Will the objector
really take the position and stand to it, that the pagan man is not a
rational and responsible creature? that he does not possess sufficient
knowledge of moral truth, to justify his being brought to the bar of
judgment? Will he say that the population that knew enough to build the
pyramids did not know enough to break the law of God? Will he affirm that
the civilization of Babylon and Nineveh, of Greece and Rome, did not
contain within it enough of moral intelligence to constitute a foundation
for rewards and punishments? Will he tell us that the people of Sodom and
Gomorrah stood upon the same plane with the brutes that perish, and the
trees of the field that rot and die, having no idea of God, knowing
nothing of the distinction between right and wrong, and never feeling the
pains of an accusing conscience? Will he maintain that the populations
of India, in the midst of whom one of the most subtile and ingenious
systems of pantheism has sprung up with the luxuriance and involutions of
one of their own jungles, and has enervated the whole religious sentiment
of the Hindoo race as opium has enervated their physical frame,--will he
maintain that such an untiring and persistent mental activity as this is
incapable of apprehending the first principles of ethics and natural
religion, which, in comparison with the complicated and obscure
ratiocinations of Boodhism, are clear as water, and lucid as atmospheric
air? In other connections, this theorist does not speak in this style. In
other connections, and for the purpose of exaggerating natural religion
and disparaging revealed, he enlarges upon the dignity of man, of every
man, and eulogizes the power of reason which so exalts him in the scale
of being. With Hamlet, he dilates in proud and swelling phrase: "What a
piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in
form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of
animals!" It is from that very class of theorizers who deny that the
heathen are in danger of eternal perdition, and who represent the whole
missionary enterprise as a work of supererogation, that we receive the