The Adequacy of Christianity to 
 Meet the World’s Need. 
 
 BY BISHOP E. R. HENDRIX, D.D., LL.D. 
 
 T HE early Christians at least never stopped to debate the 
 adequacy of Christianity to meet the world’s need, but 
 with profound and aggressive faith they sought to make 
 known its saving power among nations. They believed in the 
 spiritual dynamics of the gospel, a power that resided in the 
 truth no less than an energy that asserted itself through the zeal 
 of those who received it. The more formidable the difficulties, 
 the graver the conditions, the more eager the desire to test the 
 power of the gospel. It was the world’s need that even attracted 
 the apostles and missionaries, for the)’ remembered the words of 
 the Lord Jesus how he said: “They that are whole have no 
 need of the physician, but they that are sick.” Therefore the 
 more desperate the case the more anxious were they to apply 
 the remedy. The world’s need was a perpetual 
 The Need a challenge to the gospel with its power of an end- 
 Challenge. less life. Great cities, then as now, the storm 
 centers of the unemployed and discontented, 
 with their congested masses of the vicious and the diseased, had 
 a peculiar attraction for the greatest of the apostles. Paul's 
 Waterloos were Antioch, Ephesus, and Corinth, the most popu- 
 lous cities of Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, but he longed to 
 preach the gospel to them that were at Rome also. To do that 
 he was willing to undergo shipwrecks and to go bound in chains. 
 
It was not the prosperous journey that he prayed for, as in the 
 old version, but that if by any means he might be prospered by 
 the will of God to come to Rome. It was because he was con- 
 scious of having some spiritual gift to impart that he unceasingly 
 made mention in his prayers of those to whom he felt impelled 
 to go that he might have some fruit among them even as among 
 the rest of the Gentiles. 
 
 It was a mighty spirit that declared: “I am debtor both to 
 Greeks and Barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So, 
 as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you also 
 that are in Rome. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it 
 is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; 
 to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is revealed 
 a righteousness of God by faith unto faith: as it is written, But 
 the righteous shall live by faith.” It was doubtless the Roman 
 world that Paul had in mind in his writings and preaching when 
 he declared that this gospel had been preached unto the Colos- 
 sians “as also in all the world.” That was the world of Paul’s 
 time, embracing the best of the three continents of 
 Paul's Europe. Asia, and Africa, with their diversities of tongue 
 View, and nationalities, of religions and literatures and phil- 
 osophies. The best that Persia or Greece or Egypt or 
 Rome could offer or produce was all in that world with its crying 
 needs and unassuaged sorrows and festering wounds. So confi- 
 dent was he that he had the sole remedy entirely adequate for 
 the world’s need that he proclaimed himself a debtor to all per- 
 sons, of whatever speech or condition, in all that Roman world. 
 Nor was he ignorant of the worst that sin has wrought; for nei- 
 ther Juvenal nor Tacitus pictures the uncleanness, the wretched- 
 
ness, the malice, the self-complacency of wickedness as does the 
 inspired apostle who has the sole remedy in the Christian re- 
 ligion. 
 
 For what has occasioned* the world’s need, with its ignorance, 
 its vice, its pollution, its squalor, and wretchedness? “It was 
 sin that brought death into the world and all our woe.” The 
 whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until 
 now. It is sin that has disturbed the world’s activity and har- 
 mony, and the world’s travail is in hope of deliverance from this 
 body of death. The world’s need comes through its ignorance 
 gnd consequent helplessness. Because the whole head is sick 
 the whole heart is faint. The world’s need is born of its distrust 
 of men, who are covenant breakers, without 
 Cause of the natural affection, unmerciful. The world’s 
 World’s Need, need is the more appalling because of human 
 selfishness, with its grasping covetousness and 
 cruel ambition, which delight in dragging their helpless victims 
 at their chariot wheels. The need of the world is for light, par- 
 don, comfort, strength, hope, purity. That Babylonian senti- 
 ment is without patience and without pity which says: “ Let the 
 fittest survive; none other deserves to.” As applied to men and 
 women it is the motto of the savage as he starts on the warpath, 
 murdering his aged parents who cannot keep up on the forced 
 marches and who would be a burden. The pagan philosopher 
 that welcomes famine and pestilence to lessen the world’s over- 
 population finds its counterpart in the unrelieved sadness of 
 modern science which sees in all efforts to better the state of the 
 weak and helpless only the increase of the aggregate of human 
 suffering by augmenting the demand without adequate means of 
 
 — 3 — 
 
supply. In both views the world is orphaned. It was this wider 
 view of the race that made Voltaire say: “Strike out a few 
 sages, and the crowd of human beings is nothing 
 Scientific but a horrible assemblage of unfortunate criminals. 
 Pessimism, and the globe contains nothing but corpses. . . . 
 
 I wish I had never been born.” That was but the 
 European world that he described a century and a half ago. At 
 that very time Christendom had forgotten the great heathen 
 world where scarce a missionary held aloft the torch of truth. 
 Christianity at times needs to apologize for Christendom, but 
 heathendom is the perpetual condemnation of heathenism. 
 “The idea of man as a conscious, rational, moral individual, of 
 worth for his own sake, of equal dignity before his Maker, did 
 not exist in iniquity till it came into being through Israel.” No 
 wonder that Xerxes drove his soldiers into inclosures in order to 
 number them like so many cattle. It is not until we see the in- 
 dividual that we can know the human heart and discover the 
 world’s needs in the need of an immortal soul. 
 
 There can be no remedy without a correct diagnosis of the 
 world’s need. It is superficial treatment that sees only symp- 
 toms. Philosophers and thinkers in all ages have had much to 
 say of evil and of suffering; but appalled, they have passed by 
 on either side without pouring in oil or wine into the gaping 
 wounds of humanity. The spirit of fatalism regarded highway 
 robbery as one of the necessary evils of the road on which the 
 rape was traveling. Buddhism, therefore, thought to escape 
 from existence, with its attendant miseries, while Mohammedan- 
 ism taught “Islam,” or submission without hope, since man was 
 nothing. A world is bankrupt in morals when bankrupt in faith. 
 
 — 4 — 
 
Christianity is the religion of redemption. Redemp- 
 T he Sense tion from sin is the world’s supreme need. But the 
 of Sin. confessed existence of sin is possible only where 
 there is a holy God whose law has been violated. 
 Without the knowledge of God and of his law man has never 
 had the knowledge of sin. It is unknown in the heathen world as 
 the cause of its suffering and its woe. Centuries of wretchedness 
 have not awakened the consciousness of sin. Nothing can do that 
 but the sight of a holy God. The race is not simply unfortunate; 
 it is sinful. It has not simply violated the laws of health, of agri- 
 culture, of commerce, of reciprocity, to which fact its misfor- 
 tunes are due. It has broken the laws of a holy God, and its 
 sins are the fruitful cause of its sufferings. It is sin which has 
 dulled the intellect, stupefied the sensibilities, and weakened the 
 will. The brutal selfishness of man is due not to the animal in 
 him so much as to the devil in him. It is to the narrowing influ- 
 ence of sin that social relations have been so disordered, the 
 caste spirit has been- so powerful, and war and bloodshed have 
 abounded. To deny sin is to deny the existence of any law or 
 code of ethics, any source of divine authority. To deny sin is 
 to prevent any exalted conception of worship, is to leave the 
 world’s need undiagnosed and without an ade- 
 To Know the quate remedy. Hence what a beggarly salvation 
 Remedy We is promised by any other religion than that which 
 Must Know reveals the Son of God coming to seek and to 
 
 the Disease. save the lost. In every land Christianity has 
 
 done more since its introduction than the native 
 religion in all the past. Whatever fails to recognize the moral 
 needs of man is impotent to supply them. It is not sanitation 
 
 —5 
 
the world needs, but salvation; not “bread and games,” but the 
 Bread of Life. Art cannot gladden, as the Greeks learned, un- 
 less inspired by hope. It was only when Christ was made known 
 that art found its true inspiration, its noblest theme, and a 
 Michael Angelo was born, “who never moved his hand until he 
 had steeped his inmost soul in prayer.” 
 
 Christianity not only diagnoses accurately the world’s need by 
 pointing out sin as at once the great disturber and corrupter, but 
 it alone of all religions reveals a righteous God who is alike the 
 Author of the moral law and its exemplar. Morality and reli- 
 gion were so far divorced in the heathen world that the very ex- 
 ample of the gods was pleaded in excuse for every sort of vice 
 ^.nd crime. The philosophers who taught morals grew sick at 
 heart at their little success because of the corrupting example of 
 the gods, and wished for a javelin with which they might destroy 
 these enemies of society like Jupiter and Venus. “There was 
 not a gentleman on Olympus,” not a false god fit to be invited 
 into your home or to converse with your wife and daughters. 
 The vileness of the Hindu gods is the great foe of family life in 
 India now. The deity taught by Mohammedanism is not only a 
 cruel despot, but one who panders to lust in furnishing “the 
 black-eyed houris” of the Moslem Paradise. In the gospel alone 
 is revealed the righteousness of God, a God who is both the au- 
 thor and exemplar of the moral law, inspiring 
 God the Source reverence by his own holy nature and impart- 
 of Conscience. ing of his strength and nature, enabling men, 
 giving them power, to become the sons of 
 God. In his worship alone is found the spirit of true devotion, 
 for he alone can awaken devotion whether in angels or men who 
 
 — 6 — 
 
is the high and holy One who inhabiteth eternity. The “ Holy, 
 Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty ” which the angels sing ever 
 becomes the devout song of men when the righteous God is re- 
 vealed. Righteousness, if it exists in the world, is born of faith 
 in a holy God. His nature is revealed to faith, and the righteous 
 live by faith. Without a righteous God there can never be a 
 righteous world. 
 
 Then again Christianity speaks with sufficient authority to 
 quicken and invigorate the conscience. Christianity may almost 
 be said to create a conscience as in the Dark Continent and 
 other parts of the heathen world. While consciousness is the 
 knowledge of ourselves, conscience is in the knowledge of God 
 and ourselves. Unless there be belief in God, there is no sense 
 of responsibility. 
 
 If there be no lawgiver, there is no law requiring obedience, 
 and man becomes as irresponsible a being as the brute, to whom 
 no revelation has ever come or can ever come, because he is in- 
 capable of receiving it. The conscience of the Roman was 
 awakened by the civil law. His duties were those he owed the 
 State. His religion was a lifeless ritualism, a punctilious repeti- 
 tion of liturgical formulas, burning incense before every oath of 
 office, to validate every note or mortgage or last will and testa- 
 ment. It was reverence for the State, not for 
 Other Religions any idol. Among the Greeks raillery and 
 Wanting in jests were practiced in connection with the 
 Moral most solemn religious processions. The mys- 
 
 Sanctions. teries awoke no sense of obligation, quickened 
 
 no conscience. The Oriental worship was a 
 sort of orgy in which ecstasy exaggerated almost to frenzy took 
 
 — 7 — 
 
the place of devotion. Excesses of all sorts preceded or fol- 
 lowed the so-called acts of worship where even the worship itself 
 did not consist of vile and sensual practices such as were sup- 
 posed to be indulged in by the gods themselves. In Paul’s fearful 
 indictment of the heathen world he says that they not only do 
 such things, but take pleasure in them that do them. 
 
 But Christianity does more than reveal a righteous God, at 
 once the Author and Exemplar of the moral law, and speak with 
 sufficient authority through the certainty of its teachings to 
 quicken and invigorate the conscience. It can do what no other 
 religion can do; it can make alive. “ Christianity is a new com- 
 mandment with power to obey.” Christ not only assumes the 
 supreme place as the Ruler of human society, “the most dra- 
 matic movement in the experience of collective man,” but at- 
 tached to every precept is a promise of help. If the law was 
 given by Moses, grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Christi- 
 anity not only reveals a righteous God, but declares that man, 
 too, may be righteous. It is a revelation to faith that the right- 
 eous may live by faith. By its help the withered hand may be 
 stretched out and the palsied limb begin to walk, the very dead 
 can come forth from the grave, though bound hand and foot. 
 Every doctrine of Christianity passes through the experience of 
 Christian living and becomes real through its power to help. 
 
 God is a Father, Christ is a Saviour, the Holy 
 Reviving Power Spirit is a Comforter, there is fellowship with 
 o[ Ghristianiiy. God’s people who have had like experiences 
 of truth, and there is an indwelling power to 
 help overcome evil. This is the victory that overcomes the 
 world, even our faith. Christianity is not a mere spirit, a spirit 
 
 — 8 — — 
 
unclothed, but it enters into the individual that he may be 
 strengthened by God’s Spirit in the inner man, it enters into the 
 very institutions of mankind and molds or reforms them for its 
 own purposes, and thus changes human society into the Church 
 and the body of Christ. The Spirit of God does not enter the 
 human soul as something foreign or extraneous to it. He enters 
 it as the principle of its true life. The word “holy” is scarce 
 applicable to a single person in the heathen world, but there is 
 hardly a town in Christendom that has not had some holy person 
 who showed what it meant to receive power to become a son of 
 God. Faith sees a righteous God and becomes like him. He is 
 able to do exceeding abundantly above what we ask or think ac- 
 cording to this power that worketh in us. He causes the Spirit- 
 filled man to declare: “I can do all things through Christ that 
 strengthened me.” It was such transforming power that made 
 men kings and priests unto God, so that when any great enter- 
 prise was undertaken in the Roman Empire men knew that it 
 was either the emperor or a Christian who did it. 
 
 Henry Drummond somewhere says: “Next to love for the 
 chief of sinners the most touching thing about the religion of 
 Christ is its amazing trust in the least of saints. Here is the 
 mightiest enterprise ever launched upon this earth, mightier than 
 creation, because it is re-creation, and the carry- 
 Drurnmond. ing it out is left, so to speak, to haphazard, to in- 
 dividual loyalty, to free enthusiasms, to uncoerced 
 activities, to an uncompelled response to the pressure of God’s 
 Spirit.” But in the presence and leadership of the Spirit, and 
 in what he has made of redeemed man and can do with redeemed 
 man, is found the glory of our religion. It is the Spirit that 
 
buickeneth and leadeth. “He opened the portals of grace to 
 the Gentile world, arranging every detail of the special service 
 at which the Roman centurion was converted.” It is this con- 
 sciousness of his divine presence that enables a devout Church 
 to say: “ It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us.” Chris- 
 tianity is not alone the religion of redemption for the individual, 
 but it makes him the instrument of redemption to his fellow 
 man. Other religions have regarded man from the standpoint 
 of the State or as a member of a religious brotherhood, but it 
 remained for Christianity to teach the great truth and fact of 
 human brotherhood and to awaken an interest in universal man. 
 Only a universal religion could do that, one having in it the very 
 elements of universal power and conquest. “I believe in the 
 communion of saints” is impossible in any pagan creed. Hea- 
 thenism was without congregational life. Public spirit developed 
 itself simply on the political side. Christianity 
 Qhristianity taught men that their citizenship was in heaven, 
 a Universal and organized the brotherhood of humanity when 
 Religion. it taught the communion of saints and that the 
 Church existed for the edification of believers and 
 the conversion of the world. Among Buddhists the holier the 
 man the less he had to do with his fellow men. He was so 
 saintly as to be absolutely worthless. His was the religion of 
 selfishness, not helpfulness. Little did Rome know when she 
 was persecuting the early Christians that she was destroying that 
 which alone could save her. The weak side of the empire, the 
 very cause of her ruin, was the moral deterioration of the lower 
 classes. Her adoption of Christianity could have saved her by 
 saving them and their rulers as well. The very social meetings 
 
 — io — 
 
of Christians, such as the agapae cr love feasts, were forbidden 
 through fear. ( 
 
 Christianity thus lays bare the world’s true need as a need of 
 redemption, and shows a righteous Father, against whom and 
 all whose holy attributes man has sinned. But man’s case is not 
 hopeless, because God is a Father who is seeking his prodigal 
 sons, trying to bring them to themselves that he may bring them 
 back to him. Christianity is the religion of hope despite the 
 hopeless condition of the race which has made all men despair 
 of it save those who have seen the light of the knowledge of the 
 glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ. Though sin 
 has bestialized man and made him a wolf to his fellow man, the 
 larger view of God which Christianity gives awakens better ex- 
 pectations of man. “ No universal religion can hold to an im- 
 perfect conception of God.” Only a God of 
 Its Revelation infinite perfections can have compassion enough 
 of God. and patience enough and love enough to save a 
 
 race of prodigals who have wasted both sub- 
 stance and life. Christ comes into the midst to undertake for 
 us, and lays down his life to show the possibility of forgiveness 
 with God and the power of an endless life in man. He becomes 
 our elder brother to teach us the brotherhood of man, a doctrine 
 that was a stumbling block to the Jews, and to the Greeks fool- 
 ishness, but to us the wisdom of God and the power of God. 
 This regeneration of man, making mankind a new genus, or 
 race, is possible because at bottom man is a spirit, and God’s ap- 
 peal to the deepest, most central part of man, his spirituality. 
 But Christianity does not propose simply to save the spirit and 
 cast away the body, but it teaches that the body is a temple of 
 
 — ii— 
 
the Holy Ghost which Christ has come to redeem. It is a com- 
 plete salvation which redeems both body and soul. But it is 
 more than all this: it is an enduring salvation, for it saves forever. 
 
 Christianity is thus the final religion, because none can ever 
 arise to teach or do more. There can never be any doctrine 
 higher than the Fatherhood of God, broader than the brother- 
 hood of man, deeper than sin and spirituality, 
 Its Finality . more complete than the destiny of both soul and 
 body, and more enduring than eternity. Christi- 
 anity is like the holy city, the new Jerusalem descending out of 
 heaven: the length and the breadth and the height of it are equal. 
 It is the very tabernacle of God with men. Its perfections ex- 
 haust at once the power of thought and speech, as we behold 
 the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the knowledge 
 of God. 
 
 Not only is Christianity adequate to the world’s need because 
 of its lofty and exhaustive teachings and elevated morals; there 
 is no religion comparable to it. The highest aim, whether of 
 nature as seen by the agnostic, or of Christianity expressing the 
 mind and heart of God, is not the creation or production of any 
 othe-r creation or production of any other creature, but the per- 
 fection of man, the masterpiece of creation. Man, too, is the 
 final product of religion. The professed aim of Buddhism is the 
 extinguishment of personality; that of Christianity is the fullness 
 of personality. The controlling thought of Buddhism is that the 
 only good Chinaman is a dead Chinaman; the claim of Christi- 
 anity is that the best man is not the one who has the least but 
 the most manhood, whose personality is not diminished, but 
 completed and that the truly good man, whether Chinaman or 
 
American, is the regenerated one. Islam is an ethical and social 
 system that is a menace to the world. The des- 
 Ghristianity potisms where it prevails are not accidents, but 
 Unique. the ligitimate results of the Koran; and so long as 
 
 the. Koran exists as the authoritative book noth- 
 ing better can come in their stead, when the very god of the Ko- 
 ran is a willful despot and men are simply his slaves. If England 
 has a submerged tenth, what shall we say of Turkey and Persia, 
 with their submerged nine-tenths? Christ alone is the “Light 
 of Asia.” Only under the influence of the Christ who brought 
 immortality and life to light by the gospel do the human facul- 
 ties find their largest scope and play. Because man is an im- 
 mortal being he is worthy of sympathy and help, and a new order 
 of society is possible, the result of spiritual forces set in motion 
 through Christ. 
 
 Christianity is Christ, and there is but one Christ. There 
 have been many prophets, but only one Christ. There have 
 been many leaders, but only one Christ. There have been many 
 kings and priests, but only one Christ. There can be no second 
 Bethlehem, no second Calvary, no second Olivet, no second 
 Christ. And Christ is King, because he is Saviour. He governs 
 men because he has redeemed men. Men live for him and in hina 
 because he died for them. It is what Christ teaches, what Christ 
 suffers, what Christ does, what Christ is, that makes Christian- 
 ity. When any other religion can produce a Christ, a Saviour 
 of his people, then alone can it do anything adequate for the 
 world’s need. 
 
 What Christianity can do for the world’s need may best be 
 known by what it once did for the world in which Paul preached 
 
 —13— 
 
it, the proud Roman world coextensive with the power, the cul- 
 ture, the religions of the great nations of the three then known 
 continents which acknowledged the supremacy of the Roman 
 Empire, while the Mediterranean which washed the shores of 
 these continents was itself a Roman lake. Here was 
 What It the Pantheon against Christ, all the gods of the an- 
 Has Done, cient world with the Roman emperor at their head 
 deified as “lord and god ” to represent the supre- 
 macy of the State against one whom a Roman governor desig- 
 nated as “Jesus, that is called Christ.” That the religion of 
 Christ, which was not even the religion of his own people, a 
 people subject to a Roman yoke, should overthrow every reli- 
 gion represented in the Pantheon until the gods and temples which 
 seemed inseparable from the literature and life of the people 
 should be left without a single worshiper, and only broken im- 
 ages and altars be left to satisfy the curiosity of the student of 
 the classics seemed utterly incredible. As Prof. Freeman says: 
 “That Christianity should become the religion of the Roman 
 Empire is the miracle of history, but that it did so become is the 
 leading fact of history from that day onward.” The converts of 
 Christianity were among the educated rather than the uneducat- 
 ed, in the cities rather than in the villages, which were last to 
 yield to new ideas and the new faith. Paul’s 
 “ T he Miracle great epistles, with their deep thoughts, their 
 of History.” closely knit reasoning, and their views of truth 
 reaching out into the eternities before and 
 after, were on the face of them not intended for illiterates or 
 weaklings. It was then that Christianity showed its power to 
 stimulate, to inspire, and to lead the world’s progress because of 
 
 —14— 
 
what it did to meet the world’s need. Never was the moral dis- 
 ability of the world greater than when Christianity began its 
 triumphant career in the Roman Empire, and that without tem- 
 ples, altars, images, and opposed less by the priests or decaying 
 religions, too far gone to offer violence, than by the strong arm 
 of the State and the proud philosophy of the schools. What 
 was the secret of its triumph? 
 
 Next to its divine Lord and Founder, and because of him, its 
 success was due to what the new religion did in satisfying the 
 world’s need. Christ, who fitted for paradise the dying thief 
 whose faith and love so quickly followed his penitential tears, 
 was, before the close of the first century, recognized even in 
 Caesar’s household as greater than Caesar, and some two centu- 
 ries later was worshiped from the throne of the 
 The Secret of Roman Empire. It was Christianity that stopped 
 Its Success. human sacrifices; ended the gladiatorial shows 
 and licentious sports of the amphitheater; drove 
 from the continent of Europe the unnatural vices which Paul 
 described in his Epistle to the Romans, and which still abound 
 in the Turkish Empire and in India; put an end to the exposure 
 of infants to death by wild beasts or starvation; checked the 
 spirit of private revenge and of cruel and ceaseless warfare by 
 proclaiming the “Truce of God’’ from Thursday to Monday of 
 each week as covering the time of the passion and resurrection 
 of our Lord; abolished slavery, which was coextensive with 
 Europe; taught purity; established charities of all kinds; trans- 
 formed the morals of Europe and of the Roman Empire by sanc- 
 tifying childhood, honoring womanhood, and reverencing old 
 age. All this was done, too, despite the relentless persecutions 
 
 —15— 
 
in Asia Minor, Africa, and Gaul, which not only sat- 
 The Need urated the soil with blood and cast the ashes of 
 NLet. martyrs into the rivers, while the mocking crowds 
 
 looked on to see what had become of the boasted 
 doctrine of the resurrection, but furnished such countless vic- 
 tims for the Roman amphitheater that the very wild beasts 
 tired of attacking them as if they themselves had become men 
 when the Romans had become beasts. But the real triumph 
 of Christianity was not when the Emperor Constantine was bap- 
 tized, or even when the Roman Senate formally adopted Chris- 
 tianity as the true and only religion of the empire; it was when 
 the emperor Galerius, who was the real author of the most cruel 
 of all the persecutions under his predecessor, Diocletian, finally 
 put an end to the burning of temples and sacred books and the 
 slaughter of Christians by his historic edict of 
 Final Triumph toleration issued in 311, which declared that 
 in Rome. the purpose of the persecutions had failed, and 
 
 not only gave permission to Christians- to hold 
 their religious assemblies, but added this instruction, “that after 
 this manifestation of grace they should pray their God for the 
 welfare of the emperor, of the State, and of themselves, that the 
 .State might prosper in every respect, and that they might live 
 quietly in their homes.’’ This was when the Galilean indeed 
 conquered, and Paul, who had fallen a martyr before one Roman 
 emperor, saw another one stand up for prayers. Then it was 
 from the third heavens that Paul saw things on earth that were 
 lawful to utter, and they are lawful still. The hope of the whole 
 race as that of the proudest people of antiquity, a people having 
 crucified the Prince of Life, sought to destroy all his followers, 
 reveling in power that was rapidly passing away before a king- 
 dom that should endure forever, is the hope alike of the individ- 
 ual and of the nation that the gospel of Christ is the power of 
 God unto salvation to every one that believeth. 
 
 Board of Missions Methodist Episcopal Church, South, Nashville, Tcnn. 
 
 — 16 —