1. This is not the gospel, but it is the foundation on which the gospel builds--that humanity is one; that race distinctions are superficial, and not radical; that there is a universal brotherhood, originating in the universal Fatherhood of God. This is familiar enough to us, for our common speech is stocked with phrases and expressions which recognise it. But then no man believed in it. Jew and Greek, and Roman and barbarian were alike in this. They had their separate deities and their separate origin. Every people was proud of its own birthright, and deemed itself the elect of its own god, and regarded it as a natural law that they should despise or hate all others. Into this condition of things the inspired message of the apostles came, flinging its living cords over the wide gaps, and binding human society with a new and Divine bond.
2. And the greater our knowledge of men, the more irresistibly is this truth forced upon us. Everywhere there are substantially the same emotions, longings, regrets, some sort of conscience, hope; everywhere man is susceptible to the touch of love, moved by persuasions of kindness, thrilled by the voice of pity. Everywhere man confesses that he cannot live by bread alone, and is everywhere a praying creature. And everywhere there is in man a capacity for growth unlimited. Even among the lowest races, where science has sought, and will for ever seek in vain, for the missing link between the animal and man, proofs innumerable have been given that one or two generations are enough to work a transformation more than magical. Truly God hath made of our blood all nations of men, and the Christ who can redeem any one man is proved by that very fact to be the possible Redeemer of all.
3. How beautifully, and with what profound wisdom, does Paul here acknowledge that universal religious instinct in man which makes humanity one. They have all sought after God, if haply they might find Him, and He has not been far from any one of them. In every religion there has been something true. They have touched His feet if they have not seen His face. Their shrines have been vestibules to His Temple, if they had not been the Temple itself. Today, in all our mission work we are coming back to the generous thought of the apostle. The heathen world is becoming better known, its religions better understood, its gross errors and undying truths and aspirations more carefully and lovingly distinguished, and, therefore, the scope and nature of our work more clearly and hopefully defined. To understand the souls with which we deal is the first essential of evangelistic work. And verily there is hardly a truth of the Christian revelation which is not, at least, foreshadowed in the religious conceptions of the great Eastern races. We know, alas! too well, that all these things have been buried out of sight under successive layers of corruption. Yet, if we have patience to dig beneath the mass, we are always stumbling upon decayed forms of truth, and it is no little advantage to the missionary to be able to say, “I came not to destroy but to restore and fulfil.” Moreover, we are learning to respect those people and not simply to despise them. We are finding out not only that they are lost, but that they are really worth saving. India was the greatest of all empires before the names of Rome and Greece were known. Its people belong to the same Aryan stock as ourselves. All these races have proved themselves capable of all that we have attained, and they have fallen from all that because, as Paul says, though they once knew God, they became vain in their imagination, etc. It is the picture of Eden with a particular rendering. But whenever there is a paradise lost Christ speaks of a paradise regained. Our missionaries go to their work burning and inspired with an infinite hope, because they go where there are memories of a golden past. What has been may yet be again. They are a people to whom we can confidently say, “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.” (J. G. Greenhough, M. A.)
Mankind are one family
I.The truth of this doctrine. That mankind are one family; that a common origin, and common nature, belong to all nations.
1. We read (Gen_1:27-28). Now as we read of no more creations of man, but on the contrary, that after the formation of man, Jehovah “rested on the seventh day, from all His work which He had made,” it is evident that if we admit the correctness of the Mosaic account of the creation, we must admit that nations of every colour, and of every mode of life, are the descendants of one pair. This I think more specially appears from another statement in this early history (Gen_3:20).
2. There is reason to believe from other considerations, as well as from the words of our text, that it was the design of Almighty God, that the human race should spread over and people the whole earth; and one cannot but admire how His providence, by colonisation, adventure, and other means, continues to pursue the same design.
3. The sacred writers often express themselves in such terms as can only comport with the identity of the human species, for which we contend (Num_27:16; Rom_5:12; 1Co_15:22).
4. Against this doctrine, however, there has been advanced one objection, which, on account of the boldness and the frequency with which it has been put forth, it is proper to notice. It is this--“the difference in colour, form, and manners is so great in different nations of men, as to prove that they cannot have had a common origin.” In answer to this objection, it is to be remarked--
(1) That between the snowy whiteness of the most delicate European, and the jet black of the negro, there is, in the varieties of the human kind, every conceivable, intermediate shade of colour. And does the objector mean to say that men must have had as many distinct originals as there are distinct shades of colour in the nations of the globe?
(2) But perhaps he will choose to rest his objection rather on the conformation than on the colour of the body. But can the objector be ignorant that the different nations of Europe exhibit striking characteristic distinctions in their personal structure and appearance? Have we not an example of this in the Germans and the French?
(3) I might insist on the erect stature of man--on the bonal and muscular provisions by which this stature is produced--and on other anatomical peculiarities by which man in all his varieties is essentially distinguished from all the lower animals. And I do so far insist on this, as to affirm that Rousseau, and others, who have intimated that the negro man, and the simile of the woods, are only varieties of the same species, either wrote in utter ignorance of this department of physiology and comparative anatomy, or, what is worse, attempted to impose upon the world a wilful, wicked, and most detestable falsehood!
(4) With those who seek truth on this question it will be enough to know that all e great features which identify man are found alike in men of every colour and of every clime.
(a) One of these features is reason. The powers of ratiocination belong to man alone.
(b) Man is the only creature on earth endowed with the gift of speech.
(c) I pass over the institutions of law and government--the cultivation of science, literature, and the arts--the relations of domestic life--and the strength and durability of the natural affections. But there is another peculiarity of man on which I am bound to insist; and that is, his capacity for religion. I say that man possesses a power to contemplate, love, and worship the infinite Spirit, his Creator and Lord; and that he is the only inhabitant of earth that has this power. To my judgment this is the broad, deep, indelible mark which distinguishes man from the most sagacious of the brutes, more than any other of his characteristics.
II. The essential consequence of this doctrine to a consistent and acceptable Christian practice.
1. It is indispensable, in point of fact, to the exercise of a true faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. To suppose that shade of colour destroyed identity of species, were to us a horrid thought I for there is reason to believe that the holy Jesus Himself had not the European whiteness, but rather the Palestinian form and hue; so that if any nation must be excluded from the blessings of redemption on account of the shape of their bodies or colour of their skin, it is the English nation, and in the interdict we have our share!
2. The doctrine I have laid before you is no less necessary to enable us to feel and to act in a right manner in reference to the distinctions of rank and circumstances among men. If the father of a numerous family finds it expedient to appoint one child this task, and another that; and to one a task less easy or less honourable than to another; those children will not, surely, on this account, forget that they are brothers and sisters, that they have one father, and are equally the objects of his care and love. The use of this allusion is easy. Let the most exalted by riches, rank, office, or fame, keep in mind that he is but man, and never forget the kindliness and respect due from him to the meanest being partaking our common nature! And if there be men who choose to play the tyrant and oppressor--speaking and acting as though more than human blood flowed in their veins--let not this degrade the poor in his own eyes; let him act right in the sight of his God, and time shall show which is the greatest man!
3. It would be wrong were I to omit this further inference; that if all nations were of one blood, it must be in the highest degree criminal for one nation to enslave another.
4. In fine, from the doctrine that mankind are one family I might deduce that whole course of virtuous Christian demeanour which is due from man to man.
(1) Justice and integrity to all.
(2) Reparation where injury has been inflicted.
(3) Forbearance towards the errors and infirmities of men.
(4) Assistance to the weak, the distressed, the sorrowful, the aged, the widow, and the fatherless, according to the ability which God has given us.
(5) Instruction to the ignorant; in other words, the impartation of the religion of Jesus to them who have it not. To those near us, our own family, neighbourhood, and country, first to be sure; but not forgetting the most distant of our brethren. (James Bromley.)
The origin of mankind
I.The fact. The truth of the declaration will appear, if we consider--
1. The great similarity which is visible among the various nations of the earth. They all have the same--
(1) Exterior form.
(2) Mode of moving. They all walk erect.
(3) Use of speech, or power of articulation. None of the lower species have this.
(4) Intellectual faculties. The most uncultivated nations appear to possess the same native powers of the mind as the most civilised.
(5) Moral dispositions, “they have all gone out of the way, there is none that doeth good, no, not one.”
(6) Birth, growth, decay, and dissolution.
2. The ignorance in which they have generally been involved for many ages past, and the slow progress they have made in knowledge, learning, and civilisation.
3. The farther back we trace their origin, the more they become blended together and mixed into one. There is no nation but the Jews that appears unmixed. If different nations have originated from different sources, it is very strange that not one of them has been able to retain the knowledge of their distinct origin. But if they are all of one blood this is not strange.
II. Objections.
1. Some have said it was impossible for one family to spread over all the world. To this I reply--
(1) That it was easy for one family to scatter into any inhabitable parts of the earth where they could travel by land.
(2) As to those nations who have inhabited Iceland and America, we can conceive of various ways by which they came to these places. It has been conjectured that many islands were once connected to the main land; and that this was the case in respect to the continents. If this be true, then the difficulty is entirely removed. But if this be not true, it is easy to suppose, that those on the continent could devise means to get to the nearest islands. And as navigation was early discovered by this means, they could get to remote islands and continents.
2. Some nations presume to carry their antiquity several thousand years higher than others, such as the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Chinese. But--
(1) They have no history or monuments to prove their great antiquity.
(2) The most ancient and faithful historians bear full testimony to the contrary.
3. It is farther objected that the great diversity in the customs, manners and complexions of different nations, is inconsistent with the supposition of their common origin. It is easy to answer that all these things may be accounted for by the different circumstances and climates in which they have lived.
III. Inferences. If it be the truth that all nations are of one blood, then--
1. We may justly conclude that the Bible is the Word of God. It confirms the account which the Bible gives of--
(1) The Creation, which tells us that mankind sprang from the same two parents.
(2) The Fall. Though men have sought out many inventions to account for the universal depravity of mankind; yet the Bible gives the only rational account of it, that by one man’s disobedience all were made sinners.
(3) The Deluge. The heathen have some dark traditions concerning this awful catastrophe, but they could never give any rational account of it. It cannot be credibly accounted for but on the supposition that all nations are of one blood, universally depraved, and universally deserve destruction.
2. That notion of patriotism which is generally imbibed and admired, is false and unscriptural. One nation has no more right to seek its own interests exclusively, or in opposition to the interests of other nations, than one member of the same family has to seek his interest in opposition to the interest of the rest of the family. All nations are morally bound to seek each other’s interests, and to refrain from doing anything which they deem to be injurious.
3. They have no right to enslave one another. All men have natural and inalienable rights, which never ought to be taken from them by force and violence.
4. God has manifested peculiar care, wisdom, and kindness in fixing the various places of their residence, in the best manner, according to their relations to and connections with each other. And as He fixed the bounds of their habitations, so He fixed their times. That is, the time when every nation should rise or fall, or become mixed with any other nation. It requires great care, wisdom, and kindness in a parent to dispose of his numerous family in the wisest and best manner; it requires more in a prince; but it required far greater in God.
5. God has exercised His absolute sovereignty in a very striking manner. He has made great and innumerable distinctions among the nations and inhabitants of the earth. How differently did He treat the three branches of Noah’s family, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau! He has placed one nation in a warm and another in a cold country, one in a rich, and another in a poor. And it is impossible for any one of the human family to be happy in this world, or the next, without seeing and loving His sovereignty.
6. We have ground to think that the world will stand many centuries longer. The earth is far from being fully inhabited.
7. The whole family of Adam will be immensely numerous. If the seed of Abraham will be as the stars of heaven for multitude, what will be the seed of Adam? Their numbers will be beyond human calculation, if not beyond human conception. This immense family are to have one universal and solemn meeting at the Day of Judgment. (N. Emmons, D. D.)
The unity of the race
I.There is precisely the same plan in all the races--Of bone, nerve, artery, structure, etc. The great functions and organs are the same. If the African had his heart in his liver it would be a tough argument; but what difference does it make that his hair is kinked? The surgeon, the nurse, the dietician will treat him and you exactly alike. Yet you hear men say, “Look at his flat nose. Do you suppose that he is one with the man who has a Grecian nose? “But is not the sense of smell the same in both? The variation of superficial form does not touch the question of unity of function and structure. In fact the differences between one part of the human family and another is no greater than that which exists in a single household where one child is a genius and another practical, one poetic and another prosaic.
II. All the races of men are educable. It is not so with the lower animals. You can carry them a very little way in education, and all the rest is trick. But the moment you strike humanity at its very lowest you find capacity of culture. If you take the greatest savages and put them in better relations and conditions they show that they belong to the universal race of man.
III. All have the sense of the beautiful. There is no proof that this exists to any considerable degree in the animal kingdom. But sometimes, as among the Indians, you find this sense highly developed in the most uncultured.
IV. All have the perception of wit and humour. Man is the only laughing animal in the world.
V. Moral sense is common to all. Where men believe in killing their fathers and mothers they think it right, though their understanding is darkened, and they are misguided, just as a mariner makes his way towards a false light believing it to be true, and thus wrecks his vessel.
VI. The whole world is susceptible of sympathetic understanding, cooperation, and like social conditions. It would be impossible to herd together the different races of animals unless you pare their nails, extract their teeth, or stupefy them. But men of all nations can associate. Conclusion:
1. These thoughts are made emphatic by the undesigned tendency to unity which the growth of the world’s affairs is producing. The economic and scientific developments of the age are working alike for all the nations. Great mechanical and commercial improvements are bringing the whole world together. The Turk is borrowing civilisation from the European; and the European is bringing more threads of knowledge from Chinamen and Japanese. Mountains and oceans no longer divide. We tunnel the one and throw a nerve through the other.
2. The Church proposes, as it long has done, to move out on this tide. It has made a great many mistakes, but there never has been a time when it did not set its face towards human unity, and teach that God belonged to all men alike. (H. W. Beecher.)
The unity of the race consistent with its diversities
At a public meeting of the Anthropological Society the assertion was made that the aborigines of Australia, the negroes of Africa, and other miserable outcasts did not belong to the human family at all, but we’re merely a superior kind of orang-outang, or gorilla; that, not possessing souls, they require none of the sympathy and care the friends of missions were so anxious to extend to them. Immediately a young African requested permission to address the meeting. All eyes being fixed upon him, with a dignified mien and an unfaltering voice, he spoke as follows:--“Mr. Chairman, ladies, and gentleman,--The speaker who has just addressed the meeting thinks that I and my brethren of the negro race are not men because we have curly hair, our craniums are thick, and we have a shuffling gait when we walk. I have lately been down in Dorsetshire, where I observed the farm labourers have a shuffling gait; and I thought that my countrymen, who generally walk much better, might be tempted to laugh at them for their awkwardness if they saw them, but I do not think they would doubt their humanity on that account. And as to our curly hair, I think that need be no disparagement to us, as I have known persons of fair complexion try to make theirs curl without success. With regard to the thickness of our skulls, I may observe, that I suppose our Almighty and All-wise Creator knew what He was doing when he made us so. Our home is in a very hot and sultry climate, where the fiery rays of the sun have great power, and where the inner region of the cranium no doubt requires such a defence. If, by any mistake in our conformation, we had been made with skulls as frail as that of the learned gentleman who last spoke, our brains, under the influence of the heat, might have become as thin and addled as his appears to be, judging from the foolish and unphilosophical statement which he has made, and then it might have been reasonably doubted whether we were men worth listening to.” The young negro resumed his seat amid thundering applause; and for once, at least, it appeared to be the general opinion that the black was as clever as the white man.
Gospel aspects of the unity of the race
I. The natural unity of the race. This is--
1. Taught in the Bible.
2. Corroborated by tradition.
3. Confirmed by science.
(1) A chemist can prove the difference between the human and animal blood, but finds no difference between the blood of negro and European.
(2) Philology has reduced languages into a few orderly classes, and these again into a common tongue.
This doctrine offers the only solution to the problem of the origin of--
(1) Universal depravity with its universal consciousness of guilt.
(2) Sacrificial worship which men have always and everywhere practised.
II. The common interest of our race in the provisions of redemption. The doctrine implies--
1. Our common need of redemption as well as a common capacity for enjoying its benefits. “By one man sin entered into the world,” etc.
2. That salvation for Adam and his fallen posterity must have been provided for all men. The race existed potentially in “the first man Adam”; when, therefore, redemption was extended to him it was intended to benefit his offspring. He who has “made of one blood all nations” has made our Redeemer a “Ransom for all.”
III. The responsibility of the Church in relation to the race.
1. This springs out of the conscious brotherhood of man. If we fully believe that we share in the common evils of the Fall, and in the love of Christ, how can any who experience the great salvation avoid all sense of obligation to save others?
2. This is set forth authoritatively by Christ. “Go ye into all the world.”
3. The successive openings for missions, and the growing resources of Christian nations are intended to quicken this. (W. Hansford.)
Brotherhood
Thisdoctrine has three parts--
I. The unity of the creator.
1. Each nation in the dim past had its own gods, and the belief that they were superior to those of their neighbours.
2. But opposed to this is the revelation of one God, Creator, Universal Governor who is over all, and all in all.
II. The unity of mankind.
1. God created man--male and female.
2. This was one act, not divided or repeated at intervals in different places.
3. From this one pair the world has been peopled, through the laws of generation and dispersion. This contradicts the superstition of the heathen in reference to their origin, e.g., the Athenian belief that they were autochthons, springing from the soil.
III. The unity of destiny.
1. Man has a common nature, a mind that thinks, a heart that feels, a will that chooses, a soul that never dies.
2. Each nation has the same problems of society, government, and religion, to discover and apply.
3. Each nation is subject to the same diseases, physical and moral, and runs a like career of ruin or prosperity.
IV. Results.
1. The purple tide of related blood from one spring writes a common declaration of rights which no Christian is at liberty to disregard. Simply to be a man or woman is to have claims upon the whole race.
2. Nations are so bound together in progress and privileges, material, moral and spiritual, that whatever helps or injures man in one quarter of the globe is ultimately a help or an injury to all.
3. It is the common duty of Christian nations to labour for the general diffusion of religion and civilization, so that peace, art, and science may universally prevail, and every human faculty find unhindered liberty to develop itself to the glory of God, individual wellbeing, and the good of mankind. (Preacher’s Monthly.)
And hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitations.--
Consequences flowing out of the Divine Fatherhood to the race
I.God, as the Father of all, has, in a sovereign manner, disposed of the different nations of men. As a father disposes of his estate to his sons, and as his simple will determines the allotment of each, so has God “appointed men to dwell,” etc. (Gen_1:28). And if it be asked, Why is this nation here or that nation there? the answer is, Not by accident, but because God so determined it. And if it be still further asked, To what is to be ascribed the mutations of nations, the dying out of some peoples, or their absorption into others? the answer is, The will of God hath determined the times as well as the bounds of the habitation of each. This representation of the apostle--
1. Supplies to us a deeper and juster view of the philosophy of human history than is usually suggested. Whilst, on the one hand, we repudiate the doctrine of separate centres of creation, and treat as a fantasy the doctrine of development, we are, on the other hand, taught to turn aside from the opinion that all human varieties are due to mere differences of climate and outward circumstance. The persistency of races--the retention, generation after generation, by whole communities of the peculiar characteristics of the variety to which they belong; and that under the most altered conditions of climate, occupation, food, is against that. Look, e.g., at the Jews, and at the Europeans settled in Africa, or the Africans in North America.
2. Enables us to read and understand aright the world’s history. There are some who see in national changes nothing but the results of fixed mechanical laws. Others, again, see nothing but the result of either an ungoverned caprice or of the ordinary passions and tendencies of men. But on neither of these hypotheses can a real philosophy of history be built. We can reach this only by keeping fast hold of the truth, that all human operations are conducted under the superintendence of an infinitely wise and powerful Being, who, without interfering with man’s free will, or interrupting any of the ordinary laws of nature, regulates all events according to the council of His own will, and uses all agencies as the instruments of a vast world plan, of which He alone knows the compass and the details. On these two poles all true philosophy of history turns. If we view man as a mere piece of organised mechanism, we cannot bring the phenomena of his history within the range of modern science at all; if we deny or overlook God’s supremacy we are out upon a wide sea, across which no path is drawn, and over which no light rests.
3. Shows us how contrary to the primary order of the world, and the will of the great Father of the race, are all attempts to extirpate races, or to drive people from their native soil, or to take forcible possession of it. God, no doubt, may overrule such deeds; but the deeds themselves are impious. Each nation holds the country it has aboriginally occupied by Divine right--by the will of the common Father. Who can tell how many of the calamities that befall great nations are just retributions for the deeds of rapine and wrong perpetrated in the day of the nation’s pride and strength on some weaker or some utterly defenceless people?
II. The duty binding on men to seek after God. This Paul brings in as describing the purpose which God had in distributing the nations, and allotting to each its place and time.
1. By being thus distributed over the whole face of the globe, and placed under the constant superintendence of God, the nations had the entire revelation of God in nature and in providence subjected to their study.
2. That it is man’s duty to search after God, is one of the primary truths of morals and of natural religion. In his present state man neither knows God aright, nor are his relations with God such as they originally were. Hence he needs to seek after God that he may enter into right relations and true communion with Him. These words depict man’s course in regard to this great matter. Endowed with a religious principle, men feel themselves constrained by the highest wants of their nature to seek after God; and yet, when left to their own unaided efforts, it has ever been only as one who gropes in the dark and at a peradventure, that they have pursued their search. To a few of the higher and purer spirits there came, like angels’ visits, ever and anon, brief revelations of the hidden mystery, just and true thoughts of the Infinite. But for the mass of men it was a fruitless groping, until at length, baffled and disheartened, they were ready to carry their homage to any altar that priestcraft or superstition might erect, or at the best, to embody at once their deathless longings and their conscious impotence in an altar to “An Unknown God.”
3. To what is this melancholy failure to be traced? Not, the apostle reminded the Athenians, to want of means and materials of success. God, whom they thus haplessly groped after, was, all the while, “not far from every one of them.” Not only are the evidences of the Divine existence and attributes presented in copious abundance on every hand, but the fact that man is the offspring of God supplies to him the most natural help for realising the truth concerning God. For, if man be God’s child, he must have a natural capacity for God. And there is thus a solid basis laid in the very constitution of man’s nature on which a true theology may be built; and when the page of creation and providence is opened before a being so fitted and prepared to learn the lessons they so abundantly teach concerning God, it can only be through some perversity of his own mind that he fails to attain to the knowledge of God (Rom_1:20-22). But sin had seduced them from God, so it became the great obstacle to their receiving those right views of God which the phenomena around them so clearly taught.
4. It was thus that the nations were betrayed into idolatry. Nothing can be more absurd in itself than to represent the Great Spirit under the similitude of any creature; and nothing can be more inconsistent than for those who call themselves God’s offspring “to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone graven by art or man’s device.” Who of us would accept any image that human skill could produce as a fit representation of that which really constitutes us--our soul? And this is the true source of all those wrong, deluding, and debasing views of God, by which men are still led astray, even where the light of written revelation is enjoyed. Would that all who shudder at the thought of Atheism were equally alive to the evil and danger of a false, imperfect, or fanciful Theism!(W. L. Alexander, D. D.)
God in history
He manifests therein--
I. His creative power, causing the human spirit to be unfolded in the multiplicity of national spirits.
II. His gracious goodness, giving to each nation time and space to develop its peculiarity.
III. His judicial righteousness, appointing to each nation, whether it be Greece or Rome or Israel, the end and limit to its power and prosperity.
IV. His holy love--the whole history of the world aiming at this that the kingdom of God may come and that men may seek and find Him. (K. Gerok.)
God in history
The doctrine that God “hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitations,” was taught by Moses--“When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam, He set the bounds of the people according to the number of the Children of Israel.” The periods of their existence have been defined, and its limits mapped out by God. By the periods he means not simply their natural duration, but also the crisis or turning points in their national experience. And they had many of them in their own history. Not to speak of such epochs as the return of the Heracleids, the religious mission of Epimenides, the deeds of the Alcmaeonids, the despotism of Pisistratus, or the usurpation of the thirty tyrants, there had been the battle of Marathon, when Asiatic invasion was repelled by a gallant handful, and, ten years after, the victorious naval action at Salamis--both of them hair-breadth escapes for Athens, and both securing against loss of liberty and degradation into a Persian satrapy. These momentous junctures were the fore-appointment of an unrecognised Protector, who settles the limits of nations; for there is a boundary which they cannot pass, no matter what their ambition, and what the success of their arms. Their own defeats, and the ostracism of so many of their leaders, had shown this. Miltiades the patriot of Marathon, and Themistocles the hero of Salamis, had been sent into exile for misadventures by which the ambitious projects of Greece were limited, and similar had been the fate of Cimon and Alcibiades. Beyond certain termini Athens could not, with all her skill and valour, carry her arms; an unseen arm defined her bounds, and kept her within them. Minerva could not protect: Xerxes had burned her dwelling, and her spear and shield had neither repelled Philip from the north, nor beaten back the Roman warriors from the west. She stood immovable on that rock, defenceless against the invader. The sudden death of Alexander broke into four principalities the huge empire which he contemplated. But the Divine providence is all-embracing, and all history proclaims it. The battle of Zama relieved Italy and civilisation from all fears of Carthage. The Saracen power was thrown out of central Europe at a very critical period, and the tide of Turkish fanaticism was finally checked under the walls of Vienna. He blew with His winds and dispersed the Spanish Armada. Borodino, Leipzig, Trafalgar, and Waterloo set bounds to France in recent times, and Blenheim and Ramillies in days gone by. Bunker’s Hill put an end to British supremacy in the older American colonies. And the moral purpose of God in the allocation and government of the different nations was a special one--“That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us.” Why do nations cease to be, and why are their bounds invaded and broken down? Simply because they do not own or follow out this Divine purpose. They deify themselves and forget Him who is above them--live but for themselves, and “feel after” aggrandisement, and not after Him. The Canaanites were ripe for expulsion on the invasion of Joshua, and so were the Jews themselves before the Roman Titus. The liberties of Greece had been struck down on the fatal field of Chaeronea, and many a nation has been dispossessed of its soil. No people have an irrevocable charter to it; they possess it only so long as they are worthy of it, and act in harmony with Him who planted them in it. And they are displaced that the new occupant may be put upon its trial, too. In this light may be viewed those conquests which are establishing modern colonies--the conqueror in turn is judged, and will, if God decrees it, be in turn exiled. The Anglo-Saxon has driven back the Celt to the verge of the Atlantic, but the Sclave may be commissioned to exercise the same force upon the Anglo-Saxon if he do not service as God’s tenant of His lands. And thus God shall be for Britain, so long as Britain is for God. (Prof. Eadie.)
