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 joys 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