These views, we trust, will be amply confirmed when we come to examine
each great religion separately and carefully. We shall find them always
feeling after God, often finding him. We shall see that in their origin
they are not the work of priestcraft, but of human nature; in their
essence not superstitions, but religions; in their doctrines true more
frequently than false; in their moral tendency good rather than evil. And
instead of degenerating toward something worse, they come to prepare the
way for something better.



§ 4. How Ethnic Religions were regarded by Christ and his Apostles.


According to Christ and the Apostles, Christianity was to grow out of
Judaism, and be developed into a universal religion. Accordingly, the
method of Jesus was to go first to the Jews; and when he left the limits
of Palestine on a single occasion, he declared himself as only going into
Phoenicia to seek after the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But he
stated that he had other sheep, not of this fold, whom he must bring,
recognizing that there were, among the heathen, good and honest hearts
prepared for Christianity, and already belonging to him; sheep who knew
his voice and were ready to follow him. He also declared that the Roman
centurion and the Phoenician woman already possessed great faith, the
centurion more than he had yet found in Israel. But the most striking
declaration of Jesus, and one singularly overlooked, concerning the
character of the heathen, is to be found in his description of the day of
judgment, in Matthew (chap. XXV.). It is very curious that men should
speculate as to the fate of the heathen, when Jesus has here distinctly