special messengers and teaching the people; and he had accomplished so
little that the world was in such a condition that he was compelled to
drown it. So came the flood. After that, he chooses one family, one
little family and the descendants of that family, one little people,
and bends all his energies to the education and training of that
people,-- a small people inhabiting a country on the eastern coast of
the Mediterranean Sea just about as large as the State of
Massachusetts.

For more than two thousand years he devotes himself to the training of
this people. How does he succeed here? He sends his messengers again,
his angels, his prophets, one after another. He inspires a certain
number of men to write a book to deliver his will to the people, fallen
into such condition that they are incapable of discovering the truth
for themselves. But, after all his efforts, they are so far from the
truth that, when the second person of the Trinity appears, they have
nothing to do with him except to put him to death. After that, God
sends the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, to organize his
Church, spread his truth, convert men, bring them into the Church, and
so fit them to be saved. And, after two thousand years of that kind of
effort, what is the result? They tell us that not more than a third
part of the inhabitants of the world have heard anything about it, that
the majority of those who have heard about it reject it. Mr. Moody told
us last year that in this country, which we love to think of as the
most favored and highly civilized and intelligent country in the world,
out of seventy millions of inhabitants, not more than thirty millions
ever see the inside of any kind of church. I do not vouch for the
accuracy of the statistics. I wish to impress upon you the result of
this theory of this six thousand years of endeavor on the part of God
to bring his own children to a knowledge of his own truth. The upshot