HKB
beneficent advance equally for all, shaming the petty meanness with which, unjust alike to the old times and the new, we inveigh against the new times and overrate the old!"[1]
And what, more especially, of moral revolution and progress during the last half century? The indications are evidently hopeful and cheering. Human nature is indeed the same, but it has been under new and better influences in modern than in more remote time. Human governments have improved, and even the worst of them are better now than they were fifty years ago. Human laws have been rendered more human and less barbarous. Sympathy for the poor, the degraded, the sinful, has been more truly awakened, and is at this moment in more active operation than at any previous time. The moral obligations of political rulers, and those who sustain them, have been perhaps more vigorously discussed during these years than in any other fifty years preceding; so that there seems now a more favorable opportunity than at almost any previous day this side that of the Jewish Theocracy, to impress this truth upon the public mind, that if individuals should have consciences and a sense of responsibility to God, so should communities; that "righteousness exalteth a nation, while sin is a reproach to any people." Religious toleration also has increased. The rigid sectarianism of the past has been giving way, so that now the hunters of heresy, and the executioners of those who held it, are read of rather than seen. The false deity which even some Christians have worshipped in the past, and the false humanity with which they have supposed themselves endowed, have been in some good degree exchanged for more rational conceptions of God the Father, and of man the offspring. And this change is daily going on; never was it more perceptible than at the present hour.
We should manifest an unpardonable blindness in noting these evidences of human advancement, if we were to leave out of the account the most significant of all forces in it,--we mean Christianity.
This we regard as the foremost power in the spiritual progress thus far realized in our world, and which promises to effect for the race its highest exaltation. Refinement and barbarism have more or less marked the history of the world in the past; they do still; but where does the light of civilization shine brightest among the nations? The answer is, where the Christian religion, in its true spirit, most widely prevails. And it is the increasing prevalence of it which gives us the assurance of that consummation of the Redeemer's work with men, when they all "come in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man; unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."[2]
Christianity is a universal religion. Herein is its pre-eminence. It is for man everywhere and in all time. No other religion has so clearly asserted this claim for itself, and no other promises to do so much for mankind. True, it has had to make its way against the errors and prejudices and corruptions of the world. It has been mixed with human errors, and has been professed, taught, and practised in too many instances by those who have failed to realize clearly the heavenliness of its spirit, and its far-reaching, regenerative, and overcoming power. Its earliest promulgators failed to see at first this grand characteristic of its universality. An able Christian historian has written: "Nothing is more remarkable than to see the horizon of the Apostles gradually receding, and, instead of resting on the borders of the Holy Land, comprehending at length the whole world; barrier after barrier falling down before the superior wisdom which was infused into their minds; first, the proselytes of the gate, the foreign conformists to Judaism, and, ere long, the Gentiles themselves admitted within the pale; until Christianity stood forth, demanded the homage, and promised its rewards to the faith of the whole human race; proclaimed itself in language which the world had as yet never heard, the one, true universal religion."[3]
Rev. Dr. Gerhard Uhlhorn, of Germany, in his able work, "The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism," speaking of the early development of Christianity in the Roman Empire, calls it the first step to its universalism. "Itself passing out from the ancient narrowness into a world-wide breadth of thought and life, the old world became capable of accepting the Universalism of Christianity."[4] The old world and the new have yet many steps forward to take in this pathway of a continually increasing brightness.
[1] Oration of Governor Long before the municipal authorities and citizens of Boston, July 4, 1882.
[2] Eph. iv. 13.
[3] Milman's "History of Christianity."