ngels, the traditional enemy of God, who had fought him even in his
own heaven and been cast out, invades this fair earth. He seduces our
first parents, gets them to commit a sin against God which makes them
his enemies, turns them into rebels against his just and holy
government. The world, then, is fallen. Now from that day to this the
one effort on the part of God, according to this theory, has been to
deliver the world from this lost condition. Jonathan Edwards, for
example, published a book called "The History of Redemption." He
conceived the entire history of the world under that title, because the
history of the world, according to this theory, has been the history of
the effort of God to deliver man from the effects of the fall.

Now let us note the story as it proceeds a little further. The world
exists for I think I have a date here which may interest you 1,656
years, God meantime doing everything he could, by sending angels and
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