some appropriate food, so that it may
live and grow, has left the vast majority of his human children, made with
religious appetences of conscience, reverence, hope, without a
corresponding nutriment of truth. This view tends to atheism; for if the
presence of adaptation everywhere is the legitimate proof of creative
design, the absence of adaptation in so important a sphere tends, so far,
to set aside that proof.

The view which we are opposing contradicts that law of progress which
alone gives meaning and unity to history. Instead of progress, it teaches
degeneracy and failure. But elsewhere we see progress, not recession.
Geology shows us higher forms of life succeeding to the lower. Botany
exhibits the lichens and mosses preparing a soil for more complex forms of
vegetation. Civil history shows the savage state giving way to the
semi-civilized, and that to the civilized. If heathen religions are a
step, a preparation for Christianity, then this law of degrees appears
also in religion; then we see an order in the progress of the human
soul,--"first the blade, then the ear, afterward the full corn in the
ear." Then we can understand why Christ's coming was delayed till the
fulness of the time had come. But otherwise all, in this most important
sphere of human life, is in disorder, without unity, progress, meaning, or
providence.

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.

Sec. 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
p