Let us take some of the simpler and plainer things in this question, that we may come up to it without any hesitation.  Now, I do not need to go into the question as to what God will do with the heathen.  I don’t know what He will do with them.  I know as much about it as you do, or anybody else, because I know what the Book says about it.  God knows better about this than I do, and will find a way that I cannot dream of.  But, because the words are not uttered by divine authority, I dare not stand here and utter any word of hope for any man beyond the gospel committed to me to preach.  This I know:  That if the heathen have the Spirit of the Lord Jesus, whether they ever saw the Lord Jesus or not, they are of His.  And this I know:  That if this congregation have not the spirit of the Lord Jesus, tho it may have seen Him, they are not of His.  And this I know:  That He will save a Jew and a Gentile on the same terms; that He will do no better for the Gentile than He will for the Jew, and no better for the Jew than for the Gentile.  And if there was no other name given under heaven among men by which an ancient Jew or an ancient Gentile might be saved, that is true to-day.  The Lord Jesus thought that these people needed the gospel, and that they needed it so much that He actually came and submitted Himself unto death that they might have the gospel.  And God seems so thoroughly to believe that they need the gospel that He actually gives His only-begotten Son to die, that they may have the gospel.  He treats the case just exactly as if He thought, at least, that they do really need this divine Redeemer.  He has done, in every step and process of this great work of world-saving, just exactly as He would have done had He absolutely thought and believed that they needed a divine Redeemer.

And then I understand another thing out of the Book:  That the very last and supreme utterance of the Master on earth grew out of His conviction that we should do exactly this thing.  And see how He comes up to it, little by little!  He does not rush suddenly upon it—­He does not, upon any truth.  It is not in the divine plan to flash upon us in anything.  Truths grow; moral ideas grow.  They come into the race little, and hardly able to stand at all; we can barely find them beneath us in the lower strata of our being.  But they struggle into power and strength until they fill the field of vision.  Nearly every great truth of Old and New Testament Scripture is to be found in the Book of Genesis.  In Genesis you will find the principle of the atonement; you will find the division of animals into clean and unclean, foreshadowing sacrifice; you will find the principle of the acceptance of offerings that came out of the flock, and the rejection of the offerings out of the field; you will find the pardon of sin and the giving of covenants—­all the essential parts of the New Testament growing with their roots away back in Genesis.  There is the first declaration