And he seems to imply the Holy Spirit’s regenerative work through Christ’s atonement, when he maintains that whoever shall, “by patient continuance in well doing, seek glory and immortality,” to him shall “eternal life” be given; but “tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile.”  Peter was not prepared to be a missionary till he had been divested of his Jewish narrowness by witnessing the power of grace in the Roman centurion at Cesarea.  That widened out his horizon immensely.  He saw that God in his ultimate plan was no respecter of persons or of races.

There has been great difference of opinion as to whether the annual worship of the supreme God of Heaven in the great imperial temple at Peking is in any degree a relic of the worship of the true God once revealed to mankind.  Such Chinese scholars as Martin and Legge and Douglass think that it is; others deny it.  Some men raise a question whether the Allah of the Mohammedan faith is identical with the Jehovah of the Old Testament.  Sales, the profoundest expositor of Islam, considers him the same.  Moslems themselves have no doubt of it:  the intent of the Koran is that and nothing else; Old Testament teachings are interwoven with almost every sura of its pages.  I think that Paul would have conceded this point at once, and would the more successfully have urged the claims of Jesus, whom the Koran presents as the only sinless prophet.  Of course Mohammedans do not recognize the Triune God as we now apprehend Him, from the New Testament standpoint; neither did ancient believers of Israel fully conceive of God as He has since been more fully revealed in the person and the sacrifice of his Son—­Jesus Christ.

Both the teachings and the example of Paul seem to recognize the fact that conceptions of God, sometimes clear and sometimes dim, may exist among heathen nations; and many of the great Christian fathers evidently took the same view.  They admitted that Plato’s noble teachings were calculated to draw the soul toward God, though they revealed no real access to Him such as is found in Christ.  Archbishop Trench, in his Hulsean lectures on “Christ the Desire of the Nations,” dwells approvingly upon Augustine’s well-known statement, that he had been turned from vice to an inspiring conception of God by reading the “Hortensius” of Cicero.  Augustine’s own reference to the fact is found in the fourth book of his “Confessions,” where he says:  “In the ordinary course of study I fell upon a certain book of Cicero whose speech almost all admire—­not so his heart.  This book contains an exhortation to philosophy, and is called ‘Hortensius.’  But this book altered my affections and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord, and made me have other purposes and desires.  Every vain hope at once became worthless to me, and I longed with an incredible burning desire for an immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise that I might return to Thee.  For not to sharpen my tongue did I employ that book:  nor did it infuse into me its style, but its matter.”