[635] M.H.S.  Coll., 5th Series, III., p. 403.

APPENDIX.

Part I.

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.

CHAPTER I.

THE UNITY OF MANKIND.

In Acts xvii. 26 the apostle says, “And God hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.”  In Mark xvi. 15, 16, is recorded that remarkable command of our Saviour, “GO YE INTO ALL THE WORLD, and preach the gospel TO EVERY CREATURE.  He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” (See also Matt. xxviii. 18, 20.) Now there is a very close connection between the statement here made by the apostle, and the command here given by our Lord Jesus Christ; for it was in obedience to this command that the apostle was at that time at Athens.  There, amid the proud and conceited philosophers of Greece, in the centre of their resplendent capital, surrounded on every hand by their noblest works of art and their proudest monuments of learning, the apostle proclaims the equality of ALL MEN, their common origin, guilt, and danger, and their universal obligations to receive and embrace the gospel.  The Athenians, like other ancient nations, and like them, too, in opposition to their own mythology, regarded themselves as a peculiar and distinct race, created upon the very soil which they inhabited, and pre-eminently elevated above the barbarians of the earth,—­as they regarded the other races of men.  Paul, however, as an inspired and infallible teacher, authoritatively declares that “God who made the world and all things therein,” “hath made of one blood,” and caused to descend from one original pair the whole species of men, who are now by His providential direction so propagated as to inhabit “all the face of the earth,” having marked out in his eternal and unerring counsel the determinate periods for their inhabiting, and the boundaries of the regions they should inhabit.

The apostle in this passage refers very evidently to the record of the early colonization and settling of the earth contained in the books of Moses.  Some Greek copies preserve only the word [Greek:  enos], leaving out [Greek:  aimatos], a reading which the vulgar Latin follows.  The Arabic version, to explain both, has ex homine, or as De Dieu renders it, ex Adamo uno, there being but the difference of one letter in the Eastern languages between dam and adam, the one denoting blood, and the other man.  But if we take this passage as our more ordinary copies read it, [Greek:  exenos aimatos], it is still equally plain that the meaning is not that all mankind were made of the same uniform matter, as the author of the work styled Pre-Adamites weakly imagined, for on that ground, not only mankind, but the whole world might be said to be ex henos haimatos, i.e., of the same blood, since all things in the world were at first formed out of the same matter.  The word [Greek:  aima] therefore must be here rendered in the same sense as that in which it occurs in the best Greek authors—­the stock out of which men come Thus Homer says,—­