THE GROWTH OF THE KINGDOM OF GOD. 



Ill 



nineteenth century. Before the Church could proceed safely 

 with the work of evangelisation, the great doctrines of the 

 Christian Faith had to be defined. Heresies sprang up in 

 earlier days and forced Christians to study the Word of God 

 and learn its true teaching. Articles of religion and creeds 

 had to be drawn up, if the prophets of Christianity were to 

 speak nothing but what is true in the Name of the Lord. 



During all this time, and from the very beginning, the 

 forces of evil, the Serpent and his seed, were with great skill 

 striving to hinder the growing Kingdom of God. " Whence 

 had it tares ? An enemy hath done this." 



Of human history before the call of Abraham we have as 

 yet scarcely any knowledge. But the known world was then 

 2,000 years old, and men had souls to be saved. That surging 

 human life was under the control and the guidance of God, 

 Who overruled the boundaries of nations, and set events in 

 order, so as to make the necessary preparation for the fulfil- 

 ment of His great Eternal Purpose to save the world. A 

 careful study has led many scientific and learned men to the 

 conclusion that there has never been an evolution of religious 

 ideas. There is evidence of a devolution from the original 

 Revelation of God, from the original revealed truth and 

 morality, and a perversion of God's plan of saving fallen men. 

 To arrest this downward grade, when ic had reached a 

 terrible deptli of wickedness, and at the same time to prove 

 that human philosophy and merely human schemes for the 

 amendment of men could never reach his spiritual need, great 

 thinkers were raised up in various countries. It is startling to 

 find that Confucius, the philosopher of China, Buddha the 

 Indian, Zoroaster the Persian, Pythagoras, born of Italian 

 parents in Sidon (who travelled through Egypt, Arabia, parts 

 of India and Persia), and Socrates of Greece were all born 

 between 700 B.C. and 500 B.C. 



In a learned essay on Buddhism in relation to Christianity 

 (Transactions of the Victoria Institute, vol. xxviii), the Rev. R. 

 Collins .speaks of " the evidence of a primeval revelation." 

 Further on he says, " Parallel with these recollections of a 

 Divine worship must have been the recollection of a divinely 

 taught morality." Again he says, " I find in ' The Brahmana 

 of a Hundred Paths,' and in the Hymns of the Rig Yedas, 

 evidences of a religious thought, not constructive, but 

 destructive, nor Hearing the light, but receding from it though 

 still catching its last rays." Nevertheless, these are all human 

 systems for regenerating society. It was a necessary part of 



