The Conversion of the Roman Empire Author:Charles Merivale Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. EXPANSION OF HEATHEN BELIEF BY THE TEACHING OF THE PHILOSOPHERS. Acts xvn. 26. God hath made of one Hood all nation of men, for to dwell on... more » all the face of the earth. Few declarations of Holy Writ have sunk more deeply into the heart and conscience of Christendom than this, by which we confess the unity of the human race in its claims on man and God, on the sympathy of our fellow-beings. and on the justice and mercy of our Creator. This is the point to which all Scripture seems to lead up. The doctrine which is plainly set forth in the first chapter of Genesis, which is affirmed repeatedly in the record of God's dealings with the Jewish people, when He chose them out from among other and mightier nations, for no merit or superior character of their own, but for the special purposes of His providence, to be merged again once more in the general mass of mankind, Jew and Gentile, among whom the Church and spiritual people of Christ should be established—this doctrine, I say, of the essential unity of our race is again dogmatically asserted in the text of St. Paul, and asserted or implied elsewhere throughout the volume of the New Testament—made in fact the very foundation of the promised preaching of salvation to the Gentiles. Such is the thorough consistency of the Word of God from one end to the other; such the Divine inspiration of truth breathed into it from the beginning, and continued to it even unto the end. And this doctrine, I repeat, is one which all Christendom has uniformly accepted as certain and divine. There has been, I suppose, no doubt of it at any time in the Church ; so entirely does it seem to harmonize with our own moral convictions, as well as with the express declaration of Scripture. Nevertheless, this doctrine is far from being one of...« less