Page:Last Will and Testament of Cecil Rhodes.djvu/108

94 all earnest souls, each according to his own light, have endeavoured to probe the mystery of the universe? Is not the supreme profanity not the use of mundane dialect to describe the process, but rather the failure to put the question at all?

The first thing that impressed Mr. Rhodes, as the result of a survey of the ways of God to man, is that the Deity must look at things on a comprehensive scale. If Mr. Rhodes thinks in continents, his Maker must at least think in planets. In other words, the Divine plan must be at least co-extensive with the human race. If there be a God at all who cares about us, He cares for the whole of us, not for an elect few in a corner. Whatever instrument He uses must be one that is capable of influencing the whole race. Hence the range of the instrument, or, as a Papist would say, the catholicity of the Church, is one of the first credentials of its Divine origin and authority. Hole-and-corner plans of salvation, theological or political, are out of court. If we can discover the traces of the Divine plan, it must be universal, and that agency or constitution which most nearly approximates to it in the universality of its influence bears the Divine trade-mark.

This conception of the Divine credentials seemed to Mr. Rhodes to be immediately fatal to the pretensions of all the Churches. They may be all very good in their way,