Page:Mahometanism in its relation to prophecy - or, an inquiry into the prophecies concerning antichrist, with some reference to their bearing on the events of the present day (IA mahometanisminit00philrich).pdf/267

 and the noxious gases bubble up and explode, after which it is baked in the oven, and becomes good bread, fit for the food of man. So has it been, and so will it be with humanity, under the influence of the Gospel leaven. This leaven was given to the Church by Jesus Christ, her Divine Founder. The Church cast it at once into the corrupted mass of humanity: and as our Lord speaks in His parable of three "measures of meal," so I conceive there were to be three great fermentations of mankind before it should be perfectly leavened with the Divine doctrine. The first of these fermentations was the great strife between the Gospel and paganism during the three first centuries, working that dreadful persecution that crowned all the primitive martyrs, issuing in the conversion of Constantine, and the subjugation of the pagan element; for though paganism has not yet been rooted out from the earth, yet since Constantine's conversion, it has never been able to afflict the Church with any general and universal persecution, as it did before that epoch, and although it has ever existed, it has been only in the heart of the most distant and least influential portions of the human race; such as in India and China, or amongst the degraded nations of Africa, America, and the islands of the ocean. The conversion, there-