Page:Studies in the Scriptures - Series I - The Plan of the Ages (1909).djvu/108

 *&$ The Plan of the Ages.

ignorance as a ground of salvation. Ignorance cannot en- title any one to the reward 'of faith and obedience.

Many Christians, unwilling to believe that so many mil- lions of ignorant infants and heathen will be eternally lost (which they have been taught means to be sent to a place of eternal and hopeless torment), insist, notwithstanding these Bible statements, that God will not condemn the igno- rant. We admire their liberality of heart and their appre- ciation of God's goodness ? but urge them not to be too hasty about discarding or ignoring Bible statements. God has a blessing for all, in a better way than through ignorance.

But do these a<$fc in accordance with their stated belief? No: though they profess to believe that the ignorant will be saved on account of their ignorance, they continue to send missionaries to the heathen at the cost of thousands of valuable lives and millions of money. If they all, or even half of them, would be saved through ignorance, it is doing them a positive injury to send missionaries to teach them of Christ $ for only about one in a thousand believes, when the missionaries do go to them* If this idea be cor- rect, it would be much better to let them remain in igno- rance ; for then a much larger proportion would be saved. Continuing the same line of argument, might we not reason that if God had left all men in ignorance, all -would have been saved ? If so, the coming and death of Jesus were useless, the preaching and suffering of apostles and saints were vain, and the so-called gospel, instead of being good news, is very bad news. The sending of missionaries to the heathen by those who believe the Calvinistic or fatalistic view of election, that the eternal destiny of each individual was unalterably fixed before he had an existence, !s even more absurd and unreasonable.

But the Bible, which is full of the missionary spirit, does no*: teach that there are several ways of salvation-*one way

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