as a crucified malefactor was their true invisible King; through His
righteousness their poor merits were accepted; their inward sicknesses
were healed; He whose worship they denounced as an "execrable
superstition" stood supplicating for them at the right hand of the
Majesty on high, helping them (though they knew Him not) to crush all
that was evil within them, and pleading for them when they persecuted
even the most beloved of His saints, "Father, forgive them; for they
know not what they do."

Yes, they too were all His offspring. Even if they had not been, should
we grudge that some of the children's meat should be given unto dogs?
Shall we deny to these "unconscious prophecies of heathendom" their
oracular significance? Shall we be jealous of the ethical loftiness of
a Plato or an Aurelius? Shall we be loth to admit that some power of the
Spirit of Christ, even mid the dark wanderings of Seneca's life, kept
him still conscious of a nobler and a better way, or that some sweetness
of a divine hope inspired the depressions of Epictetus in his slavery?
Shall our eye be evil because God in His goodness granted the heathen
also to know such truths as enabled them "to overcome the allurements of
the visible and the terrors of the invisible world?" Yes, if we have of
the Christian Church so mean a conception that we look upon it as a mere
human society, "set up in the world to defend a certain religion against
a certain other religion." But if on the other hand we believe "that it
was _a society established by God as a witness for the true condition of
all human beings_, we shall rejoice to acknowledge its members to be
what they believed themselves to be,--confessors and martyrs for a truth
which they could not fully embrace or comprehend, but which, through
their lives and deaths, through the right and wrong acts, the true and
false words, of those who understand them least, was to manifest and
prove itself. Those who hold this conviction dare not conceal, or