God has ordained progress in human affairs. We are sure of this, for history demonstrates it. Those affairs mean ultimately, in their highest form, morality and religion, towards the perfecting of which further approximations are ever from time to time being made; and these successive approximations are the steps of true progress. The most conspicuous instance of this progress, in the historical period, is Christianity itself. Progress means, when we look backward, a lower precedent condition of things just as much as it does, when we look forward from any point, a higher subsequent condition. Of any particular time, it means what was, in the progressive order of things, possible under the circumstances of that time. That was what was ordained for that time. The Mosaic Dispensation, therefore, was just as much ordained of God as the Christian, and the Christian as much as the Mosaic. Each, looking at the contemporary condition of the world, was from God in the same sense, and on analogous grounds. Moses was not wrong in allowing facilities for divorce. Under the circumstances, polygamy was one of them, he was right. Just so with his abstention from using the sanction of the rewards and punishments of the future life. The promulgator of the old Dispensation, we may suppose, felt and understood that mankind would attain, in some coming time, to a higher law than that which he was himself delivering, when he spoke of a Prophet like himself, that is, a moral legislator, who would some day arise, and to whom it would be the duty of God’s people to hearken. Christianity did not contemplate the abolition of slavery. Yet its abolition was a logically and morally right deduction from, and evolution of, Christianity. It was done rightly on Christian principles. If (for argument’s sake) the world should ever grow to a higher moral condition than that apparently contemplated by the first promulgators of Christianity, that would be no proof that Christianity had not been ordained of God as a step in the foreseen and appointed progress of humanity. Just the contrary. It was necessary for that condition, which would not have been possible without it. So was it with the old Dispensation. * * * * *