The first and every subsequent step of Christianity, as of civilization, has been Westward. Neither can they ever return to the East. The Apostle of the Gentiles preached from Judea to Pamphylia and Galatia, but was forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the Word in Asia;[49] and when he assayed to go Eastward into Bithynia, the spirit suffered him not, but compelled him westerly into Macedonia. From Macedonia to Rome; from Rome to Gaul; from Gaul to Britain; from Britain to America and Polynesia, the course has still ever been uniformly westward.[50] A few isolated Christians may be made in Asia; but it will never be Christianized. Asia has performed its part on the world’s stage. It is dead out, and cannot be resuscitated. When Christianity is entertained by “all nations,” Asia will be no more. It will not be reckonable among the nations, even as a dead man is not among the living. This may seem a harsh judgment. But is it harsher that nations whose own degradation unfits them for Christianity, shall remain ignorant of it during the brief remainder of the world, than that they have been ignorant of it for nearly two thousand years? It is not for man to judge God, and to say that his ways are unjust. We must not deny the fact because we cannot comprehend it. We cannot tell by what crimes Asia has forfeited her part in the New Covenant of Grace. It may be because she rejected the first dispensation, and flagrantly violated the Old Covenant of Works. To Asia, the mother of mankind, the blissful seat of our first parents, the nurse of the renovated human race, were given the first pure, simple precepts by which Man was taught to obey his God as a child obeys his parent. How soon she flung off this obedience and rejected her Great Teacher let history, both sacred and profane, attest. Long ere Asia sent forth peoples and nations to replenish other quarters of the earth, these original precepts had been obscured and obliterated by idolatry and polytheism. A lesser crime, therefore, attached to these mis-instructed offsprings than to the misteaching mother. A second dispensation was therefore revealed to them, but forbidden to her. So far man might think he comprehended the divine purposes without impugning God’s wisdom and justice; yet he may err, and his frail musings be but the cogitations of the flea which reasons on the movements of the elephant, whose back is his universe. This should be the humble reflection of all who strive to justify the ways of God to man. We know but in part, and we see but in part, and therefore cannot judge of Him who sees and knows the whole.