First was Judaism, which began with Abraham, the pioneer and father of such as believe in a living, personal God. It ran its course, fulfilled its mission, and had attained what Paul calls “the fullness of times” when “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law.” The office of Judaism in the rôle of redemption was to bear witness to the supernatural. The Jew believed thoroughly in God as the Creator, the Providence over nature, the Ruler and Judge of mankind; in God as a person distinct from nature and supreme over it. He fully recognized the obligation of the commandment, “The Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” But he exalted the supernatural so highly as to put an impassable chasm between God and his creatures. The immanent presence of God in nature was lost sight of in the conception of his transcendency over it. An incarnation of the Deity and, above all, any such contact of God with humanity as to admit of the possibility of his suffering was abhorrent to the mind of the Jew. And so when Christ came to his own as the Word “made flesh” his own received him not. And, with his foot almost upon the throne of the world, the Jew stumbled and fell. Following this period, in Paul’s conception, was that of Gentilism, which has also its peculiar mission, runs its destined course, and has its times of fullness toward which it tends (Romans xi, 25). This was also the conception of Christ himself; for he had said, “Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled” (Luke xxi, 24). The mission of the heathen Gentilism lay in the sphere of nature and humanity. With all the beauty, grace, order, motion, and life of the world the Gentile was in sympathy. His defect was that he rose no higher. The gods he believed in were simply human and natural forces personified and exalted. His need was to be impressed vividly with the conception of the reality of the supernatural and to recognize the divine Being above and beyond man and the world. To meet the needs of all classes of humanity God has employed those two great instrumentalities to which reference is so constantly made in the Revelation of St. John――on the one hand, the Bible, the written word, the sword of the Spirit, with its intense realization of the presence and power of God in nature and history; on the other, the cross, the blood of the Lamb, with its rich testimony to the fact that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”