The Apostle’s assurance goes, indeed, beyond this illumination of our present experience, and seems to throw a glorious light upon the whole history of mankind. “God,” he says, “hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to His own purpose and grace which was given us in Christ Jesus, before the world began.” It is now made manifest by the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, but it existed from all eternity “before the world began.” If so, then through those long ages which preceded our Lord’s birth, this life and immortality were given to the millions to whom His Name had not been manifested, but who died in the discharge of their duty, and who faithfully made the sacrifices which were involved in His government and just judgment of the world. Christ revealed the wars and sufferings of this world as the inevitable consequence of the operation of God’s righteousness and justice upon the evil, the sin, and the Godlessness of mankind. Sooner or later those sins and evils gather to a head, in some great corruption of society and political life, in some enormous crime of ambition or pride; and the righteousness and justice of God, working through the ordinary laws of human nature, evokes some tremendous reaction against them; and we behold the overthrow of a great Empire, or a European Revolution, or a world-wide clash of the forces of right and wrong. That is the course of history, as determined before the world began by the inscrutable righteousness and wisdom of God.