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handed justice as shall tend to prevent the occurrence of any more riots or outrages upon foreigners. Where there has been a simple loss of property we should claim a money compensation to the full extent of that loss and for the additional expense involved in rent of houses or expenses honestly incurred by the person turned out of his premises. Where a personal injury has been sustained or a murder has been committed it is the worst possible policy to demand or to accept blood money.' The Chinese think and believe that the foreigners care for nothing but money, that they can inflict any outrage upon them, and that after haggling over the bargain they will be perfectly satisfied if they can get a big profit; no matter what may be the outrage or indignity which they have sustained. How can they respect us as long as we allow the facts to justify them in holding such an opinion? We should demand that as the law of China inflicts punishment upon one Chinese for an outrage committed upon another Chinese, so that same law should grant to the foreigner, when injured, the very same justice it should grant to the native of China, nothing more and nothing less. We ask the Court to get all the facts of the case and to award even-handed justice to all parties. In conclusion I desire to point out distinctly that this paper is made up of two parts. First, what action I would urge the missionaries to take in organizing some common basis of action for all missions, i.e., that they should elect from the local missionary associations one man to represent each mission of which the association is made up, that this committee could be a board to study these questions and to give advice only, (that they should have no power to enforce their advice). I recommend that when any mission is thinking of opening up new work or stations in any doubtful or dangerous locality they should consult with the advisory board of their local organization, talk the matter over and get the views of the board as to the advisability of starting the new work, and also as to the best methods of starting such work if it is deemed best to try it. Let it be clearly understood that the board only help and advise; any one can reject this advice if they choose. Such council will, however, give time for due deliberation and may elicit information of great value to those seeking council. It will tend to harmonious action.

Secondly, I would suggest that each local board should elect one of their number to be a member of one general board to consist of one member from each local board in China and that this general board could, after due consultation together, formulate its opinions for the guidance of its own members and of the local boards, so as to get some basis for united general action for the missions throughout China. That these local boards and the general board shall

not have any power except that of advising and assisting all who apply to them for help, and that no one shall be obliged to act on the advice given unless they voluntarily wish to do so; that these boards can be always ready to advise injured parties and missions, to sift these cases and to prepare them for presentation to the authorities, native and foreign (if the boards and the injured parties think it best to call on the authorities for help). They may, in their wisdom, prefer to arrange the entire matter quietly and without invoking the aid of the native or foreign powers. They could (if so requested) use the weight of their influence in obtaining a hearing and thus form a body of experts prepared and ready at all times to give thorough and competent attention to all matters which may come within the very limited powers delegated to them by their brother missionaries.

The above is my entire proposal. The remarks which I have made in the first part of my paper as to our rights to reside and to work in any part of this empire, as to the duty and the power of the native authorities to protect us, as to what we should require from the authorities after a riot has occurred, how the court should be made up of native officials and a competent foreign assessor, and that we should ask for even-handed justice-I desire it to be distinctly understood that this is a separate part of my paper. It is only an expression of my own individual opinions. I do not ask any one to accept them or in any way to act upon them. When we elect our local boards and they elect the general board we have selected our best qualified men of all our missions-it will be a poor compliment to them to assume that they will not be able to handle these matters wisely and well. They need no instructions from us and we can leave them to arrange matters and to do what is best to be done.

I would ask you to consider these suggestions and to act upon them. The blood of our murdered brethren cries out to us. It is no cry for vengeance, but let everyone here present examine himself and let him consider if he is doing his whole duty in this matter by doing nothing. Should we, living in safety here in a great treaty port, neglect to do all in our power to promote the safety of our brethren living in the interior of China, or, on the other hand, can we as an association take the initiative in this matter, bring it to the notice of the missionaries living in China and thus do all in our power to promote the safety of our brethren and by wise and peaceful means to obtain redress for outrages when they occur and also to hasten the time when these outrages shall cease to be committed? Having thus done all that is in our power let us commit our cause to our Divine Master and implore His blessing upon our efforts.

"The World that then was." 2. Pet. iii., 6.

BY REV. WILLIAM ASHMORE, D.D.

[Baptist Missionary Union.]

N studying out the moral history of "The World that then was," and of the fate which befel it, we confine ourselves to the Word of God and what it teaches. Explicit divine testimony is what is needed. Conjectures and speculative assumptions of men as to what ought to be the case in order to meet their conception of the ethical situation do not count for much in the way of settling conclusions. God's ethical standard is His own infinite holiness, but fallible, sinful and limited men fail in making proper estimates and adequate applications. In the past "the faith of God's elect" has been having its fight with Rationalism; nor is it over yet. And now comes its fight with its next born sister--Ethicalism. Neither do creeds and councils furnish a final authority. They are not inspired as were the Scriptures and the Scripture writers. Neither the Synods of Sirmium any of them, nor the Synods of Nice and Constantinople, nor the Church at Aquileja had any authority to supplement the authoritative teachings of the Word of God. We listen to them as to other good men in council assembled, but we do not take them as a finality any more than we would take as a binding finality the resolutions of any good company of men to-day in New York, or London, or Berlin. "The Bible, the Bible only is the religion of Protestants." We believe with Chillingworth in this matter. And so we limit ourselves to what we can gather from the Word of God, which alone "liveth and abideth forever." All manmade creeds are as grass, and all the glory of councils as the flower of grass! The creeds wither and the flower thereof falleth away 66 BUT THE WORD OF THE LORD ENDURETH FOREVER."

It will conduce to clearness, first, to note what some passages, other than those of Peter, say about "The World that then was," and then, second, to examine Peter's own theology on the subject.

PASSAGES OTHER THAN THOSE FOUND IN PETER.

Gen. vi., 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13; Ez. xiv., 14; Luke xvii., 2630; Heb. xi., 7; Jude 11, 15. "And the Lord said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years." "And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." "And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and

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it grieved him at his heart." "And the Lord said, I will destroy man, whom I have created, from the face of the earth." "The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence." "And God looked upon the earth and behold it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth." "And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them, and behold I will destroy them with the earth." "And all flesh died that moved upon the earth." "Son of Man, when the land sinneth against me by trespassing grievously then I will stretch out my hand upon it, and I will break the staff of the bread thereof, and I will send famine upon it, and will cut off man and beast from it; though these three men-Noah, Daniel and Job-were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord God." "As I live, saith the Lord, they shall deliver neither son nor daughter." "And as it was in the days of Noah, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man. They did eat, they drank, they married wives and were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, also, as it was in the days of Lot, they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded, but the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed." "By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by which he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith." "And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment on all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him."

There is no doubt or ambiguity in these utterances. They were everyone of them spoken before Peter said a word upon the subject. On the face of them they are the record of a colossal wickedness and of a colossal retribution. The minuteness and repetition of the points in Genesis added force to each other. Nowhere else is such iteration found intensifying the charges made. The earth was "corrupt"-it was "filled with violence"-from one end of it to the other. From the days of Adam down, now more than sixteen hundred years, had the Lord let them have their own way. Now the earth was corrupt; the very earth itself was corrupted. All flesh had corrupted his way. The wickedness of man was great in the earth.

It disclosed itself in all directions, in deed, in word and thought. Their general character was declared to be ungodly-not like Godbut contrary to him, opposed to him, hostile to him, for we must believe that Enoch had a reference not only to a final judgment but also to a typical one then comparatively near at hand. The men of his day were guilty of ungodly deeds; they ungodly committed them; they were a race of ungodly sinners, and they were full of hard speeches, which they spoke against God himself. They openly opposed and defied the Almighty. More than all that, the race had become rotten through and through in an incredibly short space of time in consequence of the devil poison injected into Adam. The imagination" the whole imagination," as it is in the margin, the Hebrew word signifying not only the imaginative faculty itself but also the purposes and desires of the whole nature-the imagination had become evil, the thoughts of his heart had become evilnot some of them only but everyone of them-not only evil but nothing but evil-not only occasionally but continually, without break or let up. Could moral obliquity go farther, or could it be more explicitly portrayed than is done in that accumulation of touches, going to the core of the whole matter and giving us that divinely inspired affirmation of a total human depravity.

Then follows a statement of the feelings and purposes of God in view of all this moral putridity and unchecked violence. Nowhere else in the Bible are such strong expressions used to express divine abhorrence. God is represented as having repented; that he had made man at all it grieved him at his heart. He declared that he would destroy them from the face of the earth; the end of all flesh had come before him; he would destroy them and all things with which they had had to do. No further grieving of his Spirit should be allowed. That Spirit had striven with men; it had moved and constrained until they would no longer be constrained. Now it should stop. My Spirit shall not always strive with man. The day of doom was fixed. A long day of grace; a hundred and twenty years. was allowed, but when it was up, then, in the vehemence of the divine wrath, the fountains of the great deep were broken up and the win'dows of heaven were opened. In the whole period of waiting and long suffering Noah had appeared in the character of an intercessor, classed by the Lord himself with such men as Daniel and Job. When reference to the event is made by the Saviour he associates it with the burning of Sodom, and that is declared by Jude to be a final and irreversible judgment for the reason that they of Sodom and Gomorrah are set forth (not were) for an example suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. In Hebrews it is taught that there was no reason why the men of the old world should not have believed as

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