good or evil.1 There is the whole hard mystery of election. He says, "Who maketh thee to differ from another?" He says, "It is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that showeth mercy." 3

You say that you wish the Westminster divines had left out certain articles in the Third Chapter of their Confession, and I agree with you; but certainly, if the decision had been with me, I should have begged Paul to leave out that Ninth Chapter of Romans. But there it is; this hard mystery of divine election of men was planted in the Bible long before it appeared in the creed.

But more than that, this mystery was fixed deep in human life long before it appeared in the Bible; God's choice of men-an election of some to positions of great advantage over others, and without any reference to what they themselves had done, good or bad; for in so many things the election was settled before ever the children were born. You yourself, who were born in this blessed country, in a Christian home, to an inheritance of freedom and enlightenment and faith-who made you thus to differ from the child who was born the same day in Central Africa, to an inheritance of cannibalism and fetich worship; or that wretched little Hindu baby, who was born to starve to death in the next 1 Romans ix, 11. 'I Corinthians iv, 7. 3 Romans ix, 16.

famine? There is the mystery fixed deep in the constitution of human life, creed or no creed, Bible or no Bible. Paul simply recognizes this mystery, and with what wisdom God gave him he tries to make some headway through it, but often gives up the task. How often he turns back from some experiment at solution with his emphatic "God forbid"; as if he wished to say, "Whatever it all means, certainly it cannot mean that to which my argument was leading me. God cannot be untrue or unjust. It cannot be that we must continue in sin to make His grace abound." "God forbid," says Paul. It really seems to me that one clear difference between Paul, the inspired man, and the uninspired men who formulated our creeds, is, that when their vigorous reasonings had sometimes threatened to run away with them, they did not always know enough to draw back, as he so often drew back, with a "God forbid."

Nevertheless, those men, like the Apostle before them, were only trying to make what they could of this mystery which appears everywhere in life, that men are chosen to a great many positions of privilege without any reference to their own previous merit or demerit. So often the most important part of the choice was settled before ever they were born; Jacob preferred to Esau, before the children were born.

For the last few generations it has been a common fashion-I might say a fad-to ignore this evident fact, and reason as if there could be no distinctions among men except those which the men make for themselves. In our day some even carry the principle so far as to argue that men ought not to be allowed to make these distinctions for themselves; for instance, a trades-union will sometimes insist upon a uniform rate of wages for all in a certain line of work, without any regard to the skill or industry of the particular workman; there must be no election among them; all equal.

Our own national Declaration of Independence did not go so far as that, but it leads off with this as a self-evident truth, "that all men are created equal." That was a noble State paper; we do well to be proud of it; but can any mortal man tell what they meant by that opening sentence, that all men are created equal? How equal?-in height? in weight? in muscular strength? in intellectual insight? in amiable disposition? For a self-evident truth this one is singularly obscure; and even if they meant to say, "all men are equal in social or political rights," you must remember that many of the signers of that Declaration were and continued to be slave-owners; how would they define that selfevident equality between the Caucasian master and

the African slave? It was simply one of those fine sayings that men can make themselves think they believe, if you do not crowd them too hard to tell what it means.

I suppose they were trying to say that we ought to aim at giving all men an equal chance to make the most of themselves, which we all believe, but that is not at all what they said. We honor the great Declaration because, in spite of some questionable utterances, due to the prevailing influence of Rousseau and other French philosophers, it marked a noble struggle for human rights and liberties. But let me tell you that the type of religious belief which gave birth to our Westminster Confession, this belief in God's sovereign election of men, has really done more for human rights and liberties than any political document ever written in the world.

As a monument, or bulwark of human freedom, I do not hesitate to affirm that this Westminster Confession itself deserves to outrank the American Declaration of Independence; for it is more truly universal and fearless in its democracy. It does not deal in misleading platitudes about all men created equal, but it does tell of "God's elect"; and that may be the plain Dutch burgher as against mighty Philip of Spain; it may be John Knox, or his very humblest hearer, as against Marie Stuart,

the Queen; it may be one of Cromwell's plain pikemen as against King Charles and all his nobles; it may be a black slave on a Southern plantation as against his master up in Philadelphia signing the Declaration. For God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and the weak things of the world to confound the mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught the things that are.' In the long fight for human rights and liberties nothing has ever put such heroic courage into the breasts of humble men as this belief in a sovereign choice of God.

That all men are created equal is not a self-evident truth, nor any other kind of truth; and if you try to build any great structure civil, political, industrial, religious-on such a doubtful foundation, sooner or later it will give you trouble. It is simply not true that human life is a dead level of mediocre equality. Men have always been made to differ; that is the self-evident truth; and a Christian's belief about it is simply this, that all these many evident differences between himself and his fellows, many of them less highly favored than he, were not given because he had earned them, but are under the control of an all-wise and a most loving God, the carrying out of some gracious purpose