NUMBER OF EARTHLY RACES

HOW MANY RACES ARE ON THIS EARTH?

"A certain one of them, Caiaphas, being high priest that year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor do ye take account that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not." I am not interested for the moment in these extraordinary words Caiaphas uttered, but I pass on to that which comes after: "Now this he said not of himself; but being a high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus"—this is John's exposition of it, John's inspired statement—"that Jesus should die for the nation; and not for the nation only, but that he might also gather together gather into one the children of God that are scattered abroad." John 11:49.

That doesn't simply mean the one nation. It is most explicitly stated, "not the nation only," but "the chil­dren of God that are scattered abroad." There is the clear statement that Jesus Christ came into the world to gather into one the scattered family of the Most High.

THE SOLIDARITY OF HUMANITY

        Now turn away from the Gospel narrative, and come to the day in which we live. There is a phrase that has been very much on the lips and pens of certain men for the last five and twenty years or more: the solidarity of humanity. It is one of those phrases that sound as if there was a good deal in it, and men have made the most of it. They have written books under the impulse of what there is behind that phrase; they have formulated philosophies, designing them upon that phrase. Movements have been formed as dreams came to men as Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream.”

        Trench tells us that it comes to us from the Communists. "The solidarity of humanity." What do they mean when they talk about the solidarity of humanity? It means that humanity is not a gather­ing together of units, each one separate and alone, but that humanity is one; that all men are dependent upon all other men, and that the race is united from its beginning to its end; that this particular generation of which you and I form a part owes an enormous amount to the generations that have preceded us; that we are helping to make the history of the generations that are coming after us; that what Kingsley sang about the new-born baby is perfectly true; that that child is heir of all the ages. Not only is humanity one when you trace it in its movements through history, but in its relationship today. Every nation of the world is linked to every other nation of the world. There is only one race; the human race.