Gospel
Illustration★★★Humanity of the Its coming found the heathen world without a single house of mercy. Search the Byzantine Chron icles and the pages of Publius Victor; and though the one describes all the public edifices of ancient Constantinople, and the other of ancient Rome, not a word is to be found in either of a charitable institution. Search the ancient marbles in your museums; descend and ransack the graves of Herculaneum and Pompeii; and question the many travelers who have visited the ruined cities of Greece and Rome; and see if amid all the splendid remains of statues and amphitheatres, baths, and granaries, temples, aqueducts, and palaces, mausoleums, columns and triumphal arches, a single fragment or inscription can be found telling us that it belonged to a refuge for human want or for the alleviation of human misery.
Dr. John Harris.
The point
Argues that ancient pagan civilizations, for all their grand architecture, left no trace of any charitable institution for the poor or suffering — a mercy the gospel introduced to the world.