Evangelistic Sermons

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ... Ill THE NATURE AND PERSON OF OUR LORD BEFORE reading a scripture or announcing the theme, a helpful bit of geography and history is submitted. The southwestern part of the continent of Asia is a peninsula, bounded on the south by the Mediterranean Sea, on the west by the .ZEgean Sea, the Hellespont, or Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmora, and the Bosphorus, on the north by the Black Sea. Its general name is Asia Minor, or lesser Asia. It has furnished more of the world's history than all the rest of the continent of which it is but a fragment. A Bible student is sometimes baffled by the varied and overlapping names of its several divisions on the maps of different periods--some ethnological, some geographical, and some political--the last modifying the others as sovereignty passes from one empire to another. For ages its population has been a conglomeration of blended nationalities; Oriental, Occidental, Septentrional and Austral--Gaul, Persian, Greek, Jew and Roman, commingled with earlier peoples in one heterogeneous mass. The peninsula has been the battle ground and prey of the successive empires of Persia, Greece and Rome, and of others before and since. Under the Roman supremacy its extreme northwestern part became a senatorial province called Asia, with the Greek city of Ephesus as its metropolis, so that the "Asia " of the New Testament is not the continent, nor even Asia Minor, but proconsular Asia, a relatively small part of Asia Minor. Just across the DEGREESEgean Sea is another peninsula, a narrow strip of Southeastern Europe, called in New Testament times Macedonia and Achaia, the latter including the Peloponnesus and the neighboring islands. Transactions in the small area of these peninsulas called forth, more or less directly, the...