Many Christians, unwilling to believe that so many millions of ignorant infants and heathen will be eternally lost or sent to a place of eternal and hopeless torment, insist that God will not condemn the ignorant. We admire their liberality of heart and their appreciation of God’s goodness – but we urge them not to be too hasty about discarding or ignoring Bible statements. God has a blessing for all, in a better way than through ignorance.

Do these act in accordance with their stated belief? No! Though they profess to believe that the ignorant will be saved on account of their ignorance, these Christians continue to send missionaries to the heathen at the cost of thousands of valuable lives and millions of money. If all, or even half of them, would be saved through ignorance, it is doing the heathen a positive injury to send missionaries to teach them of Christ. Only about one in a thousand believes, when the missionaries do go to them. If this idea were correct, it would be better to let the heathen remain in ignorance! Then a much larger proportion would be saved!

Continuing the same line of argument, if God had left all men in ignorance, would all would have been saved? If so, the coming and death of Jesus were useless! The preaching and suffering of apostles and saints were vain! And the so-called gospel, instead of being good news, is very bad news! The sending of missionaries to the heathen by those who believe the Calvinistic or fatalistic view of election – that the eternal destiny of each individual was unalterably fixed before he had an existence – is even more absurd and unreasonable.

However, the Bible, which is full of the missionary spirit, does not teach that there are several ways of salvation – one way by faith, another by works, and another by ignorance. Neither does it teach the God-dishonoring doctrine of fatalism.