The Bible Not of Man

The time was long between the promise given to our first parents in the garden of Eden, and the actual coming of the promised Saviour. The patriarchs were looking for him, but his advent was delayed. The prophets were looking for him, and inquired and searched diligently what, or what manner of time” it would be when He should appear, of whose ‘’ sufferings they testified beforehand, and the glory that should follow.” Holy men were watching and waiting; holy women too were look* mg out in anxious expectation for that highly favored one, who should be the mother of Him who was the Seed of the woman,” and the Son of the Highest.”

But the time was still distant. Four thousand years passed slowly away before this long cherished and eager expectation was fulfilled, and He who thought it no robbery to be equal with God took upon him the form of a servant,” and men beheld his glory as the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.” So long indeed was the pro-Eible not of Man. 1 mise delayedj that not a few began to despair of its ever being fulfilled; nor were there wanting those who questioned the divine origin of the predictions which foretold his advent. But he who sees not as man sees,” unto whom a thousand years are as one day, and one day is as a thousand years,” had nevertheless been preparing the way as fast as his unerring wisdom saw best. Events had been taking place of high interest; revolution had been succeeding revolution in the earth with a view to his appearing. ‘’ When the fulness of time was come God sent forth his Son.” It was in every respect the fit season. It was not too soon, nor was it too late, to secure the objects of his incarnation.

The period selected was, in many particulars, a remarkable period; but it was wonderfully fitted to confirm the truth of divine revelation; to wake the nations from their long-continued stupidity and infatuation, and fix their attention upon the design of his advent; as well as to show the power of God in extending his Gospel and kingdom through the aarth, in defiance of the powers of darkness, and the stagnant unbelief of men.

In adverting to some of the characteristics of this period, the first that strikes us is, the extreme corruption of religion and manners throughout the pagan world. We have no means of ascertaining for how long a period after the creation men retained the knowledge of the true God. Very soon after the flood, and certainly as early as the foundation of the Babylonian empire, they became idolaters.

From that period, the greater part of mankind had been wandering in paths which resembled an inextricable labyrinth, the deadly vapors of which extinguished the faint light that conducted their footsteps. More especially from the time in which God called Abraham out from Ur of the Chaldees, do the Gentile nations seem to have been given over to a reprobate mind. From one false notion of the Deity to another more false, and from one system of foolish and demoralizing observances to another, they rushed into idolatry of the grossest form, until they lost sight of most of their religious traditions; and ^’ because they did not like to retain God in their knowledge,” had become “Atheists in the world.” Phoenicia, Egypt, and Thrace, transmitted their absurd mythology to Greece and Rome, and amid the multiplicity of their gods, the one only living and true God had no place. A selected and favored few there were, in whose bosoms something like the miniature resemblance of this great truth was locked up as an inaccessible secret; while the multitude thought the Godhead ^’ like unto gold, and silver, and stone, graven by art and man’s device.”

Heathen sages had written upon the nature of virtue and the obligations to practise it, while their own vices showed that they had little knowledge of morals, and were very ineffectual teachers of it to others. ‘^ Across the night of paganism, philosophy flitted on, like the lantern-fly of the tropics, a light to itself, but alas! no more than an ornament of the surrounding darkness.” Thinking minds had proposed to themselves questions of importance to the life that now is, and still more important to that which is to come, without being able to give to any one of them a satisfactory answer. Everywhere they saw mysteries; and withal, so dense a cloud hanging over the vast future, that the farther they pursued their inquiries the deeper were they plunged in painful uncertainty.. Their thoughts of another life were all confused and obscure. Much was written of ^’ manes, and ghosts, and shades of departed men;” their poets sang of streams that emptied into the infernal regions, of “Elysian Fields,” of the seats of the blessed, and of nectar quaffed by the gods; but they were fables got up for the vulgar, and in which the very inventors of them had no confidence. With all her fascinating beauty and tenderness, poetry herself believed not what she wrote; and though in accordance with the spirit of the age she publicly rehearsed the absurdities of her mythology, in her hours of loneliness and reflection she scarcely ventured to echo the strains of her own lyre. The popular and civil theology, established by the laws, “worshipped everything as god except God himself,” and gave its sanction to rites in which there was such a mingling of absurdity, lasciviousness, and cruelty, that they may not be recited. Conscience was not so obdurate and silent, as to be prevented from uttering her admonitions’; nor yet so benighted, as not to have some strong, though indistinct apprehensions of a terrible recompense. Nor

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was reason, in the midst of all her degradation, so absolutely stupefied and brutalized, as not sometimes to assert her own greatness, and grasp realities of terrible import. And the more they did this, the more they both stood in frightful perplexity, lest the labyrinth in which they were wandering should border on the verge of the precipice. The state of the pagan mind, however well informed on other subjects, on the subject of religion and morals was to the last degree degraded and melancholy. Among other facts which illustrate this remark, it may be noticed, that the Senate of Rome itself did not pass the decree for the abolition of human sacrifices, until the consulship of Publius Lucius Crassus and Cneius Lentulus, which was but about ninety years before the coming of Christ. Nowhere is so much information upon this point contained within so small a compass, as in the first chapter of PauPs Epistle to the Romans. It is difficult to read the description there given without putting a veil upon one’s face. The schools of virtue had des-enerated into the merest sinks of vice and immorality; theii religion itself had consecrated all sorts of crime, while the best that can be said of their gods is, thai they were the finest representations which the ingenuity and skill of the sculptor could furnish of the basest of human passions.

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