CHAPTER V.

THE HEATHEN WORLD.

1. "What is Pagan Idolatry ?"

The corruption of the true religion, Patriarchism, as practised by Adam, Seth, Enoch, Lamech, and the other antediluvian worthies; by Noah and his family immediately after the flood; and by Job, Melchisedec, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the Israelites till the time of Moses, who fenced it from idolatrous corruption by the Levitical priesthood and institutions, as the Almighty gave him directions.

"What do you conceive to be the immediate source of idolatry?"

The unwillingness to submit the will and affections to God: the ungrateful task of keeping a conscience void of offence towards God and towards

man.

"And how did idolatry originate from this?"

Men of depraved hearts and worldly wisdom took advantage of it; philosophized upon the divine law as transmitted from Adam to Noah ; refined upon its efficacy, and explained away its force. Then, for political purposes, they proposed

to take the management of spiritual affairs upon themselves, and to conduct the business of the conscience for other men, on condition that they would till the land and perform other offices of bodily labour. And such is the natural disposition of man, that he would rather toil many hours every day, and have the rest of his time for licentious diversion, than have less bodily labour, but submit his carnal desires to the restraint which the law of God imposes on them.

"Who were the first that took on them the office of managing or keeping the consciences of others?"

The posterity of Ham. He and his race seem to have been, after the Flood, what Cain and his posterity were before it,—the corrupters of the hu

man race.

"To what degree were the immediate fathers of the Heathen world acquainted with the antediluvian history ?"

Noah would be familiar with all the antediluvian patriarchs, except Adam, Seth and Enoch. But as his grandfather Methuselah lived with Adam 243 years, and did not die till four or five years before the Flood, when Noah was near 600 years old, and his children almost 100; he and his family would be well informed of all which Adam knew of the Creation and Fall. And as Noah and

his sons lived three or four hundred years after the Deluge, when the human race was very numerous; the different families of the heathens, when they dispersed and spread themselves over the face of the earth, would carry with them a voluminous historical account of all the antediluvian affairs, as well as the postdiluvian history to the dispersion.

"What have you to say of the birth of Noah ?” His father, at it, uttered that well-remembered prophecy" This same shall comfort us, concerning our work and the toil of our hands, because of the ground which the Lord hath cursed." And so it proved, since to him, after the Flood, God promised that he would not again curse the ground for man's sake. But that, "while the earth remained, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night should not cease."

"What testimony, besides the Bible, have you of Noah, his ark, and the Deluge ?"

Wherever mankind

All that can be desired. have been found, from the learned Egyptian, the polished Greek, the ancient Celtic nations, the Scandinavian of the north to the poor outcasts of the South Sea Islands, both their mythology and their poetry have been founded on the traditionary tales of this event, and its collateral history. But their great hero, their God-man, sailing over

the shoreless flood, the bottomless abyss, and saving himself and companions in a marvellous bark, is the most prominent feature.

"What is the most remarkable incident in the life of Noah, after the Flood?"

His planting the vine, and being inebriated with the produce.

"What was the consequence?”

It occasioned his son Ham, and perhaps certain other members of his family, to display the depravity of their hearts. The affair called forth the malediction of the aged patriarch, which virtually excommunicated Ham and his posterity in Canaan, who, it seems, was involved in the guilt of his father. By Ham's posterity, (of whom were the Greeks and Romans,) this affair is referred to in Jupiter's (Ham) behaviour towards his father Saturn (Noah). Jupiter is said by them to have mutilated his father's person, to have dispossessed him of his empire, and sent him into exile. The incident also gave rise to the drunken god Bacchus. And as Adam and Noah were in their cosmogony repetitions of each other, and thus usually confounded together, it was both confounded with the Fall of Adam and considered as a repetition of it.

"What have you to say of the sacrifice imme

diately after the Flood, and the first appearance of the rainbow ?"

In the second chapter of Genesis it is said, "The Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, but there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground." From this it may be inferred, there was no rain before the Flood. Soon after Noah had removed the covering from his ark, it is very probable there fell a heavy rain, when from a dread of another deluge, he sought the Lord with prayer and sacrifice. Then it was, in the subsiding shower, that he and his family were astonished with the rainbow. At the same time the promise of security was given, with the assurance of food, and the command to increase and multiply: and therefore, it was not only styled in the heathen world the messenger of the queen of heaven, (the ark,) the daughter of wonder, but the Eros, or true bow of Cupid.

"What have you to say of the commands at this time given as the conditions of the divine blessing?"

That to this very day it has been well or ill with every nation and people, as they complied with them or otherwise.

2. "You say that the family of Ham philosophized upon the divine law: they would undoubtedly have a system. What was their theory?”