098. KNOWLEDGE AND WORSHIP OF GOD.

KNOWLEDGE AND WORSHIP OF GOD. THE evidences of Christianity may all be properly considered as either preparatory or direct.

We commence with what we term PREPARATORY EVIDENCE.

This, by some authors, has been considered as partly presumptive evidence, and partly preliminary. But we prefer to embrace both these under the more comprehensive term of preparatory; for it is certain that neither the evidence called “presumptive” nor that styled “preliminaries” amounts in itself to a proof of the truth of Christianity; but it prepares the way for the comprehension and appreciation of that proof: hence it is properly preparatory evidence. By a divine revelation, we understand, in general terms, a supernatural communication from God to man of truths not taught by nature, and which could not be learned by the mere exercise of reason. This will embrace all divine communications, whether directly from God himself to the individual, or through the medium of an angel, or some person or persons commissioned from God to make known his will to others, accompanying the communication with satisfactory evidence of their authority. Or, secondly, by divine revelation we understand the things contained in the Bible, or the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament.

Before entering upon the discussion of this subject, we premise a few remarks on the province of reason, in connection with revelation. There is danger of error here, in two opposite extremes: in its prerogatives, reason may be either too much circumscribed or too far extended. It is certainly not only our privilege, but our duty, to exert to their utmost capacity our reasoning faculties, in investigating the evidences of Christianity. As it is all-important for us to know whether God has given us a revelation or not, and as it is by the use of reason alone that we can satisfy our own minds on this question, we are culpable, if we fail to use our utmost efforts of reason, in the investigation Again, when fully satisfied that God has furnished us a revelation of his will, we should then exercise all our reasoning powers, availing ourselves of all accessible helps to gain a correct understanding of the meaning of that revelation, that we may know what has been revealed. But when once satisfied that God has spoken, and that we know what he has spoken, reason must then submissively bow to faith; and we must rely on God’s word as true, whether we comprehend all its mysteries or not. But we have the consolation to feel assured that, though many things in revelation are mysteries, and too profound for human reason to comprehend, yet there is nothing in the whole compass of God’s revelation that is repugnant to the principles of sound reason. Apparent discrepancies between divine revelation and human reason, in the very nature of things, must result alone from the fact that our faculties are limited and imperfect, and consequently are sometimes unable to penetrate so profoundly, or to soar so loftily, as to perceive the perfect consistency of sound reason with the sublime revelations of Heaven. In entering upon the discussion of the evidences of Christianity, the Christian occupies obvious vantage-ground. The prima facie evidence is in favor of revelation. This appears, not only from the great antiquity of the Scriptures, and the sanction given them by various portions of the world in different ages, but from the character and condition of man - his moral agency and accountability; his utter destitution of a proper knowledge of the being and attributes of God; and of his own origin, duty, and destiny.

We plant ourselves in the outset upon the universally-admitted, if not self-evident, truth: that man is a moral agent. In proof of this position, an appeal to the internal consciousness of every candid mind ought to be sufficient. Who that has arrived at the age of accountability and discretion, and has seriously reflected on the subject, can for a moment doubt the fact that there is a distinction between right and wrong, and that he is capable of doing the one and the other? It matters not, so far as our present purpose is concerned, nor will we stop here to inquire how this knowledge of good and evil, or consciousness of right and wrong, is derived. Whether it be an innate principle originally planted in the constitution of our nature, “growing with our growth, and strengthening with our strength,” or whether it be a direct infusion from the Divine Being, it matters not in this investigation. We assume it as an incontrovertible truth, that every one endued with rational powers has this internal consciousness of his moral agency. He feels and knows that he can do right and wrong, as he may determine in his own mind. He may bewilder his intellect by vain philosophical speculations, but, while reason and common sense occupy the throne of his mind, he never can shake off this settled conviction. The moral agency of man is farther evident from the history of the world. All men in all nations have terms expressive of approbation or blame, which they invariably use, not only in reference to their own actions, but the actions of others, indicating clearly a sense of guilt when they do wrong, or of innocence when they do right; or censure, or approval, in reference to others, accordingly as they may do right or wrong. If man be not a moral agent, capable of performing both good and bad actions, it follows that the God of providence has led all nations into the belief of a monstrous delusion; and that the God of nature has planted or infused into the mind of every individual this delusion, from which it is impossible for any to escape.

If man be a moral agent, which, we think, must be admitted, then we ask: Has he by nature, or can he acquire by his natural faculties, that knowledge of God and his perfections necessary to the performance of the functions of a moral agent? In this investigation we have nothing to do with the atheist. We assume the existence of God, and address our argument solely to the deist, or such as admit the existence and perfections of a great supreme.

Admitting, then, that God exists - that he is possessed of those perfections that even the deist ascribes to him, and that he is our creator and preserver - how can we, without divine revelation, gain that knowledge of God which we indispensably need to qualify us for acting our part as moral agents? We find the entire pagan world, even the Greeks and Romans, and all the most refined portions of them, in the boasted Augustan age of literature and intelligence, immersed in superstition and idolatry. Socrates, Plato, Cicero, and a few individuals of the wisest and best among them, may, to some extent, have arisen above the masses of the people, and so far burst the shackles that bound them in darkness as to gain a glimpse of the true light. They had clearer and more elevated views of the Deity and his perfections than their fellows. But even they were shrouded in darkness, and gloom, and doubts. They were tossed upon the sea of conjecture; and even Socrates and Plato, the wisest of them, expressed their despair of arriving at a satisfactory knowledge of God, and of their own duty and destiny, till “some one should come from God to instruct them.” But the degree of light they possessed is rather to be traced by tradition to original revelation than attributed to the efforts of their own unassisted reason. But admitting all that may be claimed in behalf of a few learned philosophers, this will not weaken the argument in reference to the great masses - the millions of the pagan world. What has ever been, and is still, their condition? In reference to God and religion, they are sitting in darkness, and dwelling in the region and shadow of death. They are blind as the bat, and stupid as the ass. “Because, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God; they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” “They changed the truth of God into a lie,” and bowed down in worship “to four-footed beasts and creeping things, to stocks and stones,” to onions and leeks, and snakes and crocodiles. Were not all these multiplied millions of idolaters moral, accountable agents? Did not they owe allegiance and worship to the God that made and preserved them? And how are they to obtain an adequate knowledge of that God of whose very existence they are ignorant? And not knowing God - having not the faintest conception of his attributes - how can they render him that homage and worship which are his due, and which their duty demands? The ignorance of the pagans, in reference to the divine attributes, is obvious from the very nature of their idolatrous worship. They knew nothing of the divine unity, for they worshiped “gods many, and lords many.” The Greeks had thirty thousand divinities, and the Hindoos three hundred and thirty millions. They understood not the divine omnipresence, for they had patron deities for every country, city, town, hamlet, grove, river, and fountain, and partitioned out the government of the world to a multitudinous family of divinities. Their worship implies that they had no conception of the idea that the same god could preside, or be present, in different and distant parts of the earth at the same time.

They knew as little of the divine omnipotence; for they never dreamed that the god of the Philistines could exert his power over the Israelites, or that the presiding divinities of Egypt could sway their scepter over Greece or Rome.

They never conceived the thought of the divine holiness; for to their divinities they attributed all manner of vice and impurity. Deceit and treachery, cruelty and revenge, drunkenness and debauchery, theft and robbery, rapine and murder - these were the virtues celebrated in heathen temples - these were the characteristics of the divinities at whose shrine they worshiped and adored. They were strangers to the divine goodness love, and mercy; for they represented their divinities as capricious, jealous, and revengeful, evil genii, delighting in mischief and destruction, swelled the register of their mythology. As among all nations, and in all religions, the attributes ascribed to the divinity, or divinities, worshiped, constitute the standard of perfection, and present the model after which the character and lives of the devout will be shaped, what can we reasonably expect from the stupid pagans, so grossly ignorant of God and his attributes? Where the mind is so shrouded in darkness, will not the heart and the life be steeped in degradation and misery? Do these pagans possess that information concerning God which their character as moral agents demands? From the entire history of the pagan world, is it reasonable to suppose that, without divine revelation, they ever could gain a qualification for acting with propriety their part, as free, moral, and accountable agents? If, then, God has created them moral agents, is it not a necessary inference that he would place within their reach the qualifications essential to their position? And if so, does it not, at least, appear that revelation is both necessary and probable? It is inconsistent with the admitted perfections of God, that he should leave any of his works imperfect or deficient. Therefore we cannot suppose that he would leave man - the noblest of his sublunary creation - destitute of the essential means for performing that part which is the great end of his being. Shall it be supposed that a being capable of knowing God, of admiring his perfections, walking in his ways, and enjoying his smiles, is to be left to grope his way through life so utterly and hopelessly ignorant of that God “in whom he lives, and moves, and has his being”? That we may know God, it is necessary he should “speak to us by his Son.” The worship of pagan nations was such as might reasonably be expected from their ignorance of the true God and his character. As they attributed all manner of abominations and crimes to their divinities, so they encouraged the same in their worship. In nearly all heathen countries, the altars of religion are crimsoned with the blood and smoked with the bodies of human sacrifices. There is incontestable evidence that this abominable worship obtained, not only among barbarous nations, but the most intelligent and refined. It prevailed among the ancient Canaanites. It was practiced by the Syrians, Persians, Phenicians, and all the nations of the East. The Scythians, Thracians, Druids, Gauls, and Germans, were polluted with the same cruel abomination. The Carthaginians sacrificed to Moloch thousands of infants. The sunny plains of Africa have been dyed with the blood of millions offered in sacrifice to devils. On our own continent, it is said, Montezuma offered annually a sacrifice to the sun of twenty thousand human victims. In India, it is well known that millions have been cast to the crocodiles of the Ganges, or crushed beneath the wheels of Juggernaut. And even learned Greece and Rome, with all their boasted statesmen, philosophers, poets, and orators, have left upon the monuments of their greatness the stain of human blood poured in sacrifice to idols. And what has been the character of the temple service among pagans generally? It has been but a school of vice, where drunkenness and revelry, lasciviousness and impurity, and all manner of abomination, have been practiced and encouraged. The heathen mysteries, which probably originated in the worship of Isis and Osiris with the Egyptians, and were afterward adopted in Persia, as well as in Greece and Rome, were not exempt from impurities and crimes of the most shameful character. Even the Eleusinian mysteries practiced at Athens, whatever may have been their original design, were but a canopy of darkness, covering from the public gaze the most atrocious impurities which were “done in secret.” Their evident tendency was to increase superstition and licentiousness. And this evil machinery was strengthened in its influence by the fact that the gods whom they worshiped were celebrated for the very crimes they here encouraged and learned to imitate. What could be the effect of such a religious service, but to degrade the intellect, imbrute the moral sensibilities, and steep the soul in iniquity? If this be the religion which man, left to himself, will follow, how necessary must be divine revelation to scatter by its beams these Cimmerian clouds, and pour into these waters of bitterness its healing streams! Does not reason proclaim that a wise and merciful Creator will be led, by his attributes, to rescue from such a state his creature man, by conferring upon him a revelation of his will?