TESTIMONIES TO THE MOST HIGH,

FROM

NATURE AND REVELATION.

CHAPTER I.

THE TRINAL UNITY AND SPIRITUALITY OF GOD,-THE ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM HEBREW, EGYPTIAN, GRECIAN, ROMAN, HINDOO, DRUID, AND CHINESE MYTHOLOGIES, ETC.

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HEAR, O Israel! the Lord our God is one Lord." (Deut. vi.) "God is a spirit, and they that adore him, must adore him in spirit and in truth." (John iv.)

Addressing the Most High, the prophet king exclaims: "Thou art God alone !" (Ps. lxxxv.) According to an evangelical witness, "there are three who give testimony in heaven-the Father, the Verb, and the Holy Ghost— and these three are one." (1 John, v.) Moreover, thus saith the Lord: "I am the first, and I am the last; and besides me there is no God." (Is. xliv.) All the gods of the nations are idols; but the Lord made the heavens, praise and magnificence are before him. (Paral. xvi.)

Hence, to believe hopefully, and to confide lovingly in one Infinite, Supreme, and Triune God, the Creator of all things, and the Sovereign Judge of the living and

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the dead, is Religion's first principle, and the chief dogma of Christianity.

In the Acts of the Apostles, it is related, how standing in the midst of Areopagus, St. Paul said: "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious; for passing by, and seeing your idols, I found an altar on which was written: To the unknown God.' What, therefore, you worship without knowing it, that I preach to you: 'God who made the world, and all things therein.'" (Acts xvii.) For, in him we live, and move, and be; and some, also, of your own poets said: 'We are also His offspring.' Being, therefore, the offspring of God, we must not suppose the divinity to be like unto gold, or silver, or stone, the graving of art, and device of man." (Id. xvii.)

Aware of his own countrymen's fondness for strange gods, the Doctor of the Gentiles also warned the Hebrews, saying: "Take heed, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief to depart from the living God." (Heb. iii.) This admonition, in a moral sense, would not be misapplied to some among christians at the present day. But of them more anon.

In the meantime, a search into the origin of Polytheism will show how grossly material and absurd were men's religious notions, until ignorance was dispelled by the Orient, which illumined the world's darkness, and guided the steps of wanderers into the way of truth.

Although, in the licentiousness of ancient mythology, there was much to fascinate and dazzle the faithless and corrupt; yet, embalmed in poetry, and personified

in artistic beauty, classic paganism affords no just idea how degrading were heathen superstitions. Confounding effects with the cause, "vain men professing themselves to be wise became fools, who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped, and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever." (Rom. i.)

From time immemorial, strange gods found votaries, even in a patriarch's family. In the Book of Genesis we read, that "Rachel absconded with the idols of her father Laban." To purge his household from such an abomination, Jacob had to bury these idols under a turpentine tree. (Gen. xxxv.) With regard to so privileged a people as the Jews, although the Red Sea waves opened a dry passage for them, and then closed upon their idolatrous enemies-notwithstanding this, and other prodigies wrought in their favour by the one, true, and living God; yet, strange to say, the inconstant Hebrews changed His glory into the likeness of a grasseating calf. They forgot the Lord who saved them, and adored a graven thing."

Subsequently, according to the Psalmist, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters to devils, and they shed innocent blood to the idols of Chanaan, and they provoked God with their inventions, and destruction was multiplied among them. (Ps. cv.)

The first idolators, it appears, were the fratricidal Cain's immediate descendants.

In the book of wisdom we read: "All men are vain who have imagined, either the fire, or the wind, or the

swift air, or the circle of the stars, or the great water, or the sun and the moon to be the Gods that rule the world. Soon, there shall be no respect had even to the idols of the Gentiles; because the creatures of God are turned to an abomination, and a temptation to the souls of man, and a snare to the feet of the unwise."

"For a father being afflicted with bitter grief, made to himself the image of his son, who was quickly taken away; and him, who then had died as a man, he began now to worship as a God, and appointed him rites and sacrifices among his servants.

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Then, in process of time, wicked custom prevailing, this error was kept as a law, and statues were worshipped by the commandment of tyrants. And those whom men could not honour in presence, because they dwelt afar-off, they brought the resemblance from afar, and made an express image of the King, whom they had a mind to honour: And the multitude of men, carried away by the beauty of the work, took him now for a God that a little before was but honoured as a man."

"And this was the occasion of deceiving human life; for men serving either their affection, or their kings, gave the incommunicable name to stones and wood. And, it was not enough for them to err about the knowledge of God, whereas they lived in a great war of ignorance, they call so many and so great evils peace." For either, they sacrifice their own children, or use hidden sacrifices. (Wisd. xiv.)

Omitting, for brevity's sake, other enormities, it may