The grace of Him who smote, has blest the stroke, And oh when comes the rich reward at last; What a mere speck will seem man's hardest fate, SHORT OUTLINES OF THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. § 1. CREATION OF The world, 4,004 BEFORE CHRIST. THE Bible tells us, that in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The little infant is now taught to repeat this great truth with its lisping tongue; but in former days it was not so: even learned men ventured from time to time to deny it some held that matter was eternal; and others taught that the world was made up of little atoms, or infinitely small particles, coming together, and happening to fall into such beautiful shapes and arrangements, as we every where see. Happening indeed! No man has ever seen a watch or any other curious contrivance made by such a chance: and what man in his senses can believe that even a plant was ever made by chance? that things happened to fall out so, that little bits of matter stuck together, and became roots and leaves and flowers, and gave the plant a power to grow and yield its seed, and continue its kind upon the earth for ages, proof against all chance whatever! Alas! men might have known God.. for he had revealed himself unto them; but they did * II. Cor. iv. 17. not choose to worship him as God, and then he allowed them to go astray in their foolish thoughts, and dream of a world made by chance! We, however, understand through faith that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear. •* We know too that God the Son was the Creator of the world: that all things were made by him, and without Him was not any thing made that was made. We feel, moreover, that he who could make, can also destroy; we are anxious, therefore, to know whether this power of destroying will ever be used. To learn this, we go to the Book of God, and we find that the world is to be destroyed. We read that the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat: the earth also, and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness ?‡ It is an Apostle's question. § 2. CREATION AND FALL OF MAN. WHEN God had furnished the earth with grasses, flowers, and trees; and filled it with inhabitants of every kind; he created man to be the lord of it; to have dominion over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.§ He created him innocent, and therefore happy but he also created him with the power of making himself miserable. Why it pleased God to make a being that could sin, we cannot tell. We must trust in him; we must be sure that he had good reasons for what he did; and that the Judge of all the earth will do right.-Enough for us, that he has given us a way of escape: that he has offered us eternal glory, through his Son; and that we cannot perish except by our own fault. Man was to be tried, whether he would obey God or not. The trial was necessarily of the simplest kind:-man could break few laws when he had no neighbours. He must be tried in the one point of obedience to his maker. He was tried and fell he ruined his nature by sin; and from Adam's nature we get our nature. That nature is corrupted in every man. In Adam we all die. † Joh. i. 37. 2 Pet. iii. 10. § 3. EARLY INVENTIONS. WE must take this fact of the corruption of our nature along with us, as we consider the history of states: and assuredly we shall find no reason to doubt it in the history of any nation that has ever existed.-The first occupations of men were tillage and pasturage. It was necessary even for the son of Adam to till the earth, and support himself by the sweat of his brow. One is surprised to find how rapidly the arts were invented! The murderer, Cain, built a city; a *surprising thing, even if we suppose it a mere assemblage of huts; it was at all events the introduction of fixed habitations. Soon afterwards tents were made; cattle kept, tools of brass and iron constructed, and even musical instruments invented by his descendents. § 4. GOVERNMENT. MAN is born to live in society; and without government society could not be kept together, and would be a curse if it could. The helpless and dependent state in which we are born, trains us up to obey. The parent was naturally the governor of his family; he would then become the chief of a tribe, when his descendents, his flocks, and his herds multiplied. Presently, however, as their numbers swelled, some would fall away. The land would be too narrow for them; and the oldest and most distinguished of those who separated, would become the chief of another tribe: or if the trial of living without any acknowledged superior were made, it probably soon failed: the weaker would become the prey of the stronger; the rich would oppress the poor; the whole tribe, if it still held together as one, would be despised and ill-treated by other tribes, for union alone is strength, and disunion, weakness. The members of such a tribe would soon choose some prudent, or some valiant man, to be their judge in peace or their commander in war. Even the wild beasts could not be kept under by a disunited horde, and some Nimrod.. some mighty hunter before the Lord↑ .. would lead the tribe against its foes, whether men or the beasts of the field, and win the headship of the tribe by his valour. Monarchy, or government by kings, is the first kind of * Gen. iv. 17. † Gen. x. 9. government we meet with in history. It is probable that the king was at first chosen by the people, or a part of them, and that his powers were very limited. EGYPT, THE Egyptians were governed by a King even in the days of Abraham and in the time of Moses they were plainly acquainted with many of the arts of life. Their country is a narrow strip of land on either side of the Nile. Little or no rain falls there; but the river overflows its banks every year at about the same time. The waters begin to rise early in August, and remain out till the end of October; so that the country is flooded for about three months of the year, and enriched by a fat slime which the waters leave behind them. The soil is so perfectly prepared by the river, that the husbandman has little to do but to scatter his seed; and the country was so rich, that in times of scarcity, all its neighbours used to go down, as Joseph's brethren did "to buy corn in Egypt."* It produced wheat, barley, rye, and flax, twith various kinds of pulse, &c.: the date and the sycamore are the only large trees. In the Nile there grows a reed called papyrus, which was used for writing on: they divided it into large layers, spread them out, moistened them with the glutinous waters of the river, and then dried them in the sun. From this papyrus we get the name of paper. Though the work of the husbandman was nearly all done for him by the river, yet in another way the river sharpened invention by causing trouble. The great flood swept away the landmarks every year. How then was a man to know how much, and which part, of the naked surface of the earth belonged to him? A new and just division had to be made every year, and hence people soon learnt to survey the land correctly. Moreover, the nature of the country made dams and canals necessary; and the stars were used as signs for determining the seasons, that they might prepare for the coming of the flood. Hence land-surveying, geometry, and astronomy§ nad their beginning. Egypt is still remarkable for its enormous buildings. In Upper or Southern Egypt, there are magnificent quarries of granite, and the country is still covered with the ruins of im* Gen. xlii. 10. † Exod. ix. 31, 32. The doctrine of different figures and their properties. § The knowledge of the heavenly bodies. mense temples, or cities of temples; with huge obelisks, or square pillars of a single stone tapering to the top, and from 50 to 180 feet high: and with sphinxes, or monstrous animals with the face of a virgin and the body of a lion. The pyramids are vast piles, generally of lime-stone; they stand on a square base, their sides slanting up to a point; they are mostly surrounded by a channel of the Nile, and contain an immense number of chambers, galleries, and vaults, in which embalmed bodies were placed. A body was embalmed by taking away the parts most liable to decay, filling it with sweet smelling herbs, and then laying it for a time in nitre: after which it was tightly wrapt in bandages of cotton, and covered with gums. You may read in the book of Genesist how "Joseph commanded his servants the physicians to embalm his father." Bodies thus preserved are called mummies, and one of them may now be seen in the British Museum :-the body of one who lived perhaps, under the Pharaohs, before many an empire that has since crumbled to the dust began to be. It is thought that the Egyptians embalmed the body from a belief that the soul existed in some happy place as long as the body could be preserved. We know, that the happiness of our souls depends on our preserving the body, not from the corruption of decay after death, but from the corruption of sin before death. We know that we need not try to preserve our bodies, for the earth and the sea will be forced to give up their dead, and that which is sown a natural body shall rise a spiritual body. Some of the principal manufactures of Egypt were weaving, dyeing, working in metal, and pottery: Ezekiel says of Tyre; fine linen with broidered work from Egypt was that which thou spreadedst forth to be thy sail.‡" § 6. GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION OF EGYPT. THE government was a monarchy; but the whole of Egypt was not always under one king. The Book of Genesis gives us a very curious account of the manner in which the monarch increased his power. He stored up corn against the years of famine, by Joseph's advice, and then the people came and sold themselves, their cattle, and their lands, for food: and * In middle Egypt. † Gen. 1. 2. + Ez. xxvii. 7. |