Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

UNITY OF CREATION

AND

THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS OF NAZARETH.

"I am come a Light into the world." He came forth from the bosom of the Father, as the Word, the Revealer of that Infinite Mind in which, from eternity, He had surveyed the Archetype and idea of all truth; and He spoke with the arthority of a divine oracle.-DR. JOHN HARRIS.

25

I. THE GODS MANY AND THE LORDS MANY OF THE ANCIENT HEATHEN: THEIR IDEAS of the OriGIN AND GOVERNMENT OF THE WORLD.

II. JESUS OF NAZARETH PROCLAIMS THE EXISTENCE OF ONE ONLY TRUE AND LIVING GOD, THE CREATOR AND RULER OF ALL.

III. THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS CONFIRMED BY MODERN SCIENCE: EVIDENCES THAT THE EARTH AND THE WHOLE UNIVERSE ARE THE WORK OF ONE SUPREME OMNIPOTENT BEING.

UNITY OF CREATION

AND

THE TEACHINGS OF JESUS OF NAZARETH.

[graphic]
[ocr errors]

IGHTEEN hundred years have rolled by since the system of truths, embodied and preserved in the New Testament Scriptures, was proclaimed to the world by Jesus of Nazareth and his chosen disciples. The moral and religious condition of mankind, at that period, was truly deplorable; in every region, and under every rule, they were fettered and held in melancholy bondage by ignorance and superstition of the most degrading character. Darkness covered the earth, and gross darkness the nations. The most favored and the most enlightened among them groped, as the blind for the wall, after the truth concerning the origin of the world, the powers that ruled over it, and the destiny of the race inhabiting it. Earnest, and often heroic was the struggle of natural intellect for the light; but all their inquiry, observation and philosophy left them in fatal error, or, at best, in painful obscurity, on all these

momentous questions. Even a Plato was constrained to begin his discourse of the gods, and the generation of the world, with the caution to his disciples, "not to expect anything beyond a likely conjecture concerning these things." And a Cicero, after ages more of investigation and subtle reasoning, was forced to the confession, "All these things are involved in deep obscurity."* The "The last and highest effort of Grecian philosophy was to erect an altar to the "unknown God." Thus the world by all its wisdom failed to attain to any clear or certain knowledge of the true and living God.

Equally ignorant were they concerning the origin of the world in which they dwelled. The sages and philosophers of antiquity, without an exception, believed that the earth, as to the materials composing it, at least, was eternal. Creation, or the originating of anything from nothing, appeared to them an absurdity-an act inconceivable, and impossible even to the gods. They held it as an indisputable axiom that "out of nothing nothing could be made." Hence some of them taught that deep in darkness, far beyond the refulgent expanse, the abode of deities, matter had ever lain, a rude and undigested and opaque mass, agitated by turbulent and irregular motions of its own provoking, and nurturing, as in a seed-bed, the rudiments of plants, birds, beasts and man, and even of every species of vice and evil. Others maintained that the universe arose out of a fortuitous concourse of eternal atoms; these, moving at hazard,

Compare, De Natura Deorum, Lib. I.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »