The Oracles of God

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH His holy covenant: the oath which He sware to Abraham our father. call of Abraham was the greatest event in the history of our redemption from the time of Noah to the coming of Jesus Christ. It was the beginning of the dispensation of grace under which we live; not a new...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V THE HOLY CATHOLIC CHURCH His holy covenant: the oath which He sware to Abraham our father. call of Abraham was the greatest event in the history of our redemption from the time of Noah to the coming of Jesus Christ. It was the beginning of the dispensation of grace under which we live; not a new purpose, for the purpose of His grace is from the beginning; but in Abraham was initiated a new method, a new scheme of ordinances, by which His gracious will is revealed and executed. From the days of Noah to the time of Abraham was a period of vast, but unknown length, unlighted by any recorded revelation. We can hardly suppose that all those ages were left in utter darkness. No doubt the righteousness of Noah and his family persisted for a time, and indeed it may be that righteousness flourished for many generations. This is probable because the world seems to have made good progress in the arts and social order, and such progress is not made when men are morally corrupt. The periods of growth in civilization have always been times of high morality, though the attainments of such periods may be retained long after men have become corrupt, for God is slow to wrath. The time of Abraham falls within the range of what we call the light of history, a rather dim light to be sure, but in the recently discovered records of that ancient land of Chaldea we have the evidences of a civilization well developed, highly complex, and, in some respects, as brilliant as that of our own day. In the arts of war and peace, in material welfare andpolitical organization, the age had attained to a high degree of culture. The primitive man that figures so largely in the theories of sociology, if he ever existed anywhere, had disappeared from Chaldea ages and ages before the time of Ab...