| 745 cities, kingdoms, nations, and their works for wickedness, and who acknowledges the arm of Jehovah in it? Who, over this wild world, when a nation is scourged with war; rebuked by earthquakes, storms, and disasters, comes out and says-ah, Lord it is thou that liftest up and thou that puttest down-in wrath remember mercy? By excepting the Latter-day Saints, it may be said with shame to the world, not one!
Singular as it may seem, all Christendom, Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherians [Lutherans], Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Universalians [Universalists], Deists, and all other denominations, (but the Mormons) worship a God afar off, and not near at hand; and add to this idea, the refinment of the age, and the spiritual wisdom of priestcraft, and a majority of the christian population, actually worship nothing-because King James' translators, not called, nor sanctioned by revelation, rendered, by supplying "is" in a certain passage in John, "God is a spirit" when common sense, in connection, with the rest of the Bible, from Genesis, where the "spirit" of God moved upon the waters, to Revelations where the testimony of Jesus is the "spirit" of prophecy, would show that God has a spirit: that God and angels dined with Abram on a calf, and that Jesus after the resurrection ate a broiled fish and honey-comb.
If, then, men have strayed so far from the just idea of the true God, is it any thing strange that they should lose the true knowledge of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof? Talk about "ruins" of cities of America; and "ruins" of ancient splendor in Asia; and what of them?-until the people believe in revelation, and in a God that has substance, and that created man in his own "image" and will raise the whole house of Israel in their flesh and bones, to dwell in their own land on earth, that they may be like him, and he like them; for he is their brethren: and has said-YE ARE GODS-until this is bona fidely the case, all we can say is, the wisdom of man is foolishness mith [with] God. Man was created upright, but he has sought out many inventions.
The world has been cumbered with Nimrods, Pharaohs, Alexanders, Nebuchadnezzars, Neros and a host of others, who, whether they built a tower to frustrate the designs of God; or, prepared catacombs to preserve the embalmed dead; guarded Thebes with an hundred thousand men at an hundred gates; conquered the world, and mourned because there was not another to conquer; looked upon themselves as God, and cropped the grass of the field, with beasts, till seven times passed over them for their sinning against heaven;-made a city the mistress of the world, or burned it to cope with religion:-it is all the same: God was not in all their ways; and though they may have tried to ascend into heaven, or dig down into hell; piled monuments to the clouds; spread dominions from sea to sea, and "walked among the stones of fire:" yet their fame has fled; their greatness has departed; their splendor has withered; their palaces have mouldered back to dust; wastes, deserts, lakes, and mountains sit in judgment upon their ruins and their spirits linger in prison, and will linger till the uttermost farthing is paid. Many of these inheritors of folly, might as well not have been born, or been an untimely birth and slept, as Job said:
"With kings and counsellors [counselors] of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves;
Or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver;
Or as an hidden untimely birth I had not been; as infants which never saw light.
There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.
There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor.
The small and great are there; and the servant is free from his master."
The way of man has been evil continually, and if we had the history of the abominations bloodsheds and mighty acts of men during the first thousand years, as we now have the last it would exhibit a course of moral depravity, fallen greatness, and beastly corruption, as sickening and shocking to the feelings of good men as the customs of cannibals. To strengthen this idea let us introduce a few paragraphs from the Book of Jasher, not allowing it to be revelation but history sustained by other history. That book says:
"And all the sons of men departed from the ways of the Lord in those days as they multiplied upon the face of the earth with sons and daughters, and they taught one another their evil practices, and they continued sinning against the Lord.
And every man made unto himself a god, and they robbed and plundered every man his neighbor as well as his relative, and they corrupted the earth, and the earth was filled with violence.
And their judges and rulers went to the daughters of men and took their wives by force from their husbands according to their choice, and the sons of men in those days took from the cattle of the earth, the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, and taught the mixture of animals of one species with the other, in order therewith to provoke the Lord; and
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