them immediately; and for want of a prophet to warn and admonish, run that little of religion which there might be left in Shem and Japhet, quite out of the world, and deluged them all in Idolatry.
How long the whole world may be said to be thus overwhelmed in ignorance and idolatry, we may make some tolerable guess at by the history of Abraham; for it was not till God called him from his father’s house, that any such thing as a church was established in the world; nor even then, except in his own family and successors for almost four hundred years after that call; and till God brought the Israelites back out of Egypt, the whole world might be said to be involved in idolatry and devil-worship.
So absolute a conquest had the Devil made over mankind immediately after the flood; and all taking its rise and beginning at the fatal defeat of Noah, who, had he lived untainted and invulnerable, as he had done for six hundred years before, would have gone a great way to have stemmed the torrent of wickedness which broke in upon mankind; and therefore the Devil, I say, was very cunning, and very much in the right of it. take him as he is a mere devil, to attack Noah personally, and give him a blow so soon.
It is true, the Devil did not immediately raze out the notion of religion, and of a God, from the minds of men; nor could he easily suppress the principle of worship and homage, to be paid to a sovereign being, the author of nature, and guide of the world: the Devil saw this clearly in the first ages of the new world; and therefore, as I have said, he proceeded politically, and by degrees. That it was so, is evident from the story of Job. and his three friends; who. if we may take it for an history, not a fable, and may judge of the time of it by the length of Job’s life, and by the family of Eliphaz the Temanite, who it is manifest was at least grandson, or great-grandson, to Esau, Isaac’s eldest son; and by the language of Abimelech King of Gerar to Abraham, and of Laban to Jacob, both the latter being at the same time idolaters; I say, if we may judge of it by all these, there were still very sound notions of religion in the minds of men; nor could Satan with all his cunning and policy deface those ideas, and root them out of the minds of the people.
And this put him upon taking new measures to keep up his interest, and preserve the hold he got upon mankind; and this method was like himself, subtle and politic to the last degree, as his whole history makes appear; for, seeing he found they could not but believe the being of a God, and that they would needs worship something, it is evident, he had no game left him to play but this; namely, to set up wrong notions of worship, and bring them to a false worship instead of a true, supposing the object worshipped to be still the same.
To finish this stratagem, he first insinuates, that the true God was a terrible, a dreadful, unapproachable being; that to see him was so frightful that it would be present death; that to worship him immediately, was a presumption which would provoke his wrath; and that as he was a consuming fire in himself, so he would burn up those in his anger that dared to offer up any sacrifice to him, but by the interposition of some medium, which might receive their adorations in his name.
Hence it occurred presently, that subordinate Gods were to be found out, and set up, to whom the people might pay the homage due to the Supreme God, and whom they might worship in his name. This I take from the most ancient account of idolatry in the world; nor, indeed, could the Devil himself find out any other reason why men should canonize, or rather deify their princes and men of fame, and worship them after they were dead, as if they could save them from death and calamity, who were not able to save themselves when they were alive; much less could Satan bring men to swallow so gross, so absurd a thing as the bowing the knee to a stock, or a stone, a calf, an ox, a lion, nay, the image or figure of a calf, such as the Israelites made at mount Sinai, and say, These be thy Gods, O Israel, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt.
Having thus, I say, brought them to satisfy themselves, that they worshipped the true God, and no other, under the figures and appearances which they made to represent him, it was easy after that to worship anything for the true God. And thus in a few ages they worshipped nothing but idols, even throughout the whole world; nor has the Devil lost his hold in some parts of the world, nay, not in most parts of the world, to this day. He holds still all the eastern parts of Asia, and the southern parts of Africa, and the northern parts of Europe; and in them the vast countries of China and Tartary, Persia and India, Guinea, Ethiopia, Zanqnebar, Congo. Angola, Moriomotapa, &c. in which, except Ethiopia, we find no vestiges of any other worship, but that of idols, monsters, and even the Devil himself; till after the coming of our Saviour, and even then, if it be true that the gospel was preached in the Indies and China by St. Thomas, and in other remote countries by other of the Apostles, we see that whatever ground Satan lost, he seems to have recovered it again; and all Asia and Africa is at present overrun with Paganism or Mahometanism, which I think of the two is rather the worst; besides all America, a part of the world, as some say, equal in bigness to all the other, in which the Devil’s kingdom was never in terrupted from its first being inhabited, whenever it was, to the first discovery of it by the European nations in the sixteenth century.
In a word, the Devil got what we may call an en tire victory over mankind, and drove the worship of the true God, in a manner, quite out of the world, forcing, as it were, his Maker, in a new kind of Creation, the old one proving thus ineffectual, to recover a certain number by force, and mere omnipotence, to return to their duty, serve him, and worship him. But of that hereafter.
Chapter 11
OF GODS CALLING A CHURCH out of the midst of a de generate world; and of Satan’s new measures upon that incident. How he attacked them immediately; and his success in those attacks.
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SATAN HAVING, AS I have said in the preceding chapter, made, as it were, a full conquest of mankind; de bauched them all to idolatry; and brought them at least to worship the true God by the wretched medium of corrupt and idolatrous representations; God seemed to have no true servants or worshippers left in the world; but if I may be allowed to speak so, was obliged, in order to restore the world to their senses again, to call a select number out from among the rest, who he himself undertook should own his godhead, or supreme authority, and worship him as he required to be worshipped. This, I say, God was obliged to do, because it is evident it has not been done so much by the choice and counsel of men, for Satan would have overruled that part, as by the power and energy of some irresistible and invincible operation, and this our Divines give high names to; but be it what they will, it is the second defeat or disappointment that the Devil has met with in his progress in the world; the first I have spoken of already.
It is true, Satan very well understood what was threatened to him in the original promise to the Woman immediately after the fall; namely, Thou shalt bruise his head, &c., but he did not expect it so suddenly, but thought himself sure of mankind, till the fulness of time when the Messiah should come; and therefore it Avas a great surprise to him, to see that Abraham, being called, was so immediately received and established, though he did not so immediately follow the voice that directed him, yet in him, in his loins, was all God’s church at that time contained.
In the calling Abraham, it is easy to see that there was no other way for God to form a church, that is to say, to single out a people to himself, as the world was then stated, but by immediate revelation, arid a voice from heaven. All mankind were gone over to the enemy, overwhelmed in idolatry: in a word were en gaged to the Devil; God Almighty, or, as the Scripture distinguishes him, the Lord, the true God, was out of the question; mankind knew little or nothing of him; much less did they know anything of his worship, or that there was such a being in the world.
Well might it be said the Lord appeared to Abraham, Gen. xii. 7, for if God had not appeared himself, he must have sent a messenger from heaven; and perhaps it was so too, for he had not one true servant or worshipper that we know of then on earth, to send on
