Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 461

1850.

Defense of an Essay, &c.

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dwelt there And they said one to another, Go to, let us inake brick and burn them throughly. And they said, Go to, let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach to heaven, and let us make us a name (or a sign) lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord said, Go to, let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth." From this we may infer that when Peleg was born, men received a Divine command to divide themselves into separate groups, and go into different quarters of the earth, that the whole might be inhabited. Against this Divine command they determined to rebel, and as a rally- ing point to prevent their being "scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth," they commenced building "a tower whose top should reach to heaven," a lofty object that could be seen afar, and would serve to bring them all back to a common centre. For this rebellion God confounded their speech, and by this means enforced obedience to his command, which they were in the act of disobeying. "So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth;" and we hear nothing more of the scattered groups, except those immediately connected with the chosen people, until they come up, hundreds of years afterwards, on the pages of profane history. Whether the men who were building this tower had taken God's at- tributes and given them to other beings, and called these beings by His name, and thus become polytheists, we can not tell; the account in Genesis is too brief."

* Dr. Hales (Chronology, Vol. I, page 358) thus speaks of the “ringleader in this rebellion "The prime author of this rebellion against the divine decree, and grand corrupter of the pure patriarchal religion, by Sabianism and Demonol atry, was the Cuthite Nimrod, "the Rebel," as the name implies, who was after- wards deified himself under the title of Belus, and supposed to be translated to the constellation Orion, in the heavens. And from the central region of Babel, this grand apostacy from the primitive faith, seems to have been trans- planted into the four quarters of the world; as proved from the remarkable fact of the general resentblance of the pagan mythology, in these its two leading outlines, in Asia, Africa, Europe and America; and from the conformity be tween the leading doctrines of the primitive pagan priesthood, the Magi in Chaldea, the Brahmine in the East, and the Druids in the West, as circumstan- tially proved by Faber in his elaborate work."

Faber says, "When the children of Noah left the high land of Armenia they journeyed until they reached the flat country of Shinar. During their progress, or possibly before they quitted Mount Ararat, the ambitions Nimrod, at the head of his enterprizing Cuthites, accustomed them to submit to his rule, and laid the foundation of that idolatrous apostacy, which he after completed at Babylon. Noah and the three great paternal patriarchs were now dead and I am strongly inclined to suspect that even before the emigration from Armenia, the worship of the true God on the summit of Ararat, was perverted to the worship, or at least to the excessive veneration of the self-triplicating great