N. B. It is worth Remark here, what a terrible Advantage the Devil gain’d by the debauching poor Noah, and drawing him into the Sin of Drunkenness; for by this, as I said, he silenc’d and stop’d the Mouth of the great Preacher of Righteousness, that Father and Patriarch of the whole World, who not being able for the Shame of his own foul Miscarriage, to pretend to instruct or reprove the World any more, the Devil took hold of them immediately, and for want of a Prophet to warn and admonish, ran that little of Religion which there might be left in Shem and Japhet, quite out of the World, and delug’d them all in Idolatry.
How long the whole World may be said to be thus overwhelm’d in Ignorance and Idolatry, we may make some tolerable guess at by the History of Abraham; for it was not till God call’d him from his Father’s House, that any such Thing as a Church was establish’d 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 may be said to be involv’d 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 liv’d untainted and invulnerable, as he had done for six hundred Years before, would have gone a great way to have stem’d 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 meer 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 a 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 Abimilech 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 his Method was like himself, subtle and politick 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 worship’d 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 dar’d to offer up any Sacrifice to him, but by the Interposition of some Medium which might receive their Adorations in his Name.
Hence it occur’d 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 who 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 Cannonise 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 worship’d the true God and no other, under the Figures and Appearances which they made to represent him, it was easy after that to worship any thing for the true God; and thus in a few Ages they worship’d nothing but Idols, even throughout the whole World; nor has the Devil lost this 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, Zanquebar, Congo, Angola, Monomotapa, &c. in all which, except Ethiopia, we find no Vestiges of any other worship but that of Idols, Monsters, and even the Devil himself; till after the very coming of our Saviour, and even then, if it be true that the Gospel was preach’d 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 interrupted 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 entire 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 meer Omnipotence to return to their Duty, serve him and worship him; But of that hereafter.