Mankind in their infancy were ignorant creatures; as much below the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, intellectually and morally, as they are below us. They wandered, naked, in clans, like the Indians of the West, subsisting on fish, reptiles, and such animals as they could kill with their simple weapons, and on the spontaneous fruit of the earth, without shelter by night, or protection from the burning sun or pelting storm.
Many centuries after this period, about the time the city of Babylon was founded, although great advancement had been made, yet the mass of the people were as ignorant as are the aborigines of America. There were a few highly developed minds, but the great body of the people were enveloped in mental darkness, of which we can form but faint conception—fit materials for tyrants and leaders to make machines of, and they freely used them for such sacrilegious purposes. They were subject to their leader’s will; were his bone and sinew; his battle axe and shield. He was the head, they the body. At his will they suffered and toiled, lived and died, and when their oppressors’ earthly career closed, they erected pyramids to perpetuate his fame and their degradation. No effort was made to enlighten and moralize the mass of mankind, for their masters well knew that ignorant men made the best tools. No advancement would have been made under such unfavorable circumstances had not growth been natural to man.
If we trace the history of mankind during the rise and progress of the Chaldean, Babylonian, Persian and Roman empires, up to the time Christ was on earth, we find, that although ignorance and degradation are prominent features of the civilization of those times, yet our hearts are made glad with clear evidence of human progress. Every subsequent generation was wiser and better than the previous one. True, the advancing tide was slow, the current sluggish; sometimes obstacles would arrest its progress, and even force it back toward its source, but nature would then redouble her efforts, and sweep away all obstacles, and press forward with her immortal freight to sunnier skies and fairer climes.
When the Christian Era opened, it was the golden age of antiquity. The purity of our Savior’s life, his deep and fervent love for mankind, the beauty and life-giving energy of the precepts and truths he uttered, together with the goodness, zeal and extensive labors and sufferings of his apostles and their associates, gave the human mind an impetus it had not before known.
The apostles and their coadjutors traversed the Roman empire, which embraced most of the known world, and denounced Paganism, and every species of immorality, and called on the nations of the earth to worship the one living and true God, who made and governs the universe. They proclaimed, in obedience to their divine Master, that God was the Father of all mankind; that the latter compose one great BROTHERHOOD, and are destined for IMMORTALITY, PROGRESSION and HAPPINESS; and from these cardinal truths they drew these inferences, and enforced them with holy life and eloquent speech—that men should exercise brotherly kindness, general benevolence and charity, and aid each other in traveling the heavenly road.
Those holy men did not labor in vain. The human soul was quickened into higher life by the germinating power of truth; and had the gospel been retained in its purity, and had the social and political condition of mankind been in a higher sphere of development, and had those favorable conditions continued to the present time, long ago the Millenium would have been ushered in. But the gospel was corrupted; the social and political condition of mankind, although in advance of any previous period, was in a deplorable state. The Roman heart was rotten, the Roman empire was corrupt, and before Christianity was proclaimed in it to much extent, the empire was tottering on its throne, and shaking from center to circumference; and these precursors of still greater evils filled the world with terror and confusion. The Pope supplanted Christ, and Catholicism, Christianity; and the Roman empire, by political earthquakes, was shaking on its sandy foundation. And to add to the terrors and disasters of the times, floods of barbarians came rushing from the north, and the Saracens from the east, like the lava from Vesuvius, that overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii, and buried the empire and civilization beneath the flood, and almost extinguished the light and life of Christianity. Those were the darkest days the world had seen for many a century.
Human progress then received a check from which it was a long time in recovering; but the innate tendency of human nature to move onward finally overcame the mountains that human folly had thrown in its way, and after the lapse of several centuries it emerged into the light of science and religion.
The morning twilight which succeeded that long night of anarchy, priestly rule and superstition, dawned on the world in the fourteenth century. Intellect, which had slumbered for ages, began to throw off its lethargy. Universities sprang up in Europe. Science, literature and religion began to be studied. Old theories were looked into and questioned; and then the martyr’s fires were rekindled by the conservatives of that age; for every age has a class who love to stand up to their ears in mud at their old landmarks, and threaten all with temporal ruin or eternal damnation, or both, who make an effort to get out of the filth into the pure air and sunshine of heaven. This old hunkerism I abhor, whether in church, state, or literature. It would repress the energies of the world. Our motto should be—go where the stream of truth bears us, regardless of consequences; they should not be feared. Error and ignorance only are real and fearful enemies.
Those early pioneers in the domain of truth, paid dear for their independence and wisdom; many of whom were burned at the stake or incarcerated in dungeons. But the truths they uttered were not so easily forced out of the world. A pious poet of those times, speaking of the disinterment and scattering of Wickliffe’s ashes on the Avon, utters this prophetic language:
“The Avon to the Severn runs,