the sires of long ago, this prophet in the wilderness in rugged garb, proclaiming the will of Heaven, as then made known, and now manifest, this Daniel who can interpret for us the future, this mile-stone of the ages, we do revere.
By it we are enabled to adjust our chronological dates, rectify history in some of its most important points, and judge more correctly of the attainments of our ancestors; nay, more and better, to form a truer estimate of ourselves and discern the finger of God in the manipulations of men, and an overruling Providence in the rise and fall of nations.
These signs and wonders confirm God’s Word, for they prove inspiration a fact; inspiration of a kind and in the very manner demanded by the unbelieving scientists. Here is a building superhuman, and of course in part supernatural, like the Bible. In this building the human and the Divine blend.
If any deny this, it remains with them to account for it, and show how a people so far back in the world’s history could be so wise and learned; how they could embody so much of the sciences. One thing is certain, if the Divine had nothing to do with this building, then we are left to the conclusion that man was much superior to what the Darwinian theory admits. If void of the Divine, then the development theory is destroyed. If we admit the Divine, then it follows that inspiration is a fact.
The building is there, and it was there in the day of Egypt’s oldest historians. It has been counted as one of the seven wonders of the world.
It did not embody the ideas of the Egyptians in science, astronomy, meteorology, or religion. As their historians allow, it was built by foreigners which they hated.
Nothing idolatrous was carved on it, within or without. It was a witness pure and clean. The Egyptians proclaimed and believed the earth to be square—this building proclaimed the earth round. The builders bevelled the face of the rock in a
ratio of eight inches to the mile—the very quantity that science to-day admits to be the curviture of the earth—and accepts in surveying. It was their knowledge of this fact that kept the building sound, without the cracking of a joint, through centuries, though so high. The Egyptians did not use the sacred amma, or cubit, which is about twenty-five of our inches. They used a profane cubit, as Sir Isaac Newton shows.
This sacred cubit was a well and easily established proportion of the earth’s diameter—the very standard now used by the English Government in surveying.
The stones of the Pyramid were twelve feet long, eight feet broad, and five deep, making twenty-five total. The building itself was a five-faced figure. The Egyptians hated five. No wonder that Moses harnessed the Israelites in fives as they left Egypt, or that he should divide his book into five parts.