And so to them,
heathens as they were, God whispered that Christ should some day
bring life and immortality to light.
My friends, shall we sneer and laugh at all these dreams, as mere
follies of the heathen? If we do so, we shall not show the spirit of
God, or the mind of Christ. Nor shall we show our knowledge of the
Bible. In it, the spirit of God, who inspired the Bible, does not
laugh at these dreams. It rebukes them sternly whenever they are
immoral, and lead men to do bad and foul deeds, as Ezekiel rebuked
the Jewish women who wept for Thammuz, the dead summer. But that was
because those Jewish women should have known better. They should
have known--what the Old Testament tells us all through--what it was
especially meant to tell the men who lived while it was being
written, just because they had their fancies, and their fears about
summer and winter, and life and death. And what ought they to have
known? What does the Old Testament say? That life will conquer
death, because God, the Lord Jehovah, even Jesus Christ, is Lord of
heaven and earth. From the time that it was written in the Book of
Genesis, that the Lord Jehovah said in his heart, 'I will not again
curse the ground for man's sake: neither will I again smite any more
anything living, as I have done, while the earth remaineth--seed time
and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and
night, shall not cease'--from that time the Jews were bound not to
fear the powers of nature, or the seasons, nor to fear for them; for
they were all in the government of that one good God and Lord, who
cared for men, and loved them, and dealt justly by them, and proved
his love and justice by bringing the children of Israel out of the
land of Egypt.
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