The Divine Attributes or Perfections

Cannot be Personified or Made Personal Without Idolatry.

It was the personification of the Divine perfections, attributes, powers, or virtues, which laid the foundation, and upon which was built the whole system of the heathen mythology, or worship of “fabulous deities,” or “false gods.” Thus we see, that all heathen or pagan Rome, (of which Christian Rome, or Daniel’s “four gentile beasts or kingdoms,” were but the great image— see Daniel 2:31-44, and 7: 17,) and were set up and established upon the great error of dividing the Divine unity into separate and distinct gods, or attributes, perfections or virtues, personified or made substantive.* This we can see clearly and distinctly from Saturn,† Vesta, Jupiter, Mercury, Diana of Ephesus. down to the statue of the Virgin Mary, which succeeded Diana, and then came Jesus Christ, whom they made a god of, as they had done of all the rest of their extraordinary men under the heathen mythology, whom they declared were all begotten and sons, (as they declared he was) by some of their gods having cohabitation with women.—The Virgin Mary was said to be the first of the “vestal virgins,” and was the Divine purity, personified or made personal; Christ, her son, was the Divine light,‡ personified or made personal; Sophia, the Divine wisdom, made personal; the Spirit of God was even made a [separate] god of, and called “God the Holy Ghost;” and this they made substantive, and even made it into the likeness and “bodily shape of a dove,” (Luke 3:22;) and so up to their first and chief gods and idols. Rome, Pagan, had gods for every imaginary thing or virtue, as Christian Rome has canonized saints for every imaginary thing or virtue. Thus their forms or rites and ceremonies were more <<123>>easily introduced, as Mosheim says:—“That the leaders imagined that the nations would the more readily receive Christianity when they saw the rites and ceremonies to which they (the heathens) had been accustomed established in the churches, (i. e. Christian churches,) and the same worship paid to Jesus Christ and his martyrs, (saints,) which they had formerly offered to their idol deities; hence it happened that in those times, the religion of the Greeks and Romans differed but little in its external appearance from that of Christians. (Vol. i,. B. 1., p. 2, chap. 4.) But we can yet clearly see in Christian Rome the exact image of Pagan Rome, although she has almost and soon will become Infidel Rome, as the inevitable consequence of her having divided the Divine unity, into her many false gods and deities. Indeed, it must be the result of her attempting to make the Divine perfection personal; for as soon as we make a pure spirit, bodily or corporeal; we come in direct contradiction to the schoolman’s thesis or axiom, “That God is without body, parts, or passions.”

* Substantive—to attach substance to principles.

† This we can see by the Christian’s Sunday, or Beel Samer; so, with the names of their months, days, and nearly all their festivals, still bearing the names of their false gods, or tutelar deities.

‡ See John 1:1-14, and 8:12.

As soon as we make a Being, whom we say is omnipresent, a visible person, composed of body and parts, the result must be, that he is and must be limited to and present in that body; we mate the invisible God, visible, changeable, subject to parts, passions, and death, and is the only legitimate result and consequence, carried out upon the principle of having divided the Divine attributes and perfections, and attaching them to persons like ourselves, that we well know are without one Divine attribute or power, as God. It is these palpable inconsistencies and contradictions that lay prostrate at or with a single blow, all our greatest and most superior men, whose reasoning powers and intellects can never quail and bow down before such a horrid mass of “pious frauds” and “lying wonders,” and such inconsistencies as common sense at once detects and abhors. And what is the consequence when these errors become established by a long night of darkness and superstition, and when the whole fashionable religious world has become thus entombed and engulphed in these errors? Why men must either throw away their reason, or become hypocrites. Hence we hear the priests make a great cry against external evidence, and that evidence too which is established upon facts. Can the whole <<124>>world deny the existence of one solitary fact, if really and truly established as a fact? and will not one such a fact destroy the whole world full of theory and empty speculation?—Some years back a Christian minister, possessing a very high order of mind and intellect, became convinced of the untruth and unsoundness of Christianity in consequence of reading Bishop Marshe’s writings on its external evidence; and yet many of his fellow ministers condemned him, because he rejected Christianity upon the ground of external evidences or facts; and pray, what is all prophecy when fulfilled but external evidence and fact fulfilled. For instance, it is prophecy that the Jews are yet to be restored from “the four corners of the earth, and from all places whither God has scattered them,” and it will be prophecy fulfilled, in fact, and in “external evidence” manifested in fact, when they shall be restored to their own land.—Prophecy is the great sign to the world and will be known and believed in by the world, when it shall have its visible accomplishment in fact, and not before. And this is the reason it sets all abstract spiritualizing at defiance, which hitherto has always only set theorists, allegorizers, spiritualizers, and abstract speculators, one against the other; and has left them and will for ever leave them upon the great sea of their vain imaginations, without chart or compass—because they have left the letter of their instrument, and have had nothing to guide, limit, or direct them, and so their spirits have flown all over, with the confused tongues of Babylon, ever opposing each other. And what must end this babel of confusion? Surely nothing but the personal coming of Elijah—proving and for ever settling the question whether “Baal be God,” or God be God; for it is certain that the whole Christian world, is “halting between the same two opinions now, as the Hebrews did then, (1 Kings 18:21,) not knowing the only true “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” as God alone, and as the one only Eternal Being and none beside Him.

WARDER CRESSON.