Note (return) — Chapter II

This is the theory of the school of "dogmatic theologians," of which the ablest and most familiar presentation is found in the "Theological Institutes" of R. Watson. 79 He claims that all our religious knowledge is derived from oral revelation alone, and that all the forms of religion and modes of worship which have prevailed in the heathen world have been perversions and corruptions of the one true religion first taught to the earliest families of men by God himself. All the ideas of God, duty, immortality, and future retribution which are now possessed, or have ever been possessed by the heathen nations, are only broken and scattered rays of the primitive traditions descending from the family of Noah, and revived by subsequent intercourses with the Hebrew race; and all the modes of religious worship--prayers, lustrations, sacrifices--that have obtained in the world, are but feeble relics, faint reminiscences of the primitive worship divinely instituted among the first families of men. "The first man received the knowledge of God by sensible converse with him, and that doctrine was transmitted, with the confirmation of successive manifestations, to the early ancestors of all nations." 80 This belief in the existence of a Supreme Being was preserved among the Jews by continual manifestations of the presence of Jehovah. "The intercourses between the Jews and the states of Syria and Babylon, on the one hand, and Egypt on the other, powers which rose to great eminence and influence in the ancient world, was maintained for ages. Their frequent dispersions and captivities would tend to preserve in part, and in part to revive, the knowledge of the once common and universal faith." 81 And the Greek sages who resorted for instruction to the Chaldean philosophic schools derived from thence their knowledge of the theological system of the Jews. 82 Among the heathen nations this primitive revelation was corrupted by philosophic speculation, as in India and China, Greece and Rome; and in some cases it was entirely obliterated by ignorance, superstition, and vice, as among the Hottentots of Africa and the aboriginal tribes of New South Wales, who "have no idea of one Supreme Creator." 83