the civilization which has produced our own. In the Greek and Roman
world, the stories of the gods were not very edifying, as every one
knows: the worship of Bacchus gave no encouragement to temperance, and
the festivals of Venus were not a school of chastity. It would be easy,
by bringing together facts of this sort, to form a picture full of
sombre coloring, and to conclude that our idea of God, the idea of the
only and holy God, does not proceed from the impure sources of idolatry.
The proceeding would be brief and convenient; but such an estimation of
the facts, false because incomplete, would destroy the value of the
conclusion. In pagan antiquity, in fact, the abominations of which I
have just reminded you did not by themselves make up religious
tradition. Side by side with a current of darkness and impurity, we meet
with a current of pure ideas and of strong gleams of the day.

Almost all the pagans seem to have had a glimpse of the Divine unity
over the multiplicity of their idols, and of the rays of the Divine
holiness across the saturnalia of their Olympi. It was a Greek who wrote
these words: "Nothing is accomplished on the earth without Thee, O God,
save the deeds which the wicked perpetrate in their folly."[6] It was in
a theatre at Athens that the chorus of a tragedy sang, more than two
thousand years ago: "May destiny aid me to preserve unsullied the purity
of my words and of all my actions, according to those sublime laws
which, brought forth in the celestial heights, have Heaven alone for
their father, to which the race of mortal men did not give birth, and
which oblivion shall never entomb. In them is a supreme God, and one who
waxes not old."[7] It would be easy to multiply quotations of this
order, and to show you in the documents of Grecian and Roman
civilization numerous traces of the knowledge of the only and holy God.
Listen now to a voice which has come forth actually from the recesses of
the sepulchre: it reaches us from ancient Egypt.