The Leon reporter. (Leon, Iowa) 1887-1930, 1912-03-28

S~tS~oWo.s0HS Observation-Disclosures
| In law and craftsmanship who sur
passes Moses or Hammurabi of an
cient Babylonia? Taking the human
race as whole, since the entrance
of sin, it has tended toward i'm
perfection and the upward progress
it has made is due to the invoking
power of divine grace and the all
wise purpose of an overruling prov
ideEce.
fields has proven beyond a shadow
of doubt that as far back as we can
trace the history of man on earth,
he was in state of civilization
which was real and human and that
man was not a rude something, half
animal and half man. We speak of
the human race as a whole and not
of individual races. There have
been, of course, inferior races all
along, just as there are today. The
savage tribes of earth today are in no
higher state of civilization than they
ever were. Some will speak of the
cave-dwellers and infer that they
must have lived ages and ages before
the dawn of recorded history. The
hard facts are all against this i'll
advised inference. The cave-dwell-
ers had language and written one
at that just as the present tribes Of
Africa and the North American In
dams had In regard to the cave
jewellers Prof. Soyce, that great
Assyriologist of Oxford says: THE
average cave-dweller in France at a
remote period could draw as we'll as
the, average. Frenchman of today
! His drawing was his system of writ
ing. 1t is now known that there
were cave-dwellers living contempor-
aneOus with some of the greatest
civilizations Of earth.
| There is nothing strange in all this
but what common sense would ex-
pect. For instance, take two men
and give one of these men fine
tract of land he would live and die
in some little old rackety shanty
while the other would in the course
of few years own modern home.
Think of the great Chinese empire
asleep and if she had not been awak-
ened by outside influences would
finally have slept to her destruction.
Some nations and peoples have ad-
vanced in the civilization, some have
degenerated, while still others have
stood almost still, as examples of ar
rested development. Why, accord
ing to the way evolutionists meas
ure progress it would have taken
at least 10000 years for the pro-
gress that has taken place within
the last fifty years. Well, as you
know anyhow, Darwinism is dead.
Biology found the vulnerable spot
in the heel of this Achilles Of evolu-
ton and recent research work has
preached the funeral sermon.
Again, the claim, that the first
five books Of the Bible, commonly
called the Pentateuch, could not
have been written by Moses at the
period claimed must now be dis
carded forever. Both the Egyptians
and Babylonians at the very begin
ming of their history had a system
of writing in about as high state of
development as it ever reached, with
exceptions, of course. The Prisse
papyrus of Egypt and the Cuneiform
clay tablets of Babylonia have been
discovered more than thousand
years older than the days of Abra-
ham. Please bear in mind we say
these writings are older than the
writings of Moses but the records
they contain are not so old as many
of the records in the Pentateuch.
We derived our alphabet from the
Phoenicians but the Phoenicians did
not invent the alphabet, one of the
greatest if not the very greatest of
human inventions. Long before the
Phoenicians the Egyptians and
Babylonians had a system ofalphabet
writing, the hieroglyphs Of Egypt
being a sort of combination of the
alphabetic syllable and picture writ
ing. Recently a remarkable discov-
cry has been made in the island of
Crete. King Minos of the Minotaur
and the Labyrinth legend of ancient
Grecian history is proven a mighty
reality. And it is also proven that
these Cretans over whom Minos rul-
ed had we'll developed system of
alphabet writing, over 1000 years
before the days of Christ or a little
earlier than the time of Abraham.
You may ask what does this have to
do with my purpose? It shows that
it would have been an easy thing for
Moses to have written the Penta-
touch at the time claimed since in
his day there were several well-de-
veloped systems of writing. But
what does this have to do with Moses
or Abraham who were members of
the Hebrew race? Much every way.
The Hebrews belonged to the same
race of people as the Babylonians Of
their day. Abraham's home was in
Ur of the Chaldees, the ancient seat
of learning of Babylonia and could
doubtless both read and write, while
Moses was educated at the court of
the Pharaohs of Egypt and a forty
year term of contract with Jethro in
the land of indian under Babylonian
culture and influence. No student
will now risk his attainments in as
sorting that Moses could not have
written the Pentateuch at the period
usually assigned.
Again, another consideration is
that while the work of antiquarians
has thrown food of light on Bible
times, the Bible itself has helped
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