erprising, civilized, and flourishing; others were
naked savages, living in ignorance, poverty, vice, and starvation,
perpetually murdering one another, and dying out of the earth.

Solomon noticed _another great fact_. In his own country, and in
Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and some others, God had revealed his will
to certain persons for the benefit of their neighbors. He did so
generally by opening the eyes of these prophets to see future events,
and the great facts of the unseen world, and by giving them messages of
warning and instruction to the nations. From this mode of revelation, by
opening the prophets eyes to see realities invisible to others, they
were called seers, and the revelations they were commissioned to make
were called visions; and revelation from God was called, in general,
vision. Solomon was struck with the fact that some nations were thus
favored by God, and other nations were not. The question would naturally
arise, What difference does it make, or does it make any difference,
whether men have any revelation of God's will or not?

Solomon was led to observe a _third great fact_. The nations which were
favored with these revelations were the civilized, enterprising, and
comparatively prosperous nations. In proportion to the amount of divine
revelation they had, and their obedience to it, they prospered. The
nations that had no revelation from God were the idolatrous savages, who
were sinking down to the level of brutes, and perishing off the face of
the earth. He daguerreotypes these three great facts in the proverb:
"Where there is no vision the people perish; but he that keepeth the
law, happy is he."

Oh, says the Rationalist, the world is wiser now than it was in
Solomon's days. He lived in the old mythological period, when men
attributed everything extraordinary to the gods. But the world is too
wise now to believe in any supernatural revelation. "The Hebrew and
Christian religions like all others have their myths." "The fact is, the
pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews during the
whole of their political existence." "When, therefore, we meet with an
account of certain phenomena, or events of which it is expressly stated
or implied that they were produced immediately by God himself (such as
divine apparitions, voices from heaven, and the like), or by human
beings possessed of supernatural powers (miracles, prophecies, etc.),
such an account is so far to be considered n