fastens the chains of civil
and ecclesiastic despotism.

It is not possible for a people thoroughly under the influence of the
teachings of the religion of Christ to be ignorant of their own rights and
the responsibility of their rulers. Where the teachings of Christ and the
Bible form public opinion the people must be free. No such tyrant as
Caligula or Nero would be tolerated in Protestant Christendom. The
necessary effect of Christianity upon an abused people is to make them
restless under a tyrant's yoke. The author of Travels in England, France,
Spain and the Barbary States, although an enemy to the Bible, said, after
leaving the Barbary States and arriving in France, I could breathe more
freely. I no longer looked upon my fellow men with distrust, and I thanked
God that I was once more in a Christian land. When we survey the history
of past events and kingdoms we, too, find good reasons to thank the Lord
for a Christian land. The only authoritative history of remote events and
kingdoms is in the writings of Moses and the Prophets. In the times of
Moses there were no historical records in Greece, Chaldea, Phoenicia,
Egypt or Assyria. No other historian lived so remote as Moses. He was five
hundred years before Sanconiathan, and more than a thousand years before
Manetho. He has been called the _father of history_. Men have claimed that
astronomical calculations carry us farther back, but this claim has been
successfully refuted by the calculations of Bedford. There is a fact upon
record in Gillie's history of Greece that confirms Bedford's calculations.
This man says: After Alexander conquered Babylon he eagerly demanded the
astronomical calculations that had been preserved in that ancient capital
about nineteen centuries, and ordered them faithfully transcribed and
handed to Aristotle, who was the preceptor of this prince. They extended
back twenty two hundred and thirty-four years behind the Christian era.
There is no reliable history so ancient as the writings of Moses. All the
efforts between Moses and David are without regular form--a mass of
rearranged tradition, both fabulous and corrupt; long after the times of
David the pages of writers regarded authentic, are loaded with absurd and
disgusting fictions.

Nimrod's kingdom was Babel, and he was a tyrant, instigating war and
bloodshed everywhere, laying the nations under tribute and transmitting
his tyrannical spirit and powers from son to son, until the Egyp