CONCEPTIONS OF THE DEITY

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, May 20, 1880

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 21

CONCEPTIONS OF THE DEITY.

SOME of the natural conceptions of the Deity by heathen men are wonderfully pure and admirable. They tend to confirm the fact of their great guiltiness, “because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God!” There is a sacred book in China, written long before the time of Christ, which speaks of God as a Being who “knows all things, the secrets of the heart not being hidden from him.”

“In the Hindu writings,” says Rev. J. H. Titcomb, “God is described by some of the most glorious of his attributes; thus, in the Bhagavat Geeta, which is an episode in the great national poem of India called the Mahabharatta, which is certainly nearly three thousand years old, we meet with the following: ‘O Thou who art All in All! Infinite is Thy power and glory! Thou art the Father of all things, animate and inanimate; there is none like unto Thee.’ In Egypt, also, we meet with conceptions of the Deity, which are no less grand and lofty. What can exceed in beauty the inscription of the temple of Isis at Saïs, ‘I am all that hath been, is, and shall be, and no man hath lifted my vail;’ thus bringing out both the unity and eternity of the Divine essence.”

The heathen who thus wrote about God, and their successors, knew, and to this day still know, something of God and his will. When they sin, they know that they are acting in opposition to that will, and they know that they are doing wrong, so that the heathen world is filled with lashing consciences.—Illustrated Missionary News.