Canon Fausset on the Tower of Babel.
IN his address before the Evangelical Alliance, at Cheltenham, 1890, Canon Fausset spoke of the Tower of Babel. He said that at the time when it was built, men had substituted the worship of the sun for the worship of the true God. In all pagan religions, sun-worship is the first departure from the spiritual worship of the unseen God. The pagan holy places were at the east of the temples, because those were nearest the rising sun. In the Jerusalem temple the west end was chosen, to mark the opposition of the true religion to all the false ones. Confirmation of the Biblical story of Babel has been found near the ruins of Babylon. An inscription on the Temple of Bel, the sun-god, which was restored by Nebuchadnezzar, states that it was built by a former king, forty-two ages ago, and that "since a remote time the people abandoned it, expressing their words without order." Canon Fausset showed that the further back we go, on examining the primitive traditions of nations, the purer we find their faith, and that divers peoples, from divers stems, show in their traditions a reminiscence of one primitive history, derived from common ancestors. "This common ground of reminiscence," he said, "extends exactly down to the Tower of Babel, and no further. The Oshini negroes of Africa, the Tongas in Polynesia, and the Toltecs in Mexico, agree, in the main, just in those primitive Bible facts." In these days, when so many are regarding the first eleven chapters of Genesis as unhistorical writings, it is reassuring to find so diligent and careful a student as Canon Fausset bearing such testimony to the accuracy of the primitive Genesis records.—Christian Commonwealth (London).