February, 1941
T H E K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
46
When rationalism, pessimism, and superman philosophy supplanted the Word of God on German students’ study tables, seeds of defeat began to produce a terrible harvest. The same seeds are bringing forth a rank growth in our own America today.
Will America, Like Germany, Suffer Defeat?
By KENNETH M. MONROE* Los Angeles, California One by one, they tower and are gone.” Were it possible to have a panorama of six thousand years of world his tory pass before our eyes, we could see nation after nation rising to prominence, glory, and power, abiding an hour, and then mingling its ashes with the dust of time. During the first half of the third millennium' before Christ, the Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom of Egypt were building the great pyramids and the Sphinx.- These structures still stand as silent but eloquèht witnesses to a civil ization that disintegrated. And then, like the Egyptian mythical phenix of Heliopolis, civilization rose again from its ashes, young and beautiful in the Empire Period (c .'1600-945 B. C.). Dis integration followed again and Egypt passed from the picture. The Assyrian Empire rose to prom inence under Tiglath-pileser IV, a great warrior and a great statesman, who ruled 745 to 727 B. C. He was suc ceeded by Shalmaneser V, who besieged Samaria of Israel for three years. Then came Sargon, who took the ten tribes into captivity, from whence they never returned; Sennacherib, whose anny at
the gates of Jerusalem was destroyed by the angel of Jehovah (2 Ki. 19: 35); Erarhaddon, who rebuilt Babylon; and Asharbanipal, who brought in the Augustan Age of Assyria. He collected a great library at Nineveh, which lyas found by Layard and Rassam about eighty-five years ago. These kings brought great glory to Assyria, and especially to the capital city, Nineveh, by their conquests. Yel, in all the glory and wealth and power, Assyria suffered a lingering death and fell at last to the Babylonians. In the year 625 B. C., Nabopolassar established the Neo-Babylonian Empire, extending his reign from the Euphrates to Carchemish. Nebuchadnezzar, his son, of Bible fame, raised Babylon to a height of power which rivaled that attained under the great Hammurapi. Nabuna’id and Belshazzar ruled for a period and then lost their empire to Darius the Mede and Cyrus the Per sian in 53g B. C. The world empire of the Medes and Persians fell before the young con queror, Alexander the , Great. Th« Grecian kingdom established by Alex ander lasted from 333 B. C. to the com-
P art T. fn p ^ H E PASSING of nations, as well as of individuals, is no more strik- X ingly portrayed than in Poussin’s painting, “The I Arcadian Shepherds,” long shown in the Louvre of Paris. The idyl depicts shepherds and shepherd esses while at play coming upon a crumbling tombstone partially hidden by an old tree. While the others .look on, one in the group is tracing-out the half-obliterated Inscription, “Et in Ar cadia Ego”—“I too have been in Ar- cady.” A shadow is- cast upon their gaiety as the passing ,of life is thus called to their attention. One is touched by the same sadness, moving among the pyramids and tem ples of Egypt, picking his way over littered sands of Tyre, musing amid the solitude of Jerash, Baalbek, and the Roman forums, disturbing the jackals of Babylon and Nineveh, and striving to envision the Panathenaea circling the Parthenon.
“Their mighty shadows cast, The giant fqrms of empire On their way to ruin,
*Oean, Bible Institute o f L ot Angeles,
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker