Again, “Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work.” The Egyptians dedicated each day of the week to one of their gods. Processions and obscene mirth characterized the homage paid to them. Jehovah commanded the Israelites to keep holy the Sabbath day, and the divine reason for the consecration of this day is that God after the six days' work of creation rested on the seventh day. After the work of six days the command was imperative to rest on the seventh. It is not a bare permission but a command, and in effect the prohibition of idolatrous feasts. Working six days and resting the seventh cut off all opportunity for the riotous feasts of idolatry, and the special guard of the law against it is plain. Moreover we see that idolatry interferes with God's arrangements for the social order of every-day life. Among the heathen, starting from Egypt every day of the week was consecrated to some idol. The same signification of name for each of the seven days is found in the East, in the barbarous North, and in Rome when it was the great center of civilization and of the world's power. The same names used by Pagans are retained by Christendom—names in honor of some god, and a proof—how wide-spread that form and aspect is, that had its development if not its origin in idolatrous Egypt. In our own land the Quakers made a vain attempt against these pagan names by adopting the terms, First day, Second day, etc.; but they were too deeply implanted to be uprooted by such an isolated body. What is in a name? Nothing per se. But the fact of identity of names proves that the stream of idolatry which issued from Egypt has washed the shores of other countries in Asia and in Europe.
When the Lord Jesus was here on the earth He condensed the whole law into two commandments. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. The second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt. 22). If the first and great commandment strikes at the root of idolatry, the second no less denounces the fruits of it. The sins forbidden in the second table of the law are the fruits of the flesh truly, but they flow direct from idolatry; and when the Lord Jesus said “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” He summed up in a word the whole second table of the law. Idolatry forbids none, permits all, sanctions some; for the feasts observed in praise of their idols were the occasions for excess of riot, and debauchery was the incense offered to them. The morality of idolaters is on a par with their worship. Their moral sense was governed by superstition; this led them to vice that allowed no check.
Honor to parents is the first thing in the second table. The Egyptians, like the Spartans afterward, paid respect to old age; but this might be paid where there was no honor rendered to parents such as the law enjoined, and of which obedience is the essence. Whether this commandment was commonly observed by the youth of Egypt, or not, we know that filial obedience forms no part of the code of idolatry, nor does it forbid anything that the law of God forbids. On the contrary the two next prohibitions are sanctioned. The Egyptians annually sacrificed a girl, and some affirm a boy and a girl to the Nile. In cities called Typhonian at certain seasons men were immolated. Theft and false witness were venial. Not the perpetration of the crime, but the discovery of it was considered shameful.
Such was the condition into which idolatry plunged mankind. Nor is this the worst aspect of it. It was far worse, and so displayed in Israel and Judaic that the images of the gods whose worship sanctioned such abominations were placed in the temple of Jehovah. It was lowering the true God to the level of their idols. As with the Gentile so with the Israelite, their gods were not only the deifying the worst passions of man, but the blinded and perverse mind fastened upon the objects around it, and clothed them with supernatural power. All that was grand or fearful, all that inspired awe or admiration, was deemed the dwelling-place of a god. Day and night, the winds, the sea were presided over by an imaginary deity. A god was found on the mountain top, and in the gloomy cavern. The smiling cornfield and the dark recesses of the forest, rivers, fountains, each had its tutelary divinity. Gradually, near the sacred places, temples were raised, and a symbol of the god placed therein; then homage paid to it until at last even the imaginary deity had to give place to the material idol. If amid all this darkness there was with some the faintest idea of a sole Power or Being above all, as with the Athenians (Acts 17), it was only that he was too high and too great to be concerned with man. A god unknown must have his shrine; but the true God was unknown, for He is so much concerned with man that in His love He gave His only-begotten Son to die for him, that believing he might not perish but have everlasting life.
If we turn for a moment to secular writers we find that this notion of an otiose god largely obtained in the East, in India. Among the Hindus, their “Supreme” was so wrapped up in his own perfections as to commit the charge of this world to inferior deities, and therefore in his relation to. men and things above in eternal sleep. This was their “Brahm” who in his primary state is a being without qualities or attributes, without intellect, without consciousness, without intelligence! A being without these is an impossibility. The Supreme is, The absolute NOTHING!! But Brahm awakes to consciousness, (how such a nonentity could is a marvel), and then he becomes omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and exclaims “I am!!!” And this is where the vaunted intellect of man leads us when it prys into the regions above mere matter. Western philosophy does not travel by the seine route, but its last stage is not less absurd. For if the Hindu, in his mythological journey back to the Original Cause of all, arrives at eternal sleep; confusion, or chaos, with the eternity of matter is the Ultinaa Thule of the Pagan west, where was found no other solution of the problem of good and evil as seen in the present condition of creation, than that each is eternal and was ever in conflict.
Historians say that idolatry as a system was carried from Egypt to India after the age of Joseph, or about the year B.C. 1635, or a little later. That afterward the same organized system spread from the north east of Asia to the north west of Europe, and prevailed throughout this region before E.c. 542. The Hindu doctrine of Brahm seems to confirm this. God's assertion of Himself as “I am” could never have been conceived by fallen man, and it must have been carried to India from the land where that name was first declared. Those who have examined Hindu mythology assert that its fundamental doctrine is one God. (What kind of God it is we have just seen). If so, then there—is the fact of God's revelation of Himself as the One God, to the Gentile world; the responsibility of the idolater in presence of this revelation, and the perversion of this truth by man, under the power of Satan. Divergent in detail and development as this system became in different countries, its identity as to source is also seen in that time is reckoned by weeks and days, and that the days of the week are consecrated to the same or similar gods.
Andity War—Dies Solis, the Sun's day—Sunday.
Soma War—Dies Lunae, the Moon's day—Monday.
Mungela War—Maras dies, Thisco's day—Tuesday.
Boodha War—Mercurii dies, W'oden's day—Wednesday
Vrihaspat War—Iovis dies, Thor's day—Thursday
Shukra War—Veneris dies, Free's day—Friday
Themisker War-Saturni dies, Seater's day—Saturday)