It is needless for us to go backward to the days before the flood to learn to what extent these truths were understood by the antediluvian races; for all the accounts that we have of those peoples come down to us through the channel of the Holy Priesthood, and all the records, books, traditions, etc., of those early inhabitants of our globe were brought to the children of the renovated earth through one family, that of Noah; and that Patriarch, by right of universal fatherhood to the new generations, ruled them as High Priest, Patriarch and King, as one to whom the living God revealed His mind and will, through whom the keys, rights and powers of the everlasting Priesthood were continued upon the earth, and with whom special covenants were made by the Almighty and the bow set in the clouds as an everlasting token of their perpetuity and unchangeableness. It will be perceived that in the first days after the flood there was but one religion, and that was the worship of the true God under the ministration and guidance of His duly authorized servants. Further, that the belief of the first inhabitants of the postdiluvian age was not only the true one, but it was accompanied by the power and authority of the Holy Priesthood, which received revelations direct from the Almighty. Thus the young world, like the old, was opened with a dispensation of God's mercy, and the posterity of Noah were not left to grope in the dark for light and truth, anymore than had been the immediate descendants of our great original father. The effects of thus repeopling the earth under the direct and immediate guidance of Jehovah, through His duly appointed servants, have been felt through all succeeding generations; for men, as they scattered over the earth, took with them the seeds of Divine truth, and though, frequently, in after ages, they disfigured it with false and base theories of their own, introduced all manner of corruptions into their forms of worship, established orders of uninspired and unauthorized priesthood, and replaced the worship of the true God by idolatry, yet the fact of the existence of God the universal Father was not entirely forgotten, nor was the doctrine of the atonement ever utterly obliterated from the minds of men. So strong and so universal a hold had this principle in the varied religions of antiquity, that its very strength has been used as an argument against the doctrine; and it has been vigorously asserted that the Gospel taught by the Savior was of pagan origin, and that He was simply a reformer who took the most excellent wisdom of past ages and framed it into a code of morals and system of religious faith to suit His own ideas and accomplish His own purposes, however noble those purposes might have been.