Thousands of years ago, Solomon perceived this fact. He was a man of great learning as well as practical common sense. He understood not merely the science of government, but likewise botany, or the science of plants, from the mighty trees that grew on Mount Lebanon, to the tiny hyssop that grew in crevices of the garden wall: and the natural history of beasts and birds, reptiles and fishes. He was also skilled in literature; he is said to have made "three thousand proverbs, and his songs were a thousand and five" (_see I. Kings, iv chap_). Better than all this, in the opinion of many, especially infidels, he made money, and tells us how to make and keep it. Any young man will make hundreds of dollars by reading his Proverbs and acting on them. They would have saved some of us many a thousand. Of course Solomon knew something of the world. He was a wide-awake trader; his ships coasted the shores of Asia and Africa, from Madagascar to Japan; and the overland caravans from India and China drew up in the depots he built for them in the heart of the desert. He knew the well-doing people with whom trade was profitable, and the savages who could only send apes and peacocks (_see I. Kings, chap. x_). Solomon was a philosopher as well as a trader, and could not help being deeply impressed with the great fact that there was a wide difference between the nations of the earth. Some were enlightened, enterprising, civilized and flourishing; others were naked savages, perpetually at war with each other, living in ignorance, poverty, vice and on the verge of starvation. {74} [ILLUSTRATION: GIANT CITIES OF BASHAN, BUILT BY SOLOMON] {75} Solomon also noticed another fact, that the nations which were favored with the revelations of God, were the civilized, enterprising and comparatively prosperous nations. In Palestine, Chaldea and Mesopotamia, God had revealed His will to certain persons for the benefit of the race. Even Egypt, it is now generally admitted, passed through the era of her greatest prosperity at the time she was in close relationship and communication with the Hebrew Patriarchs, Abraham, Jacob and Joseph, who were the living oracles of God, and whose influence greatly increased for a time her national prosperity. On the other hand the nations that were uninfluenced by the revelations of God, were the idolatrous savages, who were but little above the level of the brutes. Solomon epitomized these great facts in the proverb, "Where there is no vision the people perish, but he that keepeth the law, happy is he" (_Proverbs xxix_, 18). "O," says the skeptic, "the world is wiser now than it was in Solomon's days. He lived in the old times of ignorance and superstition, when men attributed everything extraordinary to the gods. But we are too wise now to believe in revelation."