11. What signs were given of Messiah's birth to the people on the Western Hemisphere? 12. By what divine providence was Messiah's life preserved in infancy? 13. What was the character of Herod the Great? (Note 4.) 14. Describe Herod's last illness and death. (Note 5.) 15. Where did Joseph settle on his return from Egypt? 16. What prophecies were fulfilled by Messiah being taken into Egypt and Nazareth? {20} SECTION II.[11] 1. State of the Religious World at Messiah's Birth.--At the time of the birth of the Son of God, the enfeebled world was tottering on its foundations. The national religions which had satisfied the parents, no longer proved sufficient for the children. The new generations could not repose contented within the ancient forms. The gods of every nation, when transported to Rome--then the dominant political power in the world--there lost their oracles, as the nations themselves had there lost their liberty. Brought face to face in the capital they had destroyed each other, and their divinity had vanished. A great void was thus occasioned in the religion of the world. 2. A kind of deism, destitute alike of spirit and of life, floated for a time above the abyss in which the vigorous superstitions of antiquity had been engulfed. But like all negative creeds it had no power to reconstruct. All nations were plunged in the grossest superstition. Most of them, indeed all except the Jews, supposed that each country and province was subjected to a set of very powerful beings whom they called gods, and whom the people, in order to live happily, must propitiate with various rites and ceremonies. These deities were supposed to differ materially from each other in sex, power, nature and offices. Some nations went beyond others in impiety of worship, but all stood chargeable with absurdity, if not gross stupidity in matters of religion. (See note 1, end of section.) {21} 3. Thus every nation had a class of deities peculiar to itself, among which one was supposed to be pre-eminent over the rest, and was their king, though subject himself to the laws of fate, or to an eternal destiny. The oriental nations had not the same gods as the Gauls, the Germans, and the other northern nations; and the Grecian deities were essentially different from those of the Egyptians, who worshipped brute animals, plants, and various productions of nature and art. Each nation, likewise, had its own method of worshiping its gods; differing widely from the rites of other nations. But, from their ignorance or from other causes the Greeks and Romans maintained that their gods were universally worshipped; and they therefore gave the names of their own gods to the foreign deities which has caused great confusion and errors in the history of ancient religions even in the works of the learned.