The projectors and architects of this great paragon and wonder of the world were not a horde of ignorant, wandering nomades. They had knowledge and arts adequate to an undertaking, whether considered merely as a physical undertaking, or in connection with the stupendous and enduring system of imposture, impiety, and misery it was devoted to, which has not been equalled since: and which may well be conceived of as sufficient to occasion the local and special interposition of the Messenger Jehovah to confound their language and scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. Their astronomy, and probably their geometry and other abstruse branches of knowledge, were, at least in respect to their leading principles, not inferior to those of the present day. Prideaux, speaking of this tower, which he holds to be the same with that destroyed Xerxes, observes, that "when Alexander took Babylon, Callisthenes the philosopher, who accompanied him thither, found they had astronomical observations for nineteen hundred and three years backward from that time, which carrieth the account as high as the one hundred and fifteenth year after the flood, which was within fifteen years after the Tower of Babel was built. For the confusion of tongues, which followed immediately after the building of that tower, happened in the year wherein Peleg was born, which was an hundred and one years after the flood, and fourteen years after that, those observations began. This account Callisthenes sent from Babylon into Greece, to his master Aristotle," &c. (Book II., part 1.) CHAPTER XX. The system of Idolatry founded on a perversion of the Doctrine of Mediation--References to the Worshippers of Baal, Israelite and Pagan. This system of idolatry was founded on the doctrine of mediation, which was the basis of the revealed system of true religion. But in the application of that doctrine, idolatry exhibited an entire perversion, ascribing the mediatorial office and relations, not to Messiah, the Messenger Jehovah, the one only Mediator between God and man, but to his adversary, antagonist, and competitor, who emphatically in this respect, and as creator and administrator of providence, arrogated the office, prerogatives, relations and works of Jehovah, the delegated Personal Word. This consideration alone affords a clue to any intelligent understanding of the system in its details, or of the succeeding history of the antagonism; of the enormity and turpitude of idolatry as a crime; and of the amazing retributions and judgments which it called down upon the Canaanites and other nations devoted to the worship of Baal, and upon the Israelites on their apostatizing to that worship.