From Adam to Noah righteous men taught and testified of the truth, denounced sin and warned sinners; yet all the while Satan sowed assiduously the tares of wickedness in the hearts of men, and with such evil success that, excepting Noah and his household, the whole human family became corrupt. So awful was the condition that the floods came and swept the ungodly race from the earth; and their rebellious spirits passed into the state of duress, in which they remained until the way of repentance was opened to them anew by the ministry of the disembodied Christ over twenty-three centuries later. See 1 Peter 3:18-20. As the children of men multiplied and nations developed after the Deluge, the wholesome plants of Divine truth struggled against the rank growth of error; therefore the Lord commanded Abraham to leave his idolatrous country and kindred, that through him and his posterity the saving powers of the Priesthood might be preserved among men. The tares of idolatry and its inseparable abominations grew apace. Even the harrowing experiences of Egyptian bondage failed to extirpate the weeds from Israel, though the fertilizing effect of humility under suffering did much to nurture and sustain the precious grain of the covenant. At the time of the Exodus the Israelites constituted the few whom the Lord could call His own; and they had to undergo a disciplinary probation--a course of intensive and purifying cultivation, covering four decades in the wilderness--before they were deemed fit to enter the land of their inheritance. They were distinguished as Jehovah-worshipers, and as such stood apart from the more thoroughly apostate and degenerate world. But even Israel's fields were full of tares; and the Lord mercifully suspended the fulness of the Gospel requirements, which, because of violation, would have been a means of condemnation; and the law of carnal commandments, generalized as the Mosaic Code, was given instead--as a schoolmaster, whose rigid insistence and compelling restraint, whose rod of correction would, in the course of centuries, prepare the covenant though recreant people for the reestablishment of the Gospel--as was effected through the personal ministry of the Redeemer. See Gal. 3:23-26. Following the Messianic ministry and apostolic dispensation, another cloud of apostasy enveloped the world, and for well-nigh sixteen centuries held the race befogged in its clammy mists. In this murky and fetid atmosphere the weeds of superstition, unbelief and human dogma flourished as a dank tropical jungle, while belief in revealed truth survived only as a wilted growth amidst the prevalent insalubrity.