published in his presence, with an astonishing demonstration of his majesty and power.

Till then, God had given nothing in writing, that could be a rule to man. The children of Abraham had only circumcision, and the ceremonies that accompanied it, as a token of the covenant, which God had made with that chosen race. They were distinguished by this token from the nations who worshipped false deities: moreover, they preserved themselves in God's covenant, by the remembrance they had of the promises made to their fathers, and were known as a people, who served the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God was so strangely forgotten, that it was necessary to distinguish him by the name of those who had been his worshippers, and of whom he was also the declared protector.

This great God would no longer leave to the bare memory of men the mysteries of religion, and of his covenant. It was time to set stronger barriers to idolatry, which was overflowing all mankind, and likely to extinguish the remains of natural light.

Ignorance and blindness had prodigiously increased since the days of Abraham, In his time, and a little after, the knowledge of God appeared again in Palestine and in Egypt. Melchizedek, king of Salem, was the priest of the Most High God, possessor of heaven and earth *. Abimelech, king of Gerar, and his successor of the same name,

* Gen. xiv. 18, 19.

feared God sware by his name, and admired his power. The threatenings of this great God were dreaded by Pharaoh, king of Egypt: but in the time of Moses, those nations were perverted*. The true God was no more known in Egypt, as the God of all the nations of the world, but as the God of the Hebrews †. Men worshipped the very beasts and reptiles. Every thing was god, but God himself; and the world, which God had made to manifest his power, seemed to have become a temple of idols §. Mankind went so grossly astray, as to worship their own vices and passions; nor must we be astonished at it. There was no power more unavoidable, or more tyrannical than theirs. Man, accustomed to think every thing divine, that was powerful, as he felt himself drawn to vice by an irresistible force, came easily to believe that force without him, and soon made a god of it.

Thence it was, that unchaste love had so many altars, and that the most horrid impurities began to be mingled with sacrifices.

Cruelty entered into them at the same time. Guilty man, racked with the sense of his wickedness, and looking upon the deity as an enemy, thought he could not appease him with ordinary victims. He must shed human blood along with that of beasts: a blind fear drove fathers to offer

* Gen. xxi. 22, 23, xxvi. 28, 29. + Ibid. xii. Exod. v. 1, 2, 3. ix. 1, &c. § Ibid. Levit. xx. 2, 3.

17, 18. viii, 26.

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their children, and to burn them to their gods instead of incense. These sacrifices were common from the time of Moses, and made but a part of those horrible iniquities of the Amorites, whose vengeance God committed to the Israelites.

But they were not peculiar to those people*. It is well known, that in all nations of the world, without excepting one, men have sacrificed men; and there is not a place on the earth, where they have not served some of those dismal and shocking deities, whose implacable hatred to mankind required such victims.

Amidst so much ignorance, man came to worship the very work of his own hands. He thought himself able to lodge divinity in statues, and so totally forgot that God had made him, that he thought in his turn he might make a god. Who could believe, did not experience prove it, that so stupid and brutal an error was not only the most universal, but even the most inveterate and incorrigible among men. Thus we must own, to the confusion of mankind, that the first of truths, that truth, which the world proclaims, that truth, the impression of which is the most powerful, was the farthest from the sight of man. The tradition, which preserved it in their minds, though yet clear, and sufficiently present with them, had they been attentive to it, was ready to vanish away; monstrous fables, as full of

*Herod. l. ii. Cæs. de bell. Gal. vi. Diod. lib. i. v. Plin. lib. xxx. Athen. lib, xiii. Porph. de Abst. lib. ii. Jorn. de reb. Jet. &c.

impiety as of extravagance, assumed its place. The moment was come, when the truth, so ill kept in the memory of men, could no longer be preserved but in writing; and God having, moreover, resolved to form his people to virtue by laws more express, and in greater number, he resolved at the same time, to give them in writing.

Moses was called to this work. That great man collected the history of past ages, those of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and that of Joseph, or, rather, that of God himself, and of his wondrous acts.

He had no need to dig very deep for the traditions of his ancestors. He was born an hundred years after the death of Jacob. The old men of his time might have conversed several years with that holy patriarch: the memory of Joseph, and of the wonders God had done by that great minister of the kings of Egypt, was still recent. Two or

three men's lives reached as far back as Noah, who had seen the children of Adam, and touched, so to speak, the origin of things.

Thus the ancient traditions of mankind, and those of Abraham's family, were not hard to recollect the memory of them was yet alive, and we need not wonder, if Moses, in his Genesis, speaks of things that happened in the first ages as certainties, of which too there were still to be seen remarkable monuments, both in the neighbouring nations, and in the land of Canaan.

Whilst Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had

inhabited that land, they had every where erected monuments of the things which had befallen them. There were still to be shewn the places where they had dwelt; the wells they had digged in those dry countries, to water their families and flocks; the mountains whereon they had sacrificed to God, and on which he had appeared to them; the stones they had erected, or piled up, for a memorial to posterity; and the tombs wherein their sacred ashes were deposited.. The memory of those great men was recent, not only in the whole country, but likewise over all the East; where several famous nations have never forgotten that they came of their race.

Thus, when the Hebrew people entered the promised land, every thing there celebrated their ancestors; both cities and mountains, nay the very stones there spoke of these wondrous men, and of the astonishing visions, by which God had confirmed them in the primitive and true belief.

They, that are ever so little acquainted with antiquity, know how curious the first times were in erecting and preserving such monuments, and how carefully posterity retained the occasions, on which they had been set up. This was one way This was one way of writing history stones have come since to be fashioned and polished: and statues have succeeded, after pillars, to the gross and solid masses erected in the first times.

We have even great reason to believe, that in the family wherein the knowledge of God was preserved, they preserved also