that appears so peculiar and marvellous. The nature of man is in such a
moral condition, that anything is the less acceptable for coming directly
from God; it being quite consistent, that the state of mind which is
declared to be "enmity against him," should have a dislike to his coming
so near, as to impart his communications by his immediate act, bearing on
them the fresh and sacred impression of his hand. The supplies for man's
temporal being are conveyed to him through an extended medium, through a
long process of nature and art, which seems to place the great First Cause
at a commodious distance; and those gifts are, on that account, more
welcome, on the whole, than if they were sent as the manna to the
Israelites. The manna itself might not have been so soon loathed, had it
been produced in what we call the regular course of nature. And with
respect to the intellectual communications which were given to constitute
the light of knowledge in their souls, there can, on the same principle,
be no doubt that the people would more willingly have opened their minds
to receive them and exercise the thinking faculties on them, if they could
have appeared as something originating in human wisdom, or at least as
something which, though primarily from a divine origin, had been long
surrendered by the Revealer, to maintain itself in the world by the
authority of reason only, like the doctrines worked out from mere human
speculation. But truth that was declared to them, and inculcated on them,
through a continual immediate manifestation of the Sovereign Intelligence,
had a glow of Divinity (if we may so express it) that was unspeakably
offensive to their minds, which therefore receded with instinctive recoil,
They were averse to look toward that which they could not see without
seeing God; and thus they were hardened in ignorance, through a reaction
of human depravity against the too luminous approach of the Divine
presence to give them wisdom.

But in whatever degree the case might be thus, as to the cause, the fact