is evident, that the Jewish people were not more remarkable for their
pre-eminence in privilege, than for their grossness of mental vision under
a dispensation specially and miraculously constituted and administered to
enlighten them. The sacred history of which they are the subject, exhibits
every mode in which the intelligent faculties may evade or frustrate the
truth presented to them; every way in which the decided preference for
darkness may avail to defy what might have been presumed to be
irresistible irradiations; every perversity of will which renders men as
accountable and criminal for being ignorant as for acting against
knowledge; and every form of practical mischief in which the natural
tendency of ignorance, especially wilful ignorance, is shown. A great part
of what the devout teachers of that people had to address to them,
wherever they appeared among them, was in reproach of their ignorance, and
in order, if possible, to dispel it. And were we to indulge our fancy in
picturing the forms and circumstances in which it was encountered by those
teachers, we might be sure of not erring much by figuring situations very
similar to what might occur in much later and nearer states of society. If
we should imagine one of these good and wise instructors going into a
promiscuous company of the people, and asking them, with a view at once to
see into their minds and inform them, say, ten plain questions, relative
to matters somewhat above the ordinary secular concerns of life, but
essential for them to understand, it would be a quite probable supposition
that he did not obtain from the whole company rational answers to more
than three, or two, or even one, of those questions; notwithstanding that
every one of them might be designedly so framed, as to admit of an easy
reply from the most prominent of the dictates of the "law and the
prophets," and from the right application of the memorable facts in the
national history of the Jews. In his earlier experiments he might be
supposed very reluctant to admit the fact, that so many of his countrymen,
in one spot, could have been so faithfully maintaining the ascendency of