posterity as merely the instruments of the Eternal to bring about these ends; it is repeatedly declared therein, that the reason of God’s dispensations towards them was, “that all the earth might know that the Eternal is God, and that there is no other but Him.”  According to its history, when God threatened to destroy the Israelites for their perverseness in the wilderness, and offers Moses, interceding for them, to raise, up his seed to fulfil the purposes for which he designed the posterity of Abraham; he tells Moses that his purpose should not be frustrated through the perverseness of the chosen instruments; “but, (saith He), as surely as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord,” Numbers xiv. 21.  Many passages of similar import are contained in the Psalms, and the Prophets.  In fact, there is no truth at all in the statement of the Catechisms, that the Old Testament was merely preparatory, and intended merely to prepare the way for “a better covenant,” as Paul says; even for another religion, (the Christian) which was to convert all nations; for, (if the Old Testament be suffered to tell its own story,) we shall find, that it claims, and challenges the honour of beginning, and completing, this magnificent design solely to itself.  I was going to overwhelm the patience of the reader with quotations from it, to this purpose; but being willing to spare him and myself, I will only produce one, which, as it is direct and peremptory to this effect, is as good as a hundred, to demonstrate that the Old Testament at least claims what I have said.  Zech. viii. 20, “Thus saith the Eternal of Hosts:  It shall yet come to pass, that there shall come people, and the inhabitants of many cities; and the inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying:  “Let us go speedily to pray before the Eternal, and to seek the Eternal of Hosts:  I will go also.  Yea, many people, and strong nations shall come to seek the Eternal of Hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the Eternal.  Thus saith the Eternal of Hosts:  In those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all the languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, we will go with you.”

Be it so, it may be said;—­“Still, it is to Christianity the world owes the consoling doctrine of a life to come.  Life and immortality were brought to light by the Gospel,” say the Christian divines; and they assert, that the doctrine of a resurrection was not known to Jew or Gentile, till they learned it from Jesus’ followers.  The Old Testament, (say they,) taught the Jews nothing of the glorious truths concerning “the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting,” their “beggarly elements” confined their views to temporal happiness, only.”  These assertions I shall prove from the Old Testament itself, to be contrary to fact; for the Jews both knew, and were taught by their Bibles to expect a resurrection, and believed it as firmly as any Christian can, or ever