into many discordant dialects.  Was this in any sense an improbable or improper method of making “the devices of the wicked to be of none effect, and of laughing to scorn the counsels of the mighty?” Was it not to have been expected that a fallen race should be disallowed the combinative force necessary to a common language, but that such force should be dissipated and diverted for moral usages into many tongues?—­There they were, all the chiefs of men congregated to accomplish a vast, ungodly scheme:  and interposing Heaven to crush such insane presumption—­and withal thereafter designing to bless by arranging through such means the future interchange of commerce and the enterprise of nationalities—­He, in his Trinity, was not unlikely to have said, “Let us go down, and confound their language.”  What better mode could have been devised to scatter mankind, and so to people the extremities of earth?  In order that the various dialects should crystallize apart, each in its discriminative lump, the nucleus of a nation; that thereafter the world might be able no longer to unite as one man against its Lord, but by conflicting interests, the product of conflicting languages, might give to good a better chance of not being altogether overwhelmed; that, though many “a multitude might go to do evil,” it should not thenceforward be the whole consenting family of man; but that, here by one and there by one, the remembrance of God should be kept extant, and evil no longer acquire an accumulated force, by having all the world one nation.

JOB.

Every scriptural incident and every scriptural worthy deserves its own particular discussion:  and might easily obtain it.  For example; the anterior probability that human life in patriarchal times should have been very much prolonged, was obvious; from consideration of—­1, the benevolence of God; 2, the inexperience of man; and 3, the claim so young a world would hold upon each of its inhabitants:  whilst Holy Writ itself has prepared an answer to the probable objection, that the years were lunar years, or months; by recording that Arphaxad and Salah and Eber and Peleg and Reu and Serug and Nahor, descendants of Shem, each had children at the average age of two-and-thirty, and yet the lives of all varied in duration from a hundred and fifty years to five hundred.  And many similar credibilities might be alluded to:  what shall I say of Abraham’s sacrifice, of Moses and the burning bush, of Jonah also, and Elisha, and of the prophets? for the time would fail me to tell how probable and simple in each instance is its deep and marvellous history.  There is food for philosophic thought in every page of ancient Jewish Scripture scarcely less than in those of primitive Christianity:  here, after our fashion, we have only touched upon a sample.