20.

While God guided His chosen people through all the degrees of a child-like education, the other nations of the earth had gone on by the light of reason.  The most part had remained far behind the chosen people.  Only a few had got before them.  And this too, takes place with children, who are allowed to grow up left to themselves:  many remain quite raw, some educate themselves even to an astonishing degree.

21

But as these more fortunate few prove nothing against the use and necessity of Education, so the few heathen nations, who even appear to have made a start in the knowledge of God before the chosen people, prove nothing against a Revelation.  The Child of Education begins with slow yet sure footsteps; it is late in overtaking many a more happily organised child of nature; but it does overtake it; and thenceforth can never be distanced by it again.

22

Similarly—­Putting aside the doctrine of the Unity of God, which in a way is found, and in a way is not found, in the books of the Old Testament—­that the doctrine of immortality at least is not discoverable in it, is wholly foreign to it, that all doctrine connected therewith of reward and punishment in a future life, proves just as little against the Divine origin of these books.  Notwithstanding the absence of these doctrines, the account of miracles and prophecies may be perfectly true.  For let us suppose that these doctrines were not only wanting therein, but even that they were not at all true; let us suppose that for mankind all was over in this life; would the Being of God be for this reason less demonstrated?  Would God be for this less at liberty, would it less become Him to take immediate charge of the temporal fortunes of any people out of this perishable race?  The miracles which He performed for the Jews, the prophecies which He caused to be recorded through them, were surely not for the few mortal Jews, in whose time they had happened and been recorded:  He had His intentions therein in reference to the whole Jewish people, to the entire Human Race, which, perhaps, is destined to remain on earth forever, though every individual Jew and every individual man die forever.

23

Once more, The absence of those doctrines in the writings of the Old Testament proves nothing against their Divinity.  Moses was sent from God even though the sanction of his law only extended to this life.  For why should it extend further?  He was surely sent only to the Israelitish people of that time, and his commission was perfectly adapted to the knowledge, capacities, yearnings of the then existing Israelitish people, as well as to the destination of that which belonged to the future.  And this is sufficient.

24

So far ought Warburton to have gone, and no further.  But that learned man overdrew his bow.  Not content that the absence of these doctrines was no discredit to the Divine mission of Moses, it must even be a proof to him of the Divinity of the mission.  And if he had only sought this proof in the adaptation of such a law to such a people!