LXI. To this category of providential measures belongs the state of isolation and of precarious subsistence, in which, by the Divine will, the first fathers had to live, in respect to their neighbours, in that same land which was yet promised to them as a perpetual inheritance; whereby they were brought to learn from the beginning that the great work, which their children were called upon to accomplish, was not absolutely dependent on the possession of a land under their own sovereignty, but rather on the religious doctrines to which they were to remain faithfully attached. To it belongs, also, the severance or removal of the elder branch of the first two families, which was too much inclined to material interests, to teach thereby that physical superiority is not at all requisite to the preservation of a covenant based entirely on spirituality. And, lastly, to the same category of measures belongs the decreed long servitude of the Abrahamites in a strange land, in which, not only the door to social enjoyments would be shut against them, but a barbarous tyranny would also deprive them of the free exercise of acts which are an imprescriptible right of all mortals. Through the instrumentality of such an oppression, the profound counsels of the Eternal Wisdom designed so to regulate the first education of that growing people, that, refined in the crucible of adversity, it should early learn to renounce the subjection of the senses, and turn its heart and soul to God, from whom alone it could hope salvation. It was only by depriving that people of all human support, and of all extraneous influences on its culture, that it could acquire a character, firm, independent, tenacious in the principles adopted, adverse to foreign notions, faithful to its vocation, and that its mind could be deeply impressed with the sentiment of a constant adoration of the Supreme Being, as its only Deliverer, Legislator, Father, and Sovereign. CHAPTER IX.