Though I shall not think it necessary, like Racine’s advocate in Les Plaideurs, to go back to the Assyrians and the Babylonians to illustrate my proposition, yet I must begin from a very distant period, in order to make my views thoroughly comprehensible. I must therefore beg you to notice that the tendency of man’s mind always is, and always has been, towards the visible and the tangible. The pure abstraction of a Governing Will without any perceptible presence, has in it something too remote from the common habits, powers, and feelings of human nature, ever to be thoroughly embraced by the heart of man; and we find that the Deity has always condescended so far to the weakness of his creatures, as to give the imagination some resting place. Thus the patriarch had his altar of sacrifice, where the fire from heaven marked the present Deity—and the Israelite had first the pillar of the cloud, and then the tabernacle, where the mysterious Shechinah dwelt over the mercy seat. Yet even this indistinct representation of an embodied Deity, did not satisfy the people: they required a _form_, tangible, visible, and Aaron yielded to the wish; because he thought it a prudent and allowable compliance with the weakness of human nature. He was wrong, and was punished for it; and this transaction we shall find the type and foreshadowing of every thing that has since happened in the world with regard to religion. The Almighty gives man just enough to rest his thoughts upon: it is the fire on the altar, the cloud, the temple, and last of all _the man_, in whom our devotion may find also an object of affection: but he requires that we shall not go beyond this. We must not return to earth, and make for ourselves a worship less spiritual than he has instituted; on the contrary, he requires us to pierce through the veil as we advance in knowledge, and discern the spiritual through the visible. Hence the perpetual denunciations of the prophets against the Jews for their adherence to forms, which latterly they did adhere to, instead of giving attention to the purification of their hearts.