Whatever controversies may arise out of these texts, and many others which I might cite, one fact subsists and rises above all question and all controversy. Seventeen centuries passed in the interval between the Decalogue being received by Moses upon Mount Sinai, and the actual approach of the Messiah announced by the prophets; and at the end of these seventeen centuries, the God, from whom Moses received the Decalogue, He who defined himself to be "I am that I am." Jehovah, still is, has never ceased to be the God, the sole God of Israel. Israel has passed through all governments, undergone all vicissitudes, fallen into all the errors to which it is possible for a nation to succumb: the Jews have had a hierarchy, and judges, and kings; they have been alternately conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves; they have had their days of power and their days of humiliation, their temptation to idolatry and paroxysms of impiety; still they have ever returned to the One God: to the true God; their faith has survived all their faults and all their misfortunes; and after those seventeen centuries, Israel is waiting at the hand of Jehovah a Messiah, to be, according to the affirmation of its greatest prophets, the Liberator and the Saviour, not of Israel alone, but of all nations. {229} Fact without parallel in history! In vain shall men exhaust against it all their science, and all their scepticism: there is here more than the work of man; the fact itself is not human. But what more shall that fact become, and what shall be our belief, when all shall have received its consummation,--the prophecies their accomplishment,--when Jehovah shall have given to the world Jesus Christ? {230} Eighth Meditation. Jesus Christ According To The Gospel. Need I say that by the words, "the Gospel," here used, I understand the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles, all the books, in fact, which compose the Canon of the New Testament as it is received by all Christians?