The primitive revelation did not abandon mankind on its development and dispersion; it accompanied it everywhere, as a general and permanent revelation. The light which had lighted the first man spread amongst all nations and throughout all ages, assuming the character of ideas, universal and uncontested; of instincts, spontaneous and indestructible. No nation has been without this light, none left to its own unassisted efforts to grope its way through the darkness of life. Let not the human understanding pride itself too much upon its works; the glory does not belong to it alone: what it has accomplished it has accomplished by aid of the primitive principles received from God; in all his works and all his progress man has had for point of departure and support that primitive revelation. {139} All the grand doctrines, all the mighty institutions, which have governed the world, whatever intermixture of monstrous and fatal errors they may have contained, have preserved a trace of the fundamental verities which were the dowry of humanity at its birth. God has forsaken no portion of the human race; and not less amidst the errors into which it has fallen, than in the noble developments which constitute its glory, we recognise signs of the primitive teaching derived from its Divine Author. After the revelation made to the first man, and in the midst of the general revelation diffused over all mankind, a great event occurs in history: a special revelation takes place, and has for its seat the bosom of an inconsiderable nation, that had been shut in during sixteen centuries in a little corner of the world; and it was thence that, nineteen centuries ago, that revelation proceeded to enlighten and to subdue, according to the predictions of its Author, all the human race. {140} A man of an imagination as fertile as his knowledge is profound, who, with an admirable candour has in his works associated hypothesis and faith, M. Ewald, professor at the University of Göttingen, has recently thus characterised this event:--"The history of the old Jewish people is fundamentally the history of the true religion, proceeding from step to step to its complete development, rising through all kinds of struggles, until it achieves a supreme victory, and finally manifesting itself in all its majesty and power, in order to spread irresistibly, by its proper virtue, so as to become the eternal possession and blessing of all nations." [Footnote 27] [Footnote 27: H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, bis Christus. 2nd ed., vol. i. p. 9. Göttingen, 1851. ] How is the great event thus characterised by M. Ewald proved? By what marks can we distinguish the Divine origin of this special revelation that became the Christian religion? What does it affirm itself in support of its claim to the moral conquest of mankind? {141}