Let us take, for instance, that case of extreme wickedness, which most severely tries the general proposition. The punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins was preceded by a declaration from the Most High, importing a direct relation with those guilty cities[5]; and two angels, who had visited Abraham on the plains of Mamre, ‘came to Sodom at even.’ Ruth the Moabitess was an ancestress, through king David, of our Lord. Rahab in Jericho, ‘by faith,’ as the Apostle assures us, entertained the spies of the Israelites. Job, living in a country where the worship of the sun was practised, had, as had his friends, the knowledge of the true God. Melchizedek, the priest of On, whose daughter Joseph married, and Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, are other conspicuous instances. Later in time, Nineveh, the great Assyrian capital, received the message of the prophet Jonah, and repented at his preaching. Here the teaching organ was supplied from among the Jews: but Balaam exhibits to us the gift of inspiration beyond their bounds. Once more; many centuries after the Homeric manners had disappeared, and during the captivity, we find not only a knowledge of God, but dreams and signs vouchsafed to Assyrian kings, and interpreted for them by the prophet Daniel. We have, in short, mingling with the whole course of the Old Testament, a stream of evidence which shows the partial remnants of the knowledge of God, apart from that main current of it which is particularly traced for us in the patriarchal and Mosaic histories. Again, many centuries after Homer, when all traces of primitive manners had long vanished, still in the Prometheus of Æschylus, and in the Pollio of Virgil, we have signs, though I grant they are faint ones, that the celestial rays had not even then ‘faded into the light of common day’ for the heathen world. It would really be strange, and that in a high degree, if a record like that of Homer, with so many resemblances to the earliest manners in other points, had no link to connect it with them in their most vital part. [5] See Genesis xviii. 1, 20. xx. 1. Heb. xi. 31. ~_The question one of history._~