11. Q. What is mentioned as having a tendency to unite the minds of a whole people into one common mind? A. Any cause which creates a common interest and a common feeling, common biases and common hopes in the individual minds which compose a nation. 12. Q. What are some of these causes that are especially strong? A. A common parentage, a common religion, and a common fellowship in suffering and deliverance. 13. Q. Upon what people did these causes operate with peculiar force? A. The Israelites. 14. Q. What follows as the only rational conclusion in regard to the discipline of the descendants of Abraham? A. First, that the overruling intelligence of God was employed in thus preparing material for a purer religious worship than the world then enjoyed; and, second, that a nation could have been so prepared by no other agent, and in no other way. 15. Q. What is essential for man to believe that religion has a divine origin? A. Man can not, in the present constitution of his mind, believe that religion has a divine origin unless it be accompanied with miracles. 16. Q. If, therefore, God ever gave a revelation to man, with what was it necessarily accompanied? A. With miracles, and with miracles of such a nature as would clearly distinguish the divine character and the divine authority of the dispensation. 17. Q. In order to give any divine revelation to the Israelites what two things were necessary? A. First, that God should manifest himself by miracles; and, second, that those miracles should be of such a character as evidently to distinguish them from the jugglery of the magicians, and to convince all observers of the existence and omnipotence of the true God, in contradistinction from the objects of idolatrous worship. 18. Q. In view of the idolatrous state of the world, and especially in view of the character and circumstances of the Israelites, of what is the demonstration conclusive in regard to the miracles of Egypt? A. That the true God could have made a revelation of himself in no other way than by the means and in the manner of the miracles of Egypt; and none but the true God could have revealed himself in this way. 19. Q. In view of the established laws of the mind, how was it necessary that the knowledge of God and human duty should be imparted to the Israelites? A. By successive communications—necessary that there should be a first step, or primary principles, for a starting point, and then a progression onward and upward to perfection. 20. Q. In accordance with these principles God revealed only what in the introduction of the Mosaic dispensation? A. He revealed only his essential existence to the Israelites. 21. Q. In what way does love for another always influence the will to act? A. In such a way as will please the object loved.