The Jews, previously to their exile, had both in respect to their knowledge of divine things and their practice, greatly degenerated. They had long been addicted to idolatry. They had rejected their Divine Protector and King, and yielded themselves to the false notions and corrupt practices of the heathen. The Divine presence and favor were withdrawn. They were afflicted and driven out of their country. Prophets were sent to instruct, admonish, and encourage them; but they refused to hear, being hardened and blinded in unbelief. They regarded the God of Abraham, the Jehovah who led them out of Egypt, and, in the Shekina, presided over their nation, either as having become their enemy, or as having withdrawn from them for ever. Under these circumstances, there is ground to conclude that they willingly settled down in the notion of a Supreme Creator, invisible, far removed from the concerns of mortals, and indifferent or inattentive to them. On abandoning the forms of idolatry, and rejecting the pretended mediators of idolatrous worship, while yet continuing impenitent, and maintaining a proud and haughty spirit as Jews, though now depressed, and apparently abandoned of God; they are believed to have banished from their minds all near apprehensions of the Divine Being, and all ideas of a Divine Mediator, and to have taken refuge in the abstract notion of a Supreme Creator, who, though no longer regarded as their covenant God and present protector, had promised a leader, a Messiah, who should deliver them from their temporal calamities. Such is believed to have been their state of mind at the close of their exile; such the change attending their renunciation of idolatry; and that the error and defect in question, respecting the teachings of the Old Testament, had its source with them. Their sentiments and state of mind having been perpetuated down to the period of the Advent, were propagated afterwards in the manner above referred to. There was, indeed, a partial, outward reformation under Nehemiah, after the return from Babylon, and the temple service was resumed; but the Shekina did not reäppear, and there was no general or lasting change amongst the people. The Chaldee expositors, and afterwards the paraphrasts, labored to revive and perpetuate the lost meaning of the Hebrew Scriptures; but though a few, a remnant, of such as rightly apprehended and truly feared Jehovah were preserved and perpetuated, the theology and religion of the nation generally underwent no important change for the better. The foregoing considerations may suffice to show how it has happened that the Old Testament has, both by Jews and Christians, so long and so generally been understood to ascribe the works of creation and providence, not to the Mediator, but to the Father, or to the Deity, irrespective of any personal or official distinctions.