In the minds of the patriarchs and prophets, therefore, the human likeness in which he visibly appeared was intimately and familiarly associated with his person. When they thought of him, they thought of him in that form, and accordingly his visible appearance in that form occasioned little or no surprise. They knew, it may well be believed, from and after the first appearance or announcement of the Messiah in Eden, that human nature and the human form were appointed and essential conditions of his complex official person and his sacerdotal work. Every typical sacrifice, the piacular shedding of blood, the altar typifying the cross, the burnt offering, the paschal lamb, every net of worship founded on the revealed doctrine of mediation, implied this distinctive apprehension of his person as Mediator. To suppose that patriarchs and prophets to whom he appeared in this manner, and whom he inspired to teach others, did not know and recognize him in his true character, is not less derogatory to him than to them; and to suppose that those who earliest offered typical sacrifices did not as truly and adequately understand what belonged to his personal and official character as those who succeeded, is to nullify their worship and their faith, and to treat the system as a device of sinful and ignorant men, rather than as divinely revealed and sanctioned. But the Divine Mediator being thus clearly and familiarly known from the first beginning of the race, as to the constitution of his complex official person, his delegated character, his sacerdotal and mediatory work; this knowledge being common to all true worshippers, and being illustrated and confirmed to others by local visible appearances of the Personal Word, by oral instructions from inspired men, and by the external institutions, rites and forms of the true worship; it is obvious how, and with what facility, the adverse party, the worshippers of Baal after the deluge, obtained their antagonist counterfeit notions of the incarnation of their rival god, and afterwards of other spiritual beings and disembodied intelligences; of a shekina of visible glory as the residence or tabernacle of Baal; of mediation, oracular responses, altars, sacrifices, incense, &c. To suppose that any one of these things was originally conceived and invented by the natural reason of man, is at once to yield the question between revealed religion and the competency of fallen man to devise one which should obtain the undivided suffrage of nine tenths of the human race from age to age. The utter absurdity of such a supposition is shown by the fact that all the different nations and tribes of idolaters have, from the earliest records and traditions of their history, held essentially the same ideas upon these and kindred subjects. In the history of some countries, indeed, as in that of India, Thibet and China, the notion of the incarnation, and of repeated incarnations, of their false god is more