The primeval and Levitical dispensations were specially characterized by visible manifestations, acts, rites and events, embodying, enforcing, and illustrating the great truths which were revealed. Thus, on the part of man, the first prohibition enjoined upon Adam, besides its reference to his will, had relation to an external and visible act, and an external and visible object, the fruit of a particular tree. The ritual of worship prescribing, among other offerings, that of slaughtered animals on an altar, the observance of the Sabbath, the long list of fasts, feasts, convocations, ordinances, rites and ceremonies, and most of the injunctions and prohibitions of the moral law, had respect to outward and visible acts. And on the other hand, the Divine Lawgiver and Ruler manifested himself visibly, announced his revelations and commands in audible words, distinguished the righteous generally by outward prosperity, long life, and numerous descendants, and the wicked by opposite evils, or by special calamities and judgments manifest to public observation. By this method, the personality, the attributes and perfections, the prerogatives and rights, the holiness, faithfulness, mercy and truth of Jehovah, were not only exhibited to the view of all intelligent creatures, fallen and unfallen, but were exhibited in such relations to accountable creatures, in their various circumstances, and in their connections with laws, covenants, promises, and predictions, as to lead unmistakably to a right apprehension of them, and a right apprehension of the conduct of men in view of them; results which, so far as we can judge, could have been produced in no other way, unless by endowing creatures with omniscience, or with plenary inspiration. For, from their nature as created, finite and dependent agents, their thoughts, apprehensions and inferences are successive, and all the knowledge of external things which they acquire otherwise than by inspiration, they acquire by means of their external senses; seeing visible objects, hearing audible sounds, &c. Those to whom these divine manifestations, personal, visible, and audible, were first made, had no prototypes, precedents or analogies, to assist them in gaining right apprehensions, and deducing just conclusions, had the method of instruction been that merely of announcements, from an invisible source, of abstract propositions. But by the method actually adopted, prototypes, precedents and analogies were furnished, which, being recorded in the relations and historical connections in which they occurred and were observed, serve effectually for the instruction of those to whom similar outward and visible manifestations are not vouchsafed.