specially destined for the Hebrew people, and has communicated only what appeared to him absolutely and indispensably necessary for his nation, and for his particular designs, or rather the designs of God, in the conduct of that nation. But the little he has said--the significant brevity of the first pages of the Mosaic history, involves much profound truth for us in these later ages, and comprises very many solutions as to the great problems of primitive history, did we but know how to extract the simple sense with like simplicity. But every thing else, and in general the whole tenour of the Mosaic writings, like the existence of the Hebrew nation, was formed for futurity--and to this were the views of the Jewish legislator almost exclusively directed. And as all the sacred writings of the Old Testament, which, by this direction towards futurity, were even in their _outward form_ so clearly distinguishable from the sacred books and primitive records of other ancient nations; as all these sacred writings, I say, from the first law-giver, who in a high spiritual sense, delivered from the Egyptian bondage of nature his people chosen for that especial object, down to the royal and prophetic Psalmist, and down to that last voice of warning and of promise that resounded in the desert, were both in their form and meaning eminently prophetic; so the whole Hebrew people may, in a lofty sense, be called prophetic, and have been really so in their historical existence and wonderful destiny. To these four nations, whom we have compared, in respect to the different shape and course which the primitive revelation and sacred tradition assumed, among them, as well as in respect to the diversities in their intellectual development,--the contrarieties in the internal Word, and higher consciousness of each;--to these nations, in order to complete the instructive parallel, we may now add a fifth--the Persians; a people which in some points was similar, in others dissimilar to one or other of these nations, and which bearing a nearer affinity to some in its doctrines and views of life, or even in its language and turn of fancy, and more closely connected with others in the bonds of political intercourse, may be said to occupy a middle place among these nations. In ancient history, the Persians form the point of transition from the first to the second epoch of the world; and in this they hold the first place, in so far as they commenced the career of universal conquest; a passion which passed from them to the Greeks, and from these in a still fuller extent to the Romans, like some noxious humour--some deadly disease transmitted with augmented virulence through every age from generation to generation; and even in modern times, this hereditary malady in the human race has again broken out.