The profound abyss of error, in which the most civilized nations of ancient Heathenism had sunk and were lost, becomes the more apparent, the more closely it is investigated and the more fully it is understood. And on this account, we should learn to see how necessary and salutary was that slow progression--that gradual preparation for a brighter futurity, wherein, as I above stated, consisted the peculiar destination and spiritual career of the Hebrew people. It is only from this its peculiar destination for the Future, the Hebrew people presents so high an interest to historical philosophy, and holds the lofty place assigned to it in the first period of human civilization. The later destinies of the Jewish nation, and the particular events and characters in their later annals, are subjects of the highest moment in a history of religion; for they can be rightly understood and fully appreciated only by their practical application, and profound symbolical reference to the circumstances of Christianity. But it is only the political constitution of the Jewish state in the earliest period of its history--a constitution which was so peculiar and unique in itself, so entirely without a parallel--that can be the appropriate subject of consideration in this general review of history; because this constitution was connected with the prophetic calling of the Hebrew people, and even bore a prophetic character itself. This constitution has been called a theocracy, and so it was in the right and old signification of that word, by which was meant a government under the special and immediate providence of God. But in the now ordinary acceptation of the term, which implies a sacerdotal empire or dominion, the Jewish state was at no time and by no means a theocracy. Moses was no more a priest than a king; and after him all those men of Desire, as they were called from the first circumstances of their institution, or men of the desert, because after a preparation in the solitude of the desert, they led and conducted the people in a literal or figurative sense, through the wilderness--all these men appointed by God, and without any other title or insignia but the staff, which as pilgrims they brought out of the desert, governed and directed the people under the immediate providence of God. If on a certain occasion one of the prophets girded on the sword and led out an army--this was only a transient instance; and the prophets in general were nothing more than the men of God, and the divinely appointed conductors of the people. When the wish in which the Hebrews had so long indulged of having a king, like the heathen nations, was at last gratified; a wish which in the higher views of Holy Writ, was regarded as the culpable illusion of a carnal sense;--the last of the prophets formed a party, and constituted in a very peculiar and singular manner, a species of political Opposition, which was acknowledged to be, and was in fact, perfectly legitimate and just. And