family are all disclosed, and reared, and fledged, and flown. If external circumstances thus conduct every irrational creature, individually, to the knowledge and acquirement of all that is necessary for its peculiar state, it seems to follow, as a parallelism in Providence, that man in society, at one period or another in his progress of improvement in knowledge, would inevitably discover all the means by which knowledge might be most successfully obtained and secured; these being as necessary to the rank which he holds in creation, as the respective functions of inferior animals are to their different conditions. I cannot, however, allow it to be said, because I thus state the question, that I derogate from the glory of God, by not attributing immediately to Him, what He has no where claimed for Himself, in the only book written by his command. To Him nothing is impossible; with Him nothing is great or small, easy or difficult. His power is not more magnified by working miracles, than it was by ordaining, or than it is by upholding, the regular course of nature. "There is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty giveth him understanding." Is it less, then, to say of the Almighty, that, by the understanding which He gave, man found out the divine art of writing (for divine in this connection it may be called), than to suppose, without any proof, that this art is so super-human, that it could not have been discovered, unless it had been absolutely revealed by the Deity?—No, surely; for though He made man a little lower than the angels, yet hath He crowned him with glory and ho nour; and, to speak after the manner of men, the more exalted the creature is found, the more praise redounds to the Creator, who is "God over all, and blessed for evermore." Modes of Writing. That the art of writing was practised in Egypt before the emancipation of the Israelites, appears almost certain from their frequent and familiar mention of this mode of keeping memorials. When the people had provoked the Lord to wrath, by making and worshipping the golden calf, Moses, interceding in their behalf, says,-" Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which Thou hast written. And the Lord said unto Moses, Whosoever sinneth, him will I blot out of my book." * The allusion here is to a table of genealogy, the muster-roll of an army, a register of citizenship, or even to those books of chronicles, which were kept by order of ancient oriental princes, of the events of their reigns, for reference and remembrance. Besides, such a mode of publishing important documents is alluded to, not merely as nothing new, but as if even the common people were practically acquainted with it. "And thou shalt bind them (the statutes and testimonies of the Lord) as a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes, and thou shalt write them Exod. xxxii. 32, 33. gates." upon the posts of thine house, and upon all thy There are various parallel passages which no cavilling of commentators can convert from plain meaning into paradox. But not the Egyptians and Hebrews alone possessed this invaluable knowledge, at the time of which we speak (from fourteen to seventeen hundred years before Christ); we have direct and incidental testimony, both in sacred and profane history, that the Phoenicians, Arabians, and Chaldeans, were instructed in the same. The book of Job (whoever might be the author) lays the scene and the season of his affliction about this era, and in the north of Arabia. That extraordinary composition-extraordinary indeed, whether it be regarded as an historical, dramatic, or poetic performance - contains more curious and minute information concerning the manners and customs, the literature and philosophy, the state of arts and sciences, during the patriarchal ages, than can be collected in scattered hints from all later works put together. In reference to the art and the materials of writing then in use, we meet with the following sublime and affecting apostrophe: "O that my words were now written! O that they were printed (impressed or traced out) in a book! That they were graven with an iron pen, and lead, in the rock for ever!" The latter aspiration probably alludes to the very ancient practice of hewing characters into the faces * Deut. vi. 8, 9, of vast rocks, as eternal memorials of persons and events. It is said by travellers, whose testimony seems worthy of credence, that various fragments of such inscriptions, now utterly undecypherable, may be seen to this day in the wildernesses of Arabia Petrea monuments at once of the grasp and the limitation of the mental power of man; - thus making the hardest substances in nature the depositories of his thoughts, and yet betrayed in his ambitious expectation of so perpetuating them. The slow influences of the elements have been incessantly, though insensibly, obliterating what the chisel had ploughed into the solid marble, till at length nothing remains but a mockery of skeleton letters, so unlike their pristine forms, so unable to explain their own meaning, that you might as well seek among the human relics in a charnel-vault the resemblances of - the once-living personages, or invoke the dead bones to tell their own history, -as question these dumb rocks concerning the records engraven on them. The passage just quoted shows the state of alphabetical writing in the age of Job, and, according to the best commentators, he describes three modes of exercising it: "O that my words were now written, traced out in characters, in a book composed of palm-leaves, or on a roll of linen! that they were engraven with a pen of iron on tablets of lead, or indented in the solid rock to endure to the end of time!" Arguing against the perverse sophistry of his friends, that he must have been secretly a wicked man, because such awful calamities, which they construed into divine judgments, had befallen him; so fast does he hold his integrity, that, not only with passing words, liable to be forgotten as soon as uttered, does he maintain it; but by every mode that could give his expressions publicity, and ensure them perpetuity, he longs that his confidence in God to vindicate him might be recorded, whatever might be the issue of those evils to himself, even though he were brought down by them to death and corruption, descending not only with sorrow, but with ignominy to the grave; — for, saith he, "I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day on the earth; and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God, whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, though my reins be con ́sumed within me.” Job, xix. 25-27. Had these words of the patriarch been indeed 66 engraven with a pen of iron on the rock for ever,”. yet without some more certain medium of transmission to posterity, they would have been unknown at this day, or only speaking in the desert with the voice of silence, which no eye could interpret, no mind could hear. But, being inscribed on materials as frail as the leaves in my hand, yet capable of infinitely multiplied transcription, they can never be lost; for though the giant-characters, enchased in everlasting flint, would ere now have been worn down by the perpetual foot of time, yet, committed with feeble ink to perishable paper, liable "to be crushed before the moth," or destroyed by the touch of fire or water, the good man's hope can never fail, even |