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into the support of some unsubstantial theory . The understanding is narrow , perverse , and quibbling ; delighting in mystery , and contemning whatever is easy and intelligible . Was not this the spiritual state of the Jews who would not receive the new dispensation ? Was it not clear , from the tendency of the whole nation to this state towards the time of Christ ' s appearance , that the period had arrived when the spiritual discipline must be changed , and nobler objects offered to the powers which it had been the purpose of the first dispensation to create and invigorate ?
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Tlie Education of the Human Race , 373
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* While God led his people through all the steps of a child-like education , the other people of the earth had proceeded by the light of reason . The greater number remained far below the chosen people . Only a few were gone further ; and it is just so with children who are left to themselves ; many remain quite uncultivated , while some lew rise to an astonishing height of culture .
" But as these happy few prove nothing against the utility and necessity of education , so the few among the Heathens who , in the knowledge of God , seem even now to have advanced beyond the chosen people , prove nothing against revelation . The child of education begins with slow but sure steps ; he is long before he overtakes many a more happily organized child of nature ; but he still does overtake him , and is then never in his turn overtaken .
cc The notions which the Jewish people had conceived of their One Supreme God were not precisely the just notions which we ought to have of God . But the time was come when these notions were to be enlarged , ennobled , corrected . " They returned ( from captivity ) enlightened concerning their own
unknown treasures , and became an altogether different people , whose first care was to make this newly-acquired light permanent among them ; and there was soon no farther fear of idolatry or apostacy ; for it is easy to desert a national god , but impossible to abandon the One God when he is known .
* ' The Jews must now have first recognized that the working of miracles and prophesying futurity belong to God alone , both of which they had formerly ascribed to the false idols ; on which account , even miracles and prophecy had produced so transient an effect on them . " I call an exercise or preparation for the doctrine of the immortality of the soul , the divine threat to visit the sins of the fathers on the children to
the third and fourth generation . This accustomed the fathers to live in thought with their latest posterity , and to anticipate in sentiment the evil they had brought on their innocent descendants . " In such exercises , allusions , intimations , consists the positive perfection of an elementary book ; and , in like manner , its negative perfection lies in not standing in the way of the truths still kept back , or rendering their acquisition more difficult .
" Add to this a suitable form and style , and you have all the good qualities of an elementary book for children , or for a child-like people . " But each elementary book is onl y for a certain age ; and it is pernicious to detain too long at this stage the child who is grown above it . " D . F . ( To be continued . )
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1830, page 373, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2585/page/13/
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