Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 16 CHAPTER III. THE LAWS OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE CONSTITUTE THEIR RELIGION. The first miracle of Judaism was the divine institution of the religion. To promulgate the sublime dogma of the unity of Jehovah, the Creator embracing all nature, the first government of the Israelites was Theocracy. " The earth shook and the heavens also dropped in the presence of God ." The devouring fires of Sinai proclaimed the deliverance of the law of Moses. The apparition of the Deity—an apparition without similitude—rested before the eye of mortal man. Three millions of human witnesses attested and trembled. From amidst the dense cloudhanging on the mountain, " the voice of the words" sanctified and established Judaism for eternity. Psalm Ixviii. 8. The awful vision is first described in Exodus, xix. 16, and further in Deut. iv. 10. Another still more beatific, was subsequently granted to the elders of Israel, when invited by Moses to ascend with him,before this servant of the Eternal passed into the midst of the cloud. It has all the indistinctness of whatever is superhuman, when the mortal becomes a spectator of an object of which he is unacquainted with a prototype. The Deity appeared, as if his feet were resting on a paved way, inlaid with stars, amidst the azure of the sapphire, the aerial substance of the Heavens, lucid and serene.— Aboab, Parafrasis Comentadas, p. 259. Cardoso, a zealous Hebrew, calculates the number. The six hundred thousand mentioned in Scripture, consisted only of the warriors of Israel, between the age of twenty to sixty. The aged, the children, the women, the domestics, would authorise the number of the millions, and less than millions would not satisfy the eager imaginations of the Jews as the witnesses of the authentic mission. It is curious to ad...