chance or from changing language.
Apply all these considerations to the case of the Hebrew Scriptures, and
their great antiquity is demonstrated.

_XVI. DISPERSION OF THE JEWS, AND JOSEPHUS'S ENMITY TO CHRISTIANITY._

Look into the Acts of the Apostles, you see the wide dispersion of the
Jews which had then been accomplished; a dispersion long antecedent to
that penal dispersion which occurred subsequently to the Christian era.
But search the pages of the wicked Jew, Josephus,[53] who notices
expressly this universal dispersion of the Jews, and gives up and down
his works the means of tracing them through every country in the
southern belt of the Mediterranean, through every country of the
northern belt, through every country of the connecting belt, in Asia
Minor and Syria--through every island of the Mediterranean. Search
Philo-Judaeus, the same result is found. But why? Upon what theory? What
great purpose is working, is fermenting underneath? What principle, what
law can be abstracted from this antagonist or centrifugal motion
outwards now violently beating back as with a conflict of tides the
original centripetal motion inwards? Manifestly this: the incubating
process had been completed: the ideas of God as an ideal of Holiness,
the idea of Sin as the antagonist force--had been perfected; they were
now so inextricably worked into the texture of Jewish minds, or the
Jewish minds were now arrived at their _maximum_ of adhesiveness, or at
their _minimum_ of repulsiveness, in manners and social character, that
this stage was perfect; and now came the five hundred years during which
they were to manure all nations with these preparations for
Christianity. Hence it was that the great globe of Hebraism was now
shivered into fragments; projected 'by one sling of that victorious
arm'--which had brought them up from Egypt. Make ready for Christianity!
Lay the structure, in which everywhere Christianity will strike root.
You, that for yourselves even will reject, will persecute Christianity,
become the pioneers, the bridge-layers, the reception-preparers, by
means of those two inconceivable ideas, for natural man--sin and its
antagonist, holiness.

In this way a preparation was made. But if Christianity was to benefit
by it, if Christianity was to move with ease, she must have a language.
Accordingly, from the time of Alexander, the strong he-goat, you see a
tendency--sudden, abrupt, beyond all example, swift, perfec