nd highly interesting epoch
in the history of humanity. It was the commencement of the execution of
that plan of education of mankind, which, conceived since the beginning
in the Increate Mind, came by means extraordinary, yet consistent with
the natural course of earthly events, to diffuse itself gradually and to
acquire a progressive force among the various ramifications of the human
family. In that vocation we perceive the first threads of a wonderful
tissue of events, as well in the physical as in the moral world, which
went on preparing a slow but always progressive development of the human
intelligence, and will go on to produce ultimately the full final
accomplishment of the same primitive plan, so grandly conceived. In
fact, in the very act of electing this patriarch, God revealed the
ultimate object of the election by saying, that He chose him, in order
that he might transmit to his latest posterity the obligation--which was
to become characteristic of it--of exercising and promoting CHARITY and
JUSTICE, the two chief columns on which rests the edifice of human
perfectibility, two conditions indispensable to the fulfilment of the
Divine idea, and therefore called _ways of the Eternal_.

LVIII. Abraham and his race having been called upon to perpetuate the
idea of the relation existing between God and man, it was obviously
necessary that such a relation should be fixed and established in a more
precise mode in the individuals of that race than it was in any others;
in other words, it was necessary to show clearly that the idea, which
was to be promoted among others, was firmly seated, under permanent and
concrete forms, in those who were called upon to propagate it. This
permanency of the relation exhibited itself, then, to Abraham and his
posterity under the form of a _covenant_ between God and that family,
whereby the contracting parties, as it were, promised and undertook to
maintain certain conditions, upon which depended the subsistence of that
relation. The mutual conditions established were, in substance, nothing
else than the universal relations subsisting between God and every
rational being, but expressed, with respect to Abraham's, family, in
more special and characteristic terms, viz., under a form in which God
promised Abraham that He would be particularly _his God_, his Protector,
Guardian, and Benefactor; and the Abrahamites, on their part, bound
themselves to recognise _Him alone_ as the Deity,