hey were equally rejected as food with the swine.

We see the great Jewish lawgiver looking forward to cases which actually
occurred nearly five hundred years after, as demanding a king, and again
looking still farther to cases eight hundred and a thousand years
after--their disobedience and rebellion to God. Now, many will think
that it must have been an easy thing for any people, when swerving from
their law, and especially in that one great fundamental article of
idolatry as the Jews so continually did, and so naturally when the case
is examined, to always have an easy retreat: the plagues and curses
denounced would begin to unfold themselves, and then what more easy than
to relinquish the idolatrous rites or customs, resuming with their old
rituals to God their old privileges? But this was doubly impossible.
First, because men utterly misconceive the matter when they suppose that
with direct consecutive succession the judgment would succeed the
trespass. Large tracts of time would intervene. Else such direct
clockwork as sin and punishment, repentance and relief, would dishonour
God not less than they would trivialize the people. God they would
offend by defeating all His purposes; the people they would render vile
by ripening into mechanic dissimulation. The wrath of God slept often
for a long season; He saw as one who saw not. And by the time that His
large councils had overtaken them, and His judgments were fast coming up
with the offenders, they had so hardened themselves in error that a
whole growth of false desires had sprung up, and of false beliefs, blind
maxims, bad habits, bad connections, and proverbs, which found out a
reconciliation of that irreconcilable truth with the foulest pollutions.
The victims of temptation had become slow even to suspect their own
condition. And, if some more enlightened did so, the road of existence
was no longer easy. Error had woven chains about them. They were
enmeshed. And it is but a faint emblem of their situation to say, that
as well may a man commence a habit of intoxication for the purpose of
having five years' pleasure, and then halting in his career, as the Jews
may contaminate themselves tentatively with idolatrous connections under
the delusion that it would always be time enough for untreading their
steps when these connections had begun to produce evil. For they could
not recover the station from which they swerved. They that had now
realized the _casus foederi