ng it. The prophets, so far from
seeking popularity, are foolhardy enough to denounce the bonnets, hoops,
and flounces of the ladies, and to cry, Woe! against the regular
business of the most respectable note-shavers,[142] to croak against the
march of intellect, and shake public confidence in the prosperity of
their great country,[143] to ally themselves with fanatic abolitionists,
and introduce agitating political questions into the pulpit; crying,
_Woe to him that useth his neighbor's service without wages, and giveth
him not for his work._[144] To crown all, they organized abolition clubs
to procure immediate emancipation, and published incendiary
proclamations in the cities of the slaveholders,[145] and, strange to
say, they were allowed to escape with their lives; and their writings
were held sacred by the children of those very men and women they so
unsparingly denounced; a conclusive proof that the calamities they
predicted had compelled them to acknowledge these prophets as the
heralds of God. The proof must have been conclusive, indeed, which
compelled the Jews to acknowledge the writings of the prophets as
sacred.

Another very striking feature of these writings is, their mutual
connection with each other. They were written at various intervals,
during a period of a thousand years' duration, by shepherds and kings,
by prophets and priests, by governors of States and gatherers of
sycamore fruit; in deserts and in palaces, in camps and in cities, in
Egypt and Syria, in Arabia and Babylon; under the iron heel of despotic
oppression, and amid the liberty of the most democratic republic the
world ever saw; yet, circumstances, and lapse of time, they ever hold to
one great theme, always assert the same great principles, and
perpetually claim connection with the writers who have preceded them.
There is nothing like this in the histories of other nations. Two
centuries will work such changes of opinion, that you can not find
nowadays any historian who approves the sentiments of Pepys or
Clarendon, whatever use he may make of their facts. But the historians
of the Bible not only refer to their predecessors' writings, but refer
to them as of acknowledged divine authority. Thus the very latest of
these books gives the weight of its testimony to the first--"_And they
set the priests in their divisions, and the Levites in their courses for
the service of God, which is at Jerusalem, as it is written in the book
of Moses._