guide themselves by a law which they say that they
obtained from His own hand. They maintain that they are the only people in
the world to whom God has revealed His mysteries; that all men are corrupt
and in disgrace with God; that they are all abandoned to their senses and
their own imagination, whence come the strange errors and continual changes
which happen among them, both of religions and of morals, whereas they
themselves remain firm in their conduct; but that God will not leave other
nations in this darkness for ever; that there will come a Saviour for all;
that they are in the world to announce Him to men; that they are expressly
formed to be forerunners and heralds of this great event and to summon all
nations to join with them in the expectation of this Saviour.
To meet with this people is astonishing to me, and seems to me worthy of
attention. I look at the law which they boast of having obtained from God,
and I find it admirable. It is the first law of all and is of such a kind
that, even before the term law was in currency among the Greeks, it had, for
nearly a thousand years earlier, been uninterruptedly accepted and observed
by the Jews. I likewise think it strange that the first law of the world
happens to be the most perfect; so that the greatest legislators have
borrowed their laws from it, as is apparent from the law of the Twe