the Divine
Wisdom was pleased to take that race by the hand, guiding its first
steps, and watching in an extraordinary manner over its destinies, so as
gradually to prepare it for the high mission for which it was designed.
We, therefore, perceive, during that epoch, a continual intervention of
the Divinity in regulating the particular concerns of the patriarchs and
their successors, and an incessant care to draw their attention to the
future destiny of their grandchildren, and to their duty of preparing
worthily for it. Such a care manifested itself, particularly, in various
providential measures, the objects of which evidently were to remove
from them everything that might exercise over them a sinister influence;
to enlighten them on the importance of their election, and to make them
acquainted beforehand with the severe trials in store for them for
several centuries, before they could deservedly reap the intended
benefits.

LXI. To this category of providential measures belongs the state of
isolation and of precarious subsistence, in which, by the Divine will,
the first fathers had to live, in respect to their neighbours, in that
same land which was yet promised to them as a perpetual inheritance;
whereby they were brought to learn from the beginning that the great
work, which their children were called upon to accomplish, was not
absolutely dependent on the possession of a land under their own
sovereignty, but rather on the religious doctrines to which they were to
remain faithfully attached. To it belongs, also, the severance or
removal of the elder branch of the first two families, which was too
much inclined to material interests, to teach thereby that physical
superiority is not at all requisite to the preservation of a covenant
based entirely on spirituality. And, lastly, to the same category of
measures belongs the decreed long servitude of the Abrahamites in a
strange land, in which, not only the door to social enjoyments would be
shut against them, but a barbarous tyranny would also deprive them of
the free exercise of acts which are an imprescriptible right of all
mortals. Through the instrumentality of such an oppression, the profound
counsels of the Eternal Wisdom designed so to regulate the first
education of that growing people, that, refined in the crucible of
adversity, it should early learn to renounce the subjection of the
senses, and turn its heart and soul to God, from whom alone it could
hope