ny overruling
or coercing miracle, but in a way perfectly obvious and palpable to
themselves--obvious by its operation, obvious in its remedy. They would
not resign their customs. Upon these ordinances, positive and negative,
commanding and forbidding many peculiar rites, consecrating and
desecrating many common esculent articles, these Jews have laid the
stress and emphasis of religion. They would not resign them; they did
not expect others to adopt them--not in any case; _a fortiori_ not from
a degraded people. And hence, not by any mysterious operation of
Providential control, arose their separation, their resolute refusal to
blend with other races.

This is the infidel's attempt to rebut, to defeat, utterly to confound,
the argumentative force of this most astonishing amongst all historical
pictures that the planet presents.

The following is the answer:

It is forgotten that along with the Jews there is another people
concerned as illustrations of the same prophetic fatality--of that same
inevitable eye, that same perspective of vision, which belonged to those
whose eyes God had opened. The Arabs, as children of a common ancestor,
ought not to be forgotten in this sentence upon their brother nation.
They through Ishmael, the Jews through Isaac, and more immediately
through Israel the son of Isaac, were two diverging branches of one
original stem; and to both was pronounced a corresponding doom--a
sentence which argued in both a principle of duration and
self-propagation, that is memorable in any race. The children of Ishmael
are the Arabs of the desert. Their destiny as a roving robber nation,
and liable to all men's hands, as they indifferently levied spoil on
all, was early pronounced. And here, again, we see at once how it will
be evaded: it is the desert, it is the climate, it is the solemnity of
that unchanging basis, which will secure the unchanging life of its
children. But it is remarkable enough that Gibbon and other infidels,
kicking violently against this standing miracle (because, if not so in
itself, yet, according to Bishop Butler's just explanation concerning
miraculous _per de_-_rivationem_ as recording a miraculous power of
vision), have by oscillation clung to the fixture of basis, and rejected
it; for now Gibbon denies that the Arabs have held this constant tenor
of life; they have changed it, he asserts, in large and notorious cases.
Well, then, if they have, then at once falls to the ground