close connection.

To these incidents I cannot forbear adding another, which though
universally known, is not therefore the less remarkable; I mean the taking
of Jerusalem by Titus. When he had entered that city, and viewed all the
fortifications of it, this prince, though a heathen, owned the
all-powerful arm of the God of Israel; and, in a rapture of admiration,
cried out, "It is manifest that the Almighty has fought for us, and has
driven the Jews from those towers; since neither the utmost human force,
nor that of all the engines in the world, could have effected it."(33)

Besides the visible and sensible connection of sacred and profane history,
there is another more secret and more distinct relation with respect to
the Messiah, for whose coming the Almighty, whose work was ever present to
his sight, prepared mankind from far, even by the state of ignorance and
dissoluteness in which he suffered them to be immersed during four
thousand years. It was to make mankind sensible of the necessity of our
having a Mediator, that God permitted the nations to walk after their own
ways; while neither the light of reason, nor the dictates of philosophy,
could dispel the clouds of error, or reform their depraved inclinations.

When we take a view of the grandeur of empires, the majesty of princes,
the glorious actions of great men, the order of civil societies, and the
harmony of the different members of which they are composed, the wisdom of
legislators, and the learning of philosophers, the earth seems to exhibit
nothing to the eye of man but what is great and resplendent; nevertheless,
in the eye of God it was equally barren and uncultivated, as at the first
instant of the creation. "The earth was WITHOUT FORM AND VOID."(34) This
is saying but little: it was wholly polluted and impure, (the reader will
observe that I speak here of the heathens), and appeared to God only as
the haunt and retreat of ungrateful and perfidious men, as it did at the
time of the flood. "The earth was corrupt before God, and was filled with
iniquity."(35)

Nevertheless the Sovereign Arbiter of the universe, who, pursuant to the
dictates of his wisdom, dispenses both light and darkness, and knows how
to check the impetuous torrent of human passions, would not permit
mankind, though abandoned to the utmost corruptions, to degenerate into
absolute barbarity, and brutalize themselves, in a manner, by the
extinction of the first principles of the law