est for
consideration the laws regarding inalienability of the homestead, and
the bankrupt law; the laws of marriage and inheritance; the laws of
servitude and wages; the sanitary laws regarding building, clothing,
bathing, eating, and contagion; the protection of the rights of animals;
the dispersion of the educated class; and the three great national
festivals, during which the whole people were released from the labors
of the field, and of the kitchen, and enjoyed during the eight summer
days of each picnic such an excitement of social enjoyment, religious
fervor, and political patriotism, as modern Christendom anticipates in
the millennium, but which neither Church nor State has, as yet,
systematically attempted to nurture.

That the Hebrews did not obey the law, and so did not enjoy the
happiness obedience would have secured, is only what God foresaw, and
foretold repeatedly, with solemn warning of the disastrous degradation
to which disobedience to God's laws must ever reduce man. Nevertheless,
even their very imperfect conformity to these institutions gave them
such superiority of blood and breeding to their ungodly neighbors, that
they have survived the most powerful nations, and, in spite of
dispersion, exile, disfranchisement, and persecution, they exist as a
distinct people, superior intellectually, commercially, and morally to
all the heathen nations at this day. How much higher had been their
position had they fully obeyed the law.

Our argument is, that this law of liberty, equality, fraternity, and
religion, was worthy of our Father in heaven, and a seed of blessing to
all the families of the earth.

To a Jew living before the coming of Christ, the unanimous testimony of
his nation, confirmed by all the commemorative observances of the
sacrifices, the passover, the Sabbath, and the jubilee, by the reading
of the law and the prophets, and the singing of the historical psalms in
the temple and the synagogues, by the execution of the laws of Moses in
the courts, and by the very existence of his nation as a distinct
people, separate from all the other nations--could leave no doubt that
laws so peculiar and beneficent must have been enacted by a wisdom
superior to that of man, and their observance imposed by divine
authority; nor that the miracles by which these laws were authenticated,
and the national existence of the people of Israel was secured, were
genuine, and divine. The chain of historical and inte