Moon's Graden

as such, and which is received as such; for
nobody doubted that Troy and Agamemnon no more existed than did the golden
apple. Accordingly, he did not think of making a history, but solely a book
to amuse; he is the only writer of his time; the beauty of the work has made
it last, every one learns it and talks of it, it is necessary to know it,
and each one knows it by heart. Four hundred years afterwards the witnesses
of these facts are no longer alive, no one knows of his own knowledge if it
be a fable or a history; one has only learnt it from his ancestors, and this
can pass for truth.

Every history which is not contemporaneous, as the books of the Sibyls and
Trismegistus, and so many others which have been believed by the world, are
false, and found to be false in the course of time. It is not so with
contemporaneous writers.

There is a great difference between a book which an individual writes and
publishes to a nation, and a book which itself creates a nation. We cannot
doubt that the book is as old as the people.

629. Josephus hides the shame of his nation.

Moses does not hide his own shame.

Quis mihi det ut omnes prophetent?112

He was weary of the multitude.

630. The sincerity of the Jews.--Maccabees, after they had no more prophets;
the Masorah, since Jesus Christ.

This book will be a testimony for you.

Defective and final letters.

Sincere against their honour, and dying for it; this has no example in the
world, and no root in nature.

631. Sincerity of the Jews.--They preserve lovingly and carefully the book
in which Moses declares that they have been all their life ungrateful to
God, and that he knows they will be still more so after his death; but that
he calls heaven and earth to witness against them and that he has taught
them enough.

He declares that God, being an

another. There is this sole
difference between these two things, that it is certain that God will never
allow sin, while it is not certain that He will never allow the other. But
so long as God does not permit it, we ought to regard it as sin; so long as
the absence of God's will, which alone is all goodness and all justice,
renders it unjust and wrong.

669. To change the type, because of our weakness.

670. Types.--The Jews had grown old in these earthly thoughts, that God
loved their father Abraham, his flesh and what sprung from it; that on
account of this He had multiplied them and distinguished them from all other
nations, without allowing them to intermingle; that, when they were
languishing in Egypt, He brought them out with all these great signs in
their favour; that He fed them with manna in the desert, and led them into a
very rich land; that He gave them kings and a well-built temple, in order to
offer up beasts before Him, by the shedding of whose *** they should be
purified; and that, at last, He was to send them the Messiah to make them
masters of all the world, and foretold the time of His coming.

The world having grown old in these *** errors, Jesus Christ came at the
time foretold, but not with the expected glory; and thus men did not think
it was He. After His death, Saint Paul came to teach men that all these
things had happened in allegory; that the kingdom of God did not consist in
the flesh, but in the spirit; that the enemies of men were not the
Babylonians, but the passions; that God delighted not in temples made with
hands, but in a pure and contrite heart; that the circumcision of the body
was unprofitable, but that of the heart was needed; that Moses had not given
th

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