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174 religion in so many millions of minds: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.'

"The more I contemplate the mission of Moses, the higher he rises in moral sublimity in my estimation. If I contemplate him during the forty years of his sojourn in the wilderness, he is the only depository of the true religion on earth, with the exception of the tribe he led. The whole world was sunk in the debasement of idolatry. What a noble use did the Almighty make of the recent invention of man's ingenuity, the invention of letters, to engrave upon stone his awful testimony against the great, fundamental, and all-polluting sin of the world, the worship of idols: 'Thou shalt have no other Gods before me; thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or the likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or in the earth beneath; thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them.' To realize and carry out this one thing was the purpose in separating the Jews from the rest of the world; and with all the seals and signs, and God's special judgments, it took fourteen hundred years to do it, so prone are we to worship the things that are seen, instead of the unseen. And this is one of the great troubles at the present day. This is one reason of our desolation. We thought too much of our holy city and temple; but if this was our sin, what might we expect from men in the state of ignorance in the days of Moses? Oh, brethren, let us ask ourselves, are we not more inclined to worship the created things than we are to worship Him who created