twelve tribes of Arabians descending from Ishmael, but among the nations that arose from his sons by his second wife, Keturah; and these, if I mistake not, peopled the whole country that lay between the Arabian and the Persian Gulf, and occupied considerable tracts in Africa, and in the upper part of Asia near the Caspian Sea; and the memory of these promises, in all these nations, would for several ages keep the true religion in some degree alive. So the earlier promises to Shem contained in Noah's prophetic benediction, would be for some time remembered among his posterity; and accordingly we find from ancient history, that the Persians, the Assyrians, and the people of Mesopotamia, the offspring of Shem, through his sons Elam, Ashur, and Aram, were among the last nations that fell into any gross idolatry.

Now if we are right in these principles, (and I think they are principles in which

is impossible to be greatly in the wrong, for the memory which I suppose of blessings promised to the head of a family, with which some degree of veneration for the Deity from whom they came and by whose providence they were to be accomplished, that is, some degree of the true religion would be inseparably connected ;—the memory I say of such blessings seems but a necessary effect of that complacency which men naturally feel in the notion that they have a claim, or that they stand within a probable expectation of a claim to hereditary honour and distinctions); but if we are right in the supposition of some long remembrance of the promises, and a preservation of the true religion among the descendants of the Patriarchs to whom the promises were given, the first defection

C

from the worship of the true God could not be universal, it could only be partial. And the effect of a partial defection would be, that all the nations whose loyalty to the Sovereign Lord remained unshaken, would take measures to resist the corruption and maintain among themselves the true worship of the true God.

Something of this kind seems to have happened early in the antediluvian world. "In the days of Enos men began to call "themselves by the name of Jehovah." At this time pious men took alarm at the beginning of idolatry in the reprobate family of Cain, and formed themselves in a distinct party, and took a name of distinction to themselves as worshippers of the true God. They called themselves by the name of Jehovah as we now call ourselves by the name of Christ; and they probably

made profession of the true religion by some public rites.

As human nature is in all ages much the same, something similar is likely to have happened upon the first revival of idolatry after the flood. The measures that were used for the preservation of the true religion were likely to be some one, or all of these.

If any of the nations that adhered to the true God had in these ages the use of letters, (and the use of letters in the East, I am persuaded, is of much greater antiquity than is generally supposed), they would commit to writing, and collect in books what tradition had preserved of the beginning of the world and the promises to their ancestors. These books would be committed to some public custody, and preserved as a sacred treasure.

That something of this kind was done, appears I think from fragments which still remain of ancient Eastern histories, which in certain particulars of the deluge, and in the dates which they assign to the rise of the most ancient kingdoms, are wonderfully consonant with the Mosaic records.

of

Again, the most interesting passages the ancient history of the world, particularly the promises, they would put into verse, that they might more easily be committed to memory. It would be part of the education of the youth of both sexes and of all conditions, to make them get these verses by heart. They would be set to music and sung at certain stated festivals. That this was done (that it could hardly be omitted) is highly probable, because it was the universal practice of all the nations of antiquity to record in song