Man is thus aggrandized in the image of his Maker. The history
of the patriarchs is of this kind; they are founders of a chosen race
of people, the inheritors of the earth; they exist in the generations
which are to come after them. Their poetry, like their religious creed,
is vast, unformed, obscure, and infinite; a vision is upon it; an
invisible hand is suspended over it. The spirit of the Christian
religion consists in the glory hereafter to be revealed; but in the
Hebrew dispensation Providence took an immediate share in the affairs
of this life. Jacob's dream arose out of this intimate communion between
heaven and earth: it was this that let down, in the sight of the
youthful patriarch, a golden ladder from the sky to the earth, with
angels ascending and descending upon it, and shed a light upon the
lonely place, which can never pass away. The story of Ruth, again, is
as if all the depth of natural affection in the human race was involved
in her breast. There are descriptions in the book of Job more prodigal
of imagery, more intense in passion, than anything in Homer; as that
of the state of his prosperity, and of the vision that came upon him
by night.
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