CHAPTER XVIII.
When I cast back my eye upon this narrative, through the long perspective of ages which it involves, I confess I feel incommoded by some misgivings of self-distrust. When I consider the mighty individuals, of transcendent powers and almost inexhaustible resources, who, having reconnoitred its coast, either perished in the impotency of effecting a landing, or, more wisely, receded from it as impregnable, I am thrown back, as it were, upon myself, and impeded by the comparison of my own littleness.
But if “God has often chosen the small things of the earth to confound the great”; and if success in past undertakings be any guarantee against the illusiveness of inward promise; if the roads be all chalked, the posts lighted, and the sentinels faithful, why, then, allow the influence of petty fears to mar, at all events, the project of an ennobling enterprise?
In that cherished volume, whence our first lessons upon religion have been deduced, and which, as embodying the principles of our happiness here, and our hopes hereafter, has been honoured with the pre-eminent and distinctive appellation of the Bible, or Book, there occur numerous phrases of mysterious import, but pregnant significancy, which pious men, unable to solve, have contented themselves with classifying as under the head of “above reason”—“contrary,” and “according to,” being the two other constituents of their predicamental line.
Those conventional terms which expediency alone has invented are, to say the least, arbitrary; and as all men have an equal right to form a specification of their subject-matter, I shall, without disconcerting the order of the above division, endeavour only to rescue the points to which I refer from immersion in the first class;[258] or—if allowed the latitude of parliamentary elocution—to take them out from the condemnation of Schedule A.
To begin, then, with the following text, viz. “The sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose.”[259]
What do you understand by the expression “sons of God”?
His peculiar people, you reply; such, for instance, as called upon His name;[260] or, perhaps, Seth’s descendants in opposition to those of Cain, the unrighteous.