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On this account it was that the law of God, given by the disposition
of angels, and which commanded that the one God of gods alone receive
sacred worship, to the exclusion of all others, was deposited in the
ark, called the ark of the testimony. By this name it is sufficiently
indicated, not that God, who was worshipped by all those rites, was
shut up and enclosed in that place, though His responses emanated from
it along with signs appreciable by the senses, but that His will was
declared from that throne. The law itself, too, was engraven on
tables of stone, and, as I have said, deposited in the ark, which
the priests carried with due reverence during the sojourn in the
wilderness, along with the tabernacle, which was in like manner called
the tabernacle of the testimony; and there was then an accompanying
sign, which appeared as a cloud by day and as a fire by night; when
the cloud moved, the camp was shifted, and where it stood the camp was
pitched. Besides these signs, and the voices which proceeded from the
place where the ark was, there were other miraculous testimonies to the
law. For when the ark was carried across Jordan, on the entrance to
the land of promise, the upper part of the river stopped in its
course, and the lower part flowed on, so as to present both to the ark
and the people dry ground to pass over. Then, when it was carried
seven times round the first hostile and polytheistic city they came to,
its walls suddenly fell down, though assaulted by no hand, struck by
no battering-ram. Afterwards, too, when they were now resident in
the land of promise, and the ark had, in punishment of their sin,
been taken by their enemies, its captors triumphantly placed it in the
temple of their favorite god, and left it shut up there, but, on
opening the temple next day, they found the image they used to pray to
fallen to the ground and shamefully shattered. Then, being them
selves alarmed by portents, and still more shamefully punished, they
restored the ark of the testimony to the people from whom they had taken
it. And what was the manner of its restoration? They placed it on a
wagon, and yoked to it cows from which they had taken the calves, and
let them choose their own course, expecting that in this way the divine
will would be indicated; and the cows without any man driving or
directing them, steadily pursued the way to the Hebrews, without
regarding the lowing of their calves, and thus restored the ark to its
worshippers. To God these and such like wonders are small, but they
are mighty to terrify and give wholesome instruction to men. For if
philosophers, and especially the Platonists, are with justice
esteemed wiser than other men, as I have just been mentioning,
because they taught that even these earthly and insignificant things are
ruled by Divine Providence, inferring this from the numberless
beauties which are observable not only in the bodies of animals, but
even in plants and grasses, how much more plainly do these things
attest the presence of divinity which happen at the time predicted, and
in which that religion is commended which forbids the offering of
sacrifice to any celestial, terrestrial, or infernal being, and
commands it to be offered to God only, who alone blesses us by His
love for us, and by our love to Him, and who, by arranging the
appointed times of those sacrifices, and by predicting that they were
to pass into a better sacrifice by a better Priest, testified that He
has no appetite for these sacrifices, but through them indicated others
of more substantial blessing, and all this not that He Himself may be
glorified by these honors, but that we may be stirred up to worship and
cleave to Him, being inflamed by His love, which is our advantage
rather than His?
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