said nothing of the wisdom of God in selecting a particular people from the rest of mankind, not for their own sakes, but that they might witness to the whole world, in successive ages, his existence and attributes; that they might be an instrument of subverting idolatry, of declaring the name of the God of Israel throughout the whole earth. It was through this nation that the Egyptians saw the wonders of God; that the Canaanites (whom wickedness had made a reproach to human nature) felt his judgements; that the Babylonians issued their decrees-"That none should dare to speak amiss of the God of Israel that all should fear and tremble before him:"-and it is through them that you and I, and all the world, are not at this day worshippers of idols. You have said nothing of the goodness of God in promising, that, through the seed of Abraham, all the nations of the earth were to be blessed; that the desire of all nations, the blessing of Abraham to the Gentiles, should come, You have passed by all the prophecies respecting the coming of the Messiah; though they absolutely fixed the time of his coming, and of his being cut off; described his office, character, condition, sufferings, and death, in so circumstantial a manner, that we cannot but be astonished at the accuracy of their completion in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. You have neglected noticing the testimony of the whole Jewish nation to the truth both of the natural and miraculous facts recorded in the Old Testament. That we may better judge of the weight of this testimony, let us suppose that God should now manifest himself to us, as we contend he did to the Israelites in Egypt, in the desert, and in the land of Canaan; and that he should continue these manifestations of himself to our posterity for a thousand years or more, punish-. ing or rewarding them according as they disobeyed or obeyed his commands; what would you expect should be the issue? You would expect that our posterity would, in the remotest period of time, adhere to their

God, and maintain against all opponents the truth of the books in which the dispensations of God to us and to our successors had been recorded. They would not yield to the objections of men, who, not having experienced the same divine government, should, for want of such experience, refuse assent to their testimony. No; they would be to the then surrounding nations, what the Jews are to us, witnesses of the existence and of the moral government of God.

LETTER VII.

"THE New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation." Thus you open your attack upon the New Testament; and I agree with you, that the New Testament must follow the fate of the Old; and that fate is to remain unimpaired by such efforts as you have made against it. The New Testament, however, is not founded solely on the prophecies of the Old. If an heathen from Athens or Rome, who had never heard of the prophecies of the Old Testament, had been an eye-witness of the miracles of Jesus, he would have made the same conclusion that the Jew Nicomedus did-" Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him.” Our Saviour tells the Jews-Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me; for he wrote of me:"and he bids them search the scriptures, for they testified of him :-but, notwithstanding this appeal to the prophecies of the Old Testament, Jesus said to the Jews, "Though ye believe not me, believe the works"-" believe me for the very works' sake”—“ if I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin.". These are sufficient proofs that the truth of Christ's mission was

not even to the Jews, much less to the Gentiles, founded solely on the truth of the prophecies of the Old Testament. So that if you could prove some of these prophecies to have been misapplied, and not completed in the person of Jesus, the truth of the Christian religion would not thereby be overturned. That Jesus of Nazareth was the person in whom all the prophecies, direct and typical, in the Old Testament, respecting the Messiah, were fulfilled, is a proposition founded on those prophecies, and to be proved by comparing them with the history of his life. That Jesus was a prophet sent from God, is one proposition that Jesus was the prophet, the Messiah, is another; and though he certainly was both a prophet and the prophet, yet the foundations of the proof of these propositions are separate and distinct.

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The mere existence of such a woman as Mary, and of such a man as Joseph, and Jesus, is," you say, a matter of indifference, about which there is no ground either to believe or to disbelieve." Belief is different from knowledge, with which you here seem to confound it. We know that the whole is greater than its part; and we know that all the angles in the same segment of a circle are equal to each other-we have intuition and demonstration grounds of this knowledge; but, is there no ground for belief of past or future existence? Is there no ground for believing that the sun will exist to-morrow, and that your father existed before you? You condescend, however, to think it probable, that there were such persons as Mary, Joseph, and Jesus; and, without troubling yourself about their existence or non-existence, assuming, as it were, for the sake of argument, but without positively granting, their existence, you proceed to inform us, that it is the fable of Jesus Christ as told in the New Testament, and the wild and visionary doctrine raised thereon," against which you contend. You will not repute it a fable that there was such a man as Jesus Christ; that he

lived in Judea near eighteen hundred years ago; that he went about doing good, and preaching, not only in the villages of Galilee, but in the city of Jerusalem; that he had several followers who constantly attended him; that he was put to death by Pontius Pilate ; that his disciples were numerous a few years after his death, not only in Judea, but in Rome, the capital of the world, and in every province of the Roman empire; that a particular day has been observed in a religious manner by all his followers, in commemoration of a real or supposed resurrection; and that the - constant celebration of baptism, and of the Lord's supper, may be traced back from the present time to him, as the author of those institutions. These things constitute, I suppose, no part of your fable; and if these things be facts, they will, when maturely considered, draw after them so many other things related in the New Testament concerning Jesus, that there will be left for your fable but very scanty materials, which will require great fertility of invention before you will dress them up into any form which will not disgust even a superficial observer.

The miraculous conception you esteem a fable, and, in your mind, it is an obscene fable. Impure indeed must that man's imagination be, who can discover any obscenity in the angel's declaration to Mary"The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore, that holy thing which shall be born of thee, shall be called the Son of God."—I wonder you do not find obscenity in Genesis, where it is said, "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters," and brought order out of confusion, a world out of a chaos, by his fostering influence. As to the Christian faith being built upon the heathen mythology, there is no ground whatever for the assertion; there would have been some for saying, that much of the heathen mythology was built upon the events recorded in the Old Testament.

You come now to a demonstration, or, which amounts to the same thing, to a proposition which cannot, you say, be controverted;-first, "That the agreement of all the parts of a story does not prove that story to be true; because the parts may agree, and the whole may be false :-secondly, That the disagreement of the parts of a story proves that the whole cannot be true. The agreement does not prove truth, but the disagreement proves falsehood positively." Great use, I perceive, is to be made of this proposition. You will pardon my unskilfulness in dialectics, if I presume to controvert the truth of this abstract proposition, as applied to any purpose in life. The agreement of the parts of a story implies that the story has been told by, at least, two persons (the life of Dr. Johnson, for instance, bv Sir John Hawkins and Mr Boswell). Now, I think it scarcely possible for even two persons, and the difficulty is increased if there are more than two, to write the history of the life of any one of their acquaintance, without there being a considerable difference between them with respect to the number and order of the incidents of his life. Some things will be omitted by one, and mentioned by the other; some things will be briefly touched by one, and the same things will be circumstantially detailed by the other; the same things, which are mentioned in the same way by them both, may not be mentioned as having happened exactly at the same point of time; with other possible and probable differences. But these real or apparent difficulties, in minute circumstances, will not invalidate their testimony as to the material transactions of his life, much less will they render the whole of it a fable. If several independent witnesses, of fair character, should agree in all the parts of a story (in testifying, for instance, that a murder or a robbery was committed at a particular time, in a particular place, and by a certain individual), every court of justice in the world would admit the fact, notwithstanding the abstract possibility,