them; and the book of Genesis being nothing else but a general and very necessary introduction to that which follows." Some of the institutions of Moses were remarkable: all the males were to go up to Jerusalem three times a year. There was to be neither ploughing nor sowing during the seventh year. They were to expect the crop of the sixth year to be equal to that of three other years, Here, at least, there could be neither mistake nor imposition. Surely nothing but the avowed sanction of God, could have induced an intelligent nation, to have its destiny depending upon such contingencies as those? Gibbon himself admits this: "the law of Moses," he observes,

66

was given in thunder from Mount Sinai, the tides of the ocean, and the course of the planets were suspended for the convenience of the Israelites. Under the pressure of every calamity, the belief of these miracles has preserved the Jews of a later period from the universal contagion of Idolatry!" "The five books of Moses," says Horne, "contain a system of ceremonial and moral laws, which, unless we reject the authority of all history, were observed by the Israelites from the time of their departure out of Egypt till their dispersion at the taking of Jerusalem. These laws, therefore, are as ancient as the conquest

Stillingfleet, Orig. Sac, Fol. 77.

of Palestine. It is also an undeniable historical fact, that the Jews in every age, believed that their ancestors had received those laws from the hand of Moses and that they formed the basis of their political and religious institutions, as long as they continued to be a people!" Let the reader go to the synagogues of Europe and he will hear Moses read now as in the primitive times of the Jewish theocracy, Surely any further demonstration cannot be necessary. In conclusion, we remark, on the scriptures generally, that it is an astonishing feature of the word of God, that, notwithstanding the time at which its compositions were written, and the multitude of topics to which it alludes, there is not one physical error-not one assertion or allusion disproved by the progress of modern science: none of those mistakes which the science of each succeeding age discovered in the books of the preceding: above all, none of those absurdities which modern astronomy indicates in such numbers in the writings of the ancients-in their sacred codesin their philosophy-and even in the Fathers of the Church-not one of those errors is to be found in any of our sacred books. Nothing there which contradicts that which, after so many ages, the investigations of the learned world have been able to reveal to us on the state of our globe, or that of the heavens.

"It

Peruse with care those scriptures from one end to another, to find there such spots as modern science has discovered in the sun; and whilst you apply yourselves to this examination, remember that it is a book which speaks of every thing; which describes nature; which recites its creation; which tells us of land, of water, of the atmosphere, of the animals, and of the planetary system! It teaches the first revolutions of the world and foretells its last! recounts them in the circumstantial language of history, it extols them in the sublimest strains of poetry, and chaunts them in the charms of glowing and pathetic song. It is a book full of oriental rapture, elevation, variety, and boldness. It is a book which speaks of every thing visible, while it brings life and immortality to light! It is a book which fifty writers of every degree of cultivation, of every state, of every condition, and living through the course of fifteeen hundred years, have concurred to make. It is a book which was written in the centre of "Asia, in the sands of Arabia, and in the deserts of Judæa: in the court of the Jewish Temple, in the schools of the prophets of Bethel and Jericho; in the sumptuous palaces of Babylon, and on the idolatrous banks of the Cheber; and finally, in the centre of western civilization, in the midst of the Jews and of their

ignorance, in the midst of polytheism and its idols, as also in the midst of pantheism and its corrupt philosophy!" It is a book the first writer of which, was forty years a pupil of the Magicians of Egypt, in whose opinion the sun, moon, and the elements were endowed with intelligence, re-acted on the elements, and governed the world by a perpetual alluvium. It is a book whose first writer preceded, by nearly one thousand years, the most ancient philosophers of Greece and Asia. It is a book that carries its narratives even to the hierarchies of angels, even to the most distant epochs of the future and glorious scenes of the last day.

Well; search amongst its fifty authors: its 66 books; its 1,189 chapters, and its 31,713 verses, search for only one of those thousand errors which the ancients and the moderns committed when they spoke of the heavens or of the earth-of their revolutions, of their elements: search:-but you will find none!

FINIS.

BURNLEY: PRINTED BY T. SUTCLIFFE, ST. JAMES' STREET.