that a People thus sequestered, would, without such constant attention to the art, and application to the labour, which the meliorating of a backward soil requires, soon degenerate into barbarous and savage manners; the first product of which has been always seen to be a total oblivion of a God. But if we are to suppose what the Poet would seem to insinuate, in discredit of the Dispensation, that the soil of Judea was absolutely incorrigible; a more convincing proof cannot be given of that EXTRAORDINARY PROVIDENCE which Moses promised to them. So that if the corrigibility of a bad soil perfectly agreed with the END of the Dispensation, which was a separation, the incorrigibility of it was as well fitted to the MEAN, which was an extraordinary Providence. For the fact, that Judea did support those vast multitudes, being unquestionable, and the natural incapacity of the country so to do being allowed, nothing remains but that we must recur to that extraordinary Providence, which not only was promised, but was the natural consequence of a Theocratic form of government. keep between the two contrary suppositions, and take up the premisses of the one, and the conclusion of the other to hold that the sterility of Judea was very corrigible; but that all possible culture would be inadequate to the vast numbers which it sustained, and that therefore its natural produce was still further multiplied by an extraordinary blessing upon the land. But I am inclined to To support this system, we may observe, that this extraordinary assistance was bestowed more eminently, because more wanted, while the Israelites remained in the Wilderness. Moses, whose word will yet go as far as our General Historian's, says, that when God took Jacob up, to give him his Law, he found kim indeed in a desert Land, and in the waste-howling wilderness; but it was no longer such, when now God had the leading of him. "He led him about," [i. e. while he was preparing him for the conquest of the promised Land] "He instructed him," [i.e. by the LAW, which he there gave him]" He kept him as the "apple of his eye," [i.e. he preserved him there by his extraordinary Providence ;] the effects of which he describes in the next words,-" He made him ride on the high places of the earth," [i.e. he made the Wilderness to equal, in its produce, the best cultivated places] "that he might eat the increase of the fields; "and he made him to suck honey out of the Rock, "and oil out of the flinty Rock: Butter of kine, and "milk of sheep, with fat of lambs, and rams of the "breed of Bashan" [i. e. as large as that breed]" and goats, with the fat of kidneys of wheat," [i. e. the flour of wheat]" and thou didst drink the pure blood "of the Grape." That this was no fairy-scene, appears from the effects-" Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered "with fatness; then he forsook God which made 66 him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salva"tion," &c. This severe reproof of Moses certainly did not put the Israelites in an humour, to take the wonders in the foregoing account on his word, had the facts he appeals to been the least equivocal. On the whole, we can form no conception how God could have chosen a People, and assigned them a land to inhabit, more proper for the display of his almighty Power, than the People of Israel and the land of Judea. As to the People, the PROPHET in his Parable of the Vine-tree, informs us, that they were natu• Deut. xxxii. 10. & seq. C VOL. V. rally, rally, the weakest and most contemptible of all nations and as to the land, the POET, in his great Fable, which he calls a General History, assures us, that Judea was the vilest and most barren of all countries. Yet somehow or other this chosen People became the Instructors of mankind, in the noblest office of humanity, the science of true Theology: and the promised Land, while made subservient to the worship of one God, was changed, from its native sterility, to a region flowing with milk and honey; and, by reason of the incredible numbers which it sustained, deservedly entitled the GLORY OF ALL LANDS. This is the state of things which SCRIPTURE lays before us. And I have never yet seen those strong reasons, from the schools of Infidelity, that should induce a man, bred up in any school at all, to prefer their logic to the plain facts of the Sacred Historians. I have used their testimony to expose one, who, indecd, renounces their authority: but in this I am not conscious of having transgressed any rule of fair reasoning. The Freethinker laments that there is no contemporary historian remaining, to confront with the Jewish Lawgiver, and detect his impostures. However, he takes heart, and boldly engages his credit to confute him from his own history. This is a fair attempt. But he prevaricates on the very first onset. The Sacred History, besides the many civil facts which it contains, has many of a miraculous nature. Of these, our Freethinker will allow the first only to be brought in evidence. And then bravely attacks his adversary, who has now one hand tied behind him: for the civil and the miraculous facts, in the Jewish Dispensation, have the same, nay, a nearer relation to each other, than the two hands of the same body; for these may be used singly and independently, though to to disadvantage; whereas the civil and the miraculous facts can neither be understood nor accounted for, but - on the individual inspection of both. This is confessed by one who, as clear-sighted as he was, certainly did not see the * consequence of what he so liberally acknowledged. "The miracles in the Bible" (says his philosophic Lordship)" are not like those in Livy, "detached pieces, that do not disturb the civil History, which goes on very well without them. But "the miracles of the Jewish Historian are intimately "connected with all the civil affairs, and make a necessary and inseparable part. The whole history "is founded in them; it consists of little else; and "if it were not an history of them, it would be a history of nothing †. 66 From all this, I assume that where an Unbeliever, a Philosopher if you will, (for the Poet Voltaire makes them convertible terins) pretends to show the falsehood of Moses's mission from Moses's own history of it; he who undertakes to confute his reasoning, argues fairly when he confutes it upon facts recorded in that history, whether they be of the miraculous or of the civil kind since the two sorts are so inseparably connected, that they must always be taken together, to make the history understood, or the facts which it contains intelligible. SECT. II. ALLOWING it then, to have been God's purpose to perpetuate the knowledge of himself amidst an idolatrous World, by the means of a separated People; let us see how this design was brought about, See the View of Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophy, Vol. XII. ↑ Bolingbroke's Posthumous Works, vol. iii. p. 279. when the Family, he had chosen, was now become numerous enough to support itself under a separation; and Idolatry, which was grown to its most gigantic stature*, was now to be repressed. The Israelites were, at this time, groaning under the yoke of Egypt; whither the all-wise providence of God had conducted them, while they were yet few in number, and in danger of mixing and confounding themselves with the rest of the Nations. In this distress, one of their own brethren is sent to them with a message from GoD, by the name and character of the GOD OF THEIR FATHERS, whose virtues GoD had promised to reward with distinguished blessings on their Posterity. The message, accompanied with signs and wonders, denounced their speedy deliverance from Egyptian bondage, and their certain possession of the land of Canaan, the scene of all the promised blessings. The People hearken, and are delivered. They depart from Egypt; and in the third month from their departure, come to Mount Sinai. Here GOD first tells them by their Leader, MOSES, that, if they would obey his voice indeed, and keep his Covenant, then they should be a PECULIAR TREASURE to him above all people, for that the WHOLE EARTH WAS hist. Where we see an example of what hath been observed above, that whenever an Institution was given to this People, in compliance with the notions they had imbibed in Egypt, a corrective was always joined with it, to prevent the abuse. Thus God having here told them, that if they would obey his voice they should be his peculiar treasure above all people, (speaking in the character of a tutelary God;) to prevent this compliance from falling into abuse, as the * See note [B] at the end of this Book. division |