having the design attributed to Moses of imposing a code of laws upon his countrymen, would be, in the first place, to create a favourable impression of those laws with the people to whom they were addressed, by making them agreeable to their reason, and their experience of the common course of human affairs. But it cannot be pretended that the blessings and the curse with which Moses sanctions his code, are framed in any degree upon the model of the usual law of God's moral government. That vice, upon the whole, is detrimental to the temporal prospects and success of an individual, cannot certainly be denied ; and examples may even be found of the collective vices of a nation leading to such a degradation of the national character, as to render a country an easy prey to foreign enemies. But it is not this distant and gradual effect of immorality which the language of Moses points at: neither is the crime which he specifically threatens with captivity, one that can be at all supposed to lead to it in the way of natural consequence. He denounces national destruction as the immediate punishment of national idolatry, just as a legislator in ordinary circumstances

threatens treason with banishment or death, while he holds the means of inflicting them in his own hands. No pains are taken to enforce the probability of this judgment, considered as a natural proceeding. For who, after all, were to execute the punishment? Not the more virtuous and more pure worshippers, as might have been expected on the general principle of retribution; but it is declared as an additional degradation to the Hebrews, that their overthrow should be effected by idolaters, and they themselves be brought to serve "other gods, wood and stone *.”

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Again, Moses is not contented, as other lawgivers are forced to be, with threatening punishments, but he also promises rewards. And his rewards it would be as absurd for a person in ordinary circumstances to offer, and for a people under no peculiar dispensation to expect, as we have seen the punishments to be: since the prosperity which is to be the consequence of their obedience, must arise from the course of the seasons, and depend upon

* Deut. xxviii. 36.

the winds and clouds of heaven: being no other than the fruitfulness of the land, and the increase of their flocks and herds. "If ye walk in my statutes, and keep my "commandments, then I will give you rain "in due season, and the land shall yield her

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increase, and the trees of the field shall "yield their fruit. And your threshing "shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing-time: "" and ye shall eat your bread to the full, "and dwell in your land safely. And I "will give peace in the land, and "lie down, and none shall make you afraid; "and I will rid evil beasts out of your "land." Levit. xxvi.

ye shall

It would seem an idle waste of time if I were to set about proving systematically, that this is not a skilful adaptation of the regular laws of Providence, deduced from an attentive observation of the general course of divine government, and applied to the sanction of a code pretending to divine authority. No one, indeed, admitting the agency of a Creator, can doubt that a general providence ordains the series of events, and that a particular providence

superintends the inferior agents by whose instrumentality they are brought about: but no one can follow the path, or trace the steps of its operation. Look through a body of individuals; who will venture to assign their success to their moral virtues, or their misfortunes to their guilt? Still more, survey the nations of the world: is it possible to estimate the degree of their idolatry by their comparative barrenness, or to find any proportion preserved between their natural fertility and their moral merits? The result of observation and experience is, that the good and the bad, the wheat and the tares, grow up together till the harvest, and that the sun shines and the rain falls on the just and unjust without discrimination: this inequality being in fact essential to a probationary state, (which supposes all exactness of retributive justice to be reserved for another.

If then such is the actual and undeniable course of things, no rational impostor, intending to devise a constitution for an infant people, would have rested its stability on a violation of that course, or sanctioned his laws upon a presumption of supernatural

ing that "

interference, unauthorized by the order of nature, and contradicted by every day's experience. It is indeed possible that he might, in general terms, have instructed his people to depend upon the divine blessing, whilst they obeyed the laws proposed to them, and to dread divine vengeance, as the certain consequence of disobedience. He might have gone as far as Zaleucus, in sayevery one ought to labour all he can to become good, both in practice and principle, whereby he will render himself acceptable to the Deity *." But he never could have proposed this invisible arm as the primary instrument of success, or minister of punishment; or have rested such entire dependence on the divine agency, as to expect it to supersede the usual means of victory, or national defence. Let us refer to the example of Mahomet: no one with more confidence, or apparent enthusiasm, assured his followers of the assistance of Heaven: and without hesitation, in the moment of danger, "he demanded the succour of Gabriel and three thousand angels +." But however he

* Τὸν μέλλοντα είναι θεοφίλη.

+ Gibbon, vol. ix. p. 299.