with the characters yet sufficiently distinct. He then showed us another, of a similar form, apparently an exact copy, which, he said, was eight hundred years old. He also produced a few tattered leaves of Walton's Polyglott--part of Genesis. We asked if they did not consider the books of Joshua and Judges as sacred, in the same manner as the Torah; he replied, 'By no means: these two books we have, and we reverence them; but the Torah is our only sacred book. Joshua was not a prophet, but the disciple of a prophet; that is, of Moses.' We inquired in which direction they turn their faces when they pray. He waved his hand in the direction a little right of the angle behind the altar, that is, nearly southward. In this direction is the city of Luz, which was afterwards called Bethel, the place which the Lord appointed to set his name there. As to Jerusalem, they have no respect for it as a holy city; regarding the Jews as their rivals, and speaking entirely in the spirit of the woman of Samaria,* Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, &c."t

It is superfluous to observe how exactly this statement accords with the facts detailed in Scripture, and how strongly it confirms the alleged antiquity of the Mosaic books. It has been frequently, and justly, remarked, that the circumstance of the Jews being joint depositaries with the Christians of the Scriptures of the Old Testament in general, is an unanswerable evidence that those writings have not been tampered with and altered by the latter. The argument afforded in confirmation of the authenticity of the Pentateuch, in particular, by this testimony of a sect disposed to controvert that of every other portion of the sacred canon, is precisely similar in kind, and, as it appears to us, not less conclusive, with regard to the writings to which it refers. The pe

⚫ John iv. 20.

† Jowett's Christian Researches in Syria and the Holy Land, pp, 196, et seq,

culiar creed of this last lingering remnant of the ten schismatic tribes, which is a natural result of the events of their history, if that history be correctly transmitted to us in the Old Testament, it would be impossible to account for, on the opposite supposition of that narrative being false. Admitting, however, its accuracy, the antiquity of the Mosaic writings is at once established, up to a period which scarcely leaves room for the possibility even of their having been nothing more than a successful forgery of some still earlier epoch. The endeavour, therefore, to get rid of the difficulty attending the admission of the miraculous events of the Jewish history, by at once denying their authenticity, will be found upon trial, as in the case of all the other mysterious questions of revelation, to introduce far greater perplexity than it is calculated to remove. We can see, or at all events, imagine, a sufficient reason why, in the course of the dealings of a wise and merciful Providence, such preternatural interferences should have been allowed to occur; but we can discover no end to the embarrassment and entanglement which would be the result of a system of general scepticism, or, in other words, of a theory which would almost oblige us to believe any thing, for no better purpose than that of flattering us with the idea of believing nothing.

It cannot be too strongly impressed upon our minds that, granting the mere fact of the genuineness of the Mosaic writings, without insisting also upon their inspiration, even that admission would involve, as a necessary consequence, the reality of a large proportion of the miracles there recorded. Moses could not, like some modern fanatics, have been under a delusion with regard to the reality of his mission, or of the prodigies related respecting him. If he wrote those books, he was either a deliberate impostor, or a person really bearing God's commission, and endued, upon special occasions, with perternatural power. But we are not free to choose between even these

alternatives. He could not have been an impostor if he would. The very nature of the miracles related of him, and by him, were such as to render all imposition impossible. The whole body of the Israelites are asserted by him to have personally witnessed deviations from the ordinary course of nature, on a scale far too great to have been by any supposition within the limits of unassisted agency to effect; and an appeal is repeatedly made to their testimony for the accuracy of the respective statements. The infliction of the plagues upon the Egyptians, the passage of the Red Sea, the miraculous production of water in the Desert, the thunders and lightnings of Mount Sinai during the delivery of the law, the gift of manna, and the dreadful judgment overtaking Dathan and his accomplices, are all related, not as events of remote occurrence, and such as might be safely invented, when the production of all contradictory testimony should have been rendered impossible by the lapse of time; but as facts, for which the great mass of the nation could vouch, as having been themselves eye-witnesses of their reality. In such a case, there is no tenable middle position between absolute denial of the truth of the whole narrative, and its absolute admission in all its parts. Any attempt, therefore, at accommodation of the circumstances related, with the more tranquil course of ordinary nature, is as unphilosophical as it is unsafe. True, indeed, it is, that the prodigies related are of the most astounding description. No consistent advocate of revelation would seek to gloss over this fact. But after all, what does this prove, excepting what every believer in Christianity is, upon principle, bound to admit? namely, that the production of that mysterious system of redemption has been, of all the works of Providence with which we are acquainted, the most important in its nature, and, therefore, if we may venture so to speak of Almighty agency, the most elaborate in its contrivance and appointed

machinery. If our reason can see no possible means of escaping from the recognition of the truth of the inspired records, that same reason, then, must tell us that a dispensation so solemnly prepared, and so consistently, so slowly, and so cautiously developed, year after year, and century after century, must be one, the paramount value of which will be found to justify the vast expenditure of means employed in its production. In this view of the case, every miracle recorded in the Old Testament is only an evidence the more to the sanctity of the covenant of the Gospel; and if so, let every well-wisher to that covenant be careful how, in the vain hope of conciliating those who are not to be conciliated, he adopts a course of argument, the direct and obvious tendency of which, indeed, is to attach suspicion to only one portion of the sacred writings, but which, if established, would necessarily lower our estimate of them as a whole. "Ne Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus

Inciderit,"

is a rule of far more momentous application than that of mere literary criticism. None but the wildest fanatic will be disposed to believe hastily in every alleged deviation from the established laws of nature; but that man, on the other hand, must have imbibed little of sound philosophy who, looking round upon all the mysteries by which we are environed, would pronounce such deviations to be impossible; or, taking into consideration the concurrent testimony of past ages, to be, under befitting circumstances, improbable. Surely the legitimate and most probable conclusion, in the face of such evidence as that adduced in support of the scriptural miracles, is not, that the facts are themselves untrue, but that the motives for their occurrence were urgent in exact proportion to what may be presumed of the general unwillingness of the Creator to disturb those laws which, in his wisdom, he has thought fit to impose upon his creation.

CHAPTER XII.

Of the internal Evidence of the Authenticity of the Books of Moses, and of the other Jewish Scriptures.

BISHOP WATSON has recorded an observation, made by Sir Isaac Newton to Dr. Smith, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, "that he found more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history whatever." To those who have been in the habit of considering the books of the Holy Scriptures as a mere tissue of astounding incidents, substantiated only by a moderate weight of external evidence, this assertion will appear in the highest degree paradoxical. And yet it is one which every person will feel the more disposed to admit, the more he examines and estimates the detail of those writings by that intuitive apprehension, by which we all judge instinctively of the truth or falsehood of any series of facts which we hear related. Every one knows how difficult it is to maintain such an entire consistency through all the minor points of a fictitious narrative, that no subsequent criticism should be able to detect any incompatibility of fact, or confusion and contradiction in the delineation of character. This difficulty, which increases in a compound proportion, according to the length of the work in the hands of a single author, may and will amount to an actual impossibility in the case of a variety of authors, each separately contributing his share toward the construction of one entire and consistent narrative, especially where the facts to be related lie out of the ordinary course of events. Where, then, as in the instance of the historical books of the Old Testament, we find a long succession of writers, living some of them at remote intervals from one another, each having their